Ebook British Versus Polish Relationship Talk
The data presented here in the form of narrative analysis (NA) and interpretation of the life story interviews conducted is the result of the research project entitled: British versus Polish Relationship Talk: Comparative Life Stories of Two Married Males in Their Thirties. My choice to study masculinity and intimacy on the example of two males from Poland and Britain stemmed from relative neglect within the research literature of men in relation to intimacy and also from my lived familiarity in Poland and Britain.
I wished to investigate the ‘ungrateful’ subject - heterosexual male individuals - and their approaches towards intimacy in the context of social change within the European community.I focused on men to investigate ‘the other’, that is, men in connection with a piece of research on relationships so as to break the tendency of social research generally to treat men as a taken-for-granted norm, whereas in relation to emotions and relationships women have been treated as the norm (Stanley and Wise 1993).
Drawing upon a statement by Sartre which points out that “no individual or case is ever just an individual or a case; he or she must be studied as a single instance of more universal social experiences and social processes” (cited in Denzin and Lincoln 1998: xiv), I explored and compared the experiences and opinions of two males concerning social interaction within close relationships in relation to current sociological theories related to intimacy (Beck 1992; Giddens 1992; Jamieson 1998, 1999; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002).
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