Indirect Pursuits of Intimacy in Romantic Couples Everyday Conversations: A Discourse Analytic Approach

Abstract: A discourse analytic approach was used to examine how twenty young adult romantic couples (ages 19-26) employed criticisms and insinuations of infidelity in their natural unstructured interactions to indirectly and creatively pursue closeness. The research has been motivated by an expanding arena of research that shows that ostensibly contentious interactional moments among young adult intimates may not be adversarial, but rather may be methods that promote a playful repartee that leads to affiliation. I demonstrate how criticisms are both often highly gendered and typically formulated and responded to in tongue-in-cheek, non-serious ways that involve the creative use of various forms of irony, laughter, rekeyings, abrupt non-sequiturs, and topic shifts that mitigate the potential for the criticisms to become adversarial. Similarly, the insinuations of infidelity were often designed by the couples to attend to interactional breaches. They functioned as a brief but effective way for

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• Alternative title: Indirektes Streben nach Intimität in Alltagsgesprächen in Liebesbeziehungen: ein diskursanalytischer Ansatz
• Location: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Frankfurt am Main
• Extent: Online-Ressource
• Language: Englisch
• Notes: Veröffentlichungsversion ; begutachtet (peer reviewed) ; In: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research ; 19 (2018) 2 ; 26

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (where): Mannheim
• (when): 2018
• Creator: Korobov, Neill

Further information

• DOI: 10.17169/fqs-19.2.3012
• URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-2019080113550839337527
• Rights: Open Access; Open Access; Der Zugriff auf das Objekt ist unbeschränkt möglich.