Recent academic theorizing tends to position ordinary relationships as something we have lost, to be mourned; yet their nature, what we are assumed to have lost, is not seriously engaged
with. Drawing on rich empirical data - and on recent theoretical work on culture, reflexivity and emotions - this book questions epochal and undifferentiated claims about contemporary
emotional lives, and sets out to be explicit about the nature of ordinary relationships. In place of an academic and cultural preoccupation with emotions talk and disclosure, it emphasises
the significance of the unsaid, what we do, as much as what we say, and the work we do to maintain a sense of privacy. It also questions the extent to which a sense of vulnerability has
become central to how we make our way emotionally in the world. In doing so it argues for a reconceptualization of intimacy, reflexivity and vulnerability. Ordinary Relationships can be read
as a call to be curious about, and to have our head turned by, extant and background practices and the ordinary relationships that create and are constituted by them.
