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Almost universal among participants’ discussions of breaking up, whether they were the initiator of the split or not, was some measure of deception or dissimulation,

173 whether meant kindly or otherwise. (Of course, this is hardly specific to teenage relationships.) As we have seen, young people fairly often entered into relationships with people they were not particularly interested in. Sometimes they grew closer over time, but often the lack of enthusiasm proved fatal for the relationship. James ended his relationship with Jessie, the beginning of which we saw above.

James: Eventually I just kinda... sent her a message [NH: mm] saying – yeah i didn’t even do it face to face, that’s how bad I was – it’s not going great, I just, I’ve got, and then I used the excuse of home troubles which I was having at that time but it wasn’t a reason [NH: OK yeah] I just used that as a reason

This, however, did not end the troubles the relationship caused for James. She and her friends all stopped talking to him, and he also ended up telling her about the problems he was having at home, even though he had not felt close enough in the relationship to want to share these.

James: Yeah, I did feel a bit weird, because even though even though we had been going out and stuff I didn’t like, I mean it was kind of one of those things that you tell to someone you’ve known for years, like a really good friend, and she, yeah we went out and she was a ‘mate’ [NH: yeah] but she, I hadn’t really known her for that long

“Troubles at home ” was a frequently-used rationale for ending a relationship. People in short-term relationships might not necessarily have met their girlfriend or

boyfriend’s family (and, indeed, Link had a boyfriend for a year without telling her mother about it), so this could be a low-risk strategy as it was difficult to argue. Rachel’s ex-boyfriend had sent her a long message: “I don’t know he just said a lot about his family and that it wasn’t the right time and stuff”. However, she and her friends thought that this was not the real reason he had split up with her, and rumours had gone round about the reason he had given others for the split.

Rachel: Um apparently! <she and Natalie laugh> He broke up with me cos I wanted to have sex with him and he didn’t

NH: Oh! Really?

174 Rachel strongly denied tha t this was the case – “No! I didn’t want to <laughter>“ – representing as outrageous and ridiculous the suggestion that she might have been the sexual pursuer in the relationship. She said, instead, that he was the one who had tried to “push it”:

Rachel: Yeah he brought it up all the time [NH: OK] like not sex but like going further and stuff [yeah sure] um, don’t really understand those rumours His rumours constituted her as violating femininity through being sexually

voracious. This was an enactment of a gossip tactic several participants mentioned, whereby boys would break up with girls and then spread rumours about their sexual practices (true or otherwise) within the relationship. Despite the acceptability of sexual activity within relationships, after breaking up, girls could still be

reconstituted as “slags ” for having engaged in sexual activity. Again, aspects of relationships could be rewritten retrospectively. Rachel suggested in the interview that “I think he got – scared […] that I would want to [have sex]”, constituting his persistence and thus his masculinity as a hollow performance.

Ending a relationship, then, did not necessarily put an end to problems rooted within the relationship, and the entanglements of broader social networks with the intimate relationship could become even more salient. In the following chapter, I investigate gendered harassment within social networks after a break-up in more detail. As we have seen in this section, sexual activity that had been acceptable when bounded by the safe space of the relationship could be reinterpreted, with the single girl now again in danger of occupying the “slut ” position. Embodying femininity correctly is impossible, not only because the limits on what is acceptable are so slippery, but because a hitherto acceptable activity may be retrospectively reinterpreted.

Conclusions

This chapter has built on the insights from chapter four, analysing in detail how my participants negotiated their heterosexual subjectivities in the contexts of intimate

175 partner relationships. Through the chapter, I have addressed three of my four

research questions: how young middle-class women and men’s classed and gendered subjectivities are negotiated and regulated within their heterosexual relationships; how middle-class teenage heterosexual subjectivities are shaped by wider peer cultures and social contexts; and how power dynamics are experienced, enacted and gendered in middle-class teenage sexual and intimate relationships.

My findings on sexual negotiation within relationships broadly fit in the work of Louisa Allen, Anastasia Powell, and Deborah Tolman, emphasising the uncertainty and ambivalence of young female desire even for these confident middle-class subjects. In building on this work, though, I have looked more broadly at the intimate relationship, investigating how gender and heterosexuality are performed through everyday aspects of relating. The young people I spoke with ranged from those who had never had a relationship at all, to those who were engaged in serious, meaningful long-term relationships. Relationships varied widely in intensity. Many young people who were in relationships found them a source of support, friendship and enjoyment, and as a place of welcome escape from the pressures of school and from the social surveillance of their friends and peers. But they also had difficulties negotiating the competing pulls of other friendships, dealing with feelings of jealousy and inadequacy, and working with their partners’ emotions and changes.

Through my analysis of conflict and negotiation, I have argued that young people constructed narratives of their relationships as equal, but that these narratives

obscured the subtle undercurrents of gendered power relations that tended to put girls at a disadvantage. Girls took on the responsibility for keeping relationships on an even keel, shaping their own behaviour to fit in with their partners' desires. While young women’s emotion work has been previously discussed in the context of relationship violence (Chung 2005), my analysis looks at the intricacies of how it functions within broadly positive intimate relationships, yet contributes to gendered practices that leave the girl responsible for regulating her own actions and feelings as well as those of her partner.

176 In the next chapter, we go on to see how these gendered narratives could take darker turns, creating conditions of possibility for violence, control and coercion.

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VIOLENCE IN TEEN HETEROSEXUAL RELATIONS

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If you don’t cry, it isn’t love. If you don’t cry, then you just don’t feel it deep enough. – The Magnetic Fields, If You Don’t Cry.

This chapter looks at the darker side of relationships and sexuality in middle-class teen relationship cultures. It situates experiences and understandings of what might be called abuse or violence, or might not, within the context of a middle-class teen subjectivity – of what it means to be a middle-class teen girl/boy. It explores the uncertainties, ambivalences and confusions of sexual violence, sexuality, pleasure and danger. In it I blur the dividing lines between “violence” and “normality”, and see how they are blurred. I ask what it is about classed teen society and teen culture, that creates the possibility for violence, unhappiness, and (gendered) power causing trouble; and/or the possibility for compassion, ethical relations(hips) and equality. The chapter builds upon and expand s themes from the two previous chapters, exploring the ‘darker side’ of both ‘public’ and ‘private’ relations(hips), at people causing each other pain and hurt.

As we see throughout this chapter, these experiences and understandings are not divorced or separate from the other ways in which relationships are negotiated. We have already seen hurtful and distressing ways of relating. Here I explore the ways that the social environment shaping teen sexualities, as presented in chapter two, influences young people’s experiences, understandings and narratives of gendered conflict, violence, coercion and control within their heterosexual relationships both long-term and short-term. I also explore in more detail how particular experiences and inequalities were often disavowed and downplayed by young people. This is, of course, a sensitive balance to attend to. By including particular experiences and discussions in this chapter, I do not intend to pathologise them or the people involved. “Abuse” and “violence” are terms that invoke a heavy weight of “otherness”, and as such, may be unrecognisable and unhelpful to young people

178 themselves as descriptors of everyday relations. I do not mean to negate the

understandings and beliefs of participants. Yet at the same time, (young) people – especially young women – frequently downplayed and reinterpreted experiences of harm and power differentials, in ways that often reinforced existing lines of power. These disavowals, which will be highlighted throughout the chapter, were entwined with gendered, classed and aged identifications: the desire to produce particular constructions of the self in particular contexts.