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ANALYSIS
HOME ALONE
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Kenan Malik
Producer: Ingrid Hassler
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS
020 8752 6252

Broadcast Date: 14.08.03 2030-2100

Repeat Date:
17.08.03 2130-2200
Tape Number: TLN332/03VT1032
Duration:
27. 26
Taking part in order of appearance:
Mary Balfour
Director of Drawing Down the Moon,
LoveandFriends.com and Only Lunch
Professor Richard Scase,
Leading forecaster of socio-economic trends and
Author of Britain in 2010
Zygmunt Bauman
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Leeds University
Jan MacVarish
Sociologist, University of Kent
Mary Evans
Professor of Womens Studies, University of Kent
Professor Deborah Cameron
Socio-Linguist at the Institute of Education, London
Rebecca ONeill

Researcher at Civitas
Author of Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family

MALIK: Surveys suggest that in less

than a generation, at least 40 per cent of Britons will be
living in single-person households. If theyre right, that
will be the biggest demographic and cultural change of
our lifetimes. For Mary Balfour, who runs this countrys
longest-established dating agency Drawing Down the
Moon , it heralds a world of new freedoms and
possibilities.
BALFOUR:
People think its quite cool
to be single today, and the single lifestyle and all the
culture and media stuff that goes with it is definitely
okay. And I dont think people do worry about being
single any more, and now its for the first time in history
that women can be economically independent and own
their own properties. You know I mean even back in the
60s, you had to get a man to guarantee your mortgage
for you if you were a woman. Thats not very long ago.
Now we have this wonderful freedom and women can do
their own thing and its great.
MALIK: What does the rise of the
singleton society mean for the way that people
experience personal relationships? And what are the
social consequences of these changes?
There have always, of course, in every society, in every
age, been people living by themselves - widowers,
divorcees, those whom we used to call spinsters. But they
were always a tiny minority, and most were single by
force of circumstance rather than by choice. Whats
different today is that a lifestyle that was marginal has
become mainstream. Seven million adults live alone in
Britain today - three times as many as 40 years ago.
According to the statistics bible Social Trends, this figure
will more than double in the next 20 years.
Single people used to be treated with condescension or
pity. No longer.
SCASE: In my view, this shift to
singleness is a very good thing.

MALIK: Richard Scase, a leading

business forecaster of socio-economic trends and author
of Britain in 2010.
SCASE: Remember, living alone and
living with a partner is rather like getting on and off a bus
- its not a permanent status so the future lifestyle will
be characterised by a period where one is living with a
partner, then followed by a period of living alone, then
followed by a period of living with another partner, and so
on. Its increasingly a lifestyle decision, and to me this is
an indication of a far more liberated culture, a more
democratic culture and one which is much more
preferable than in the past when men and women were
putting up with each other, living together but quite
literally loathed each other. Its not so long ago there
was a lot of stigma attached to divorce. Now we live in a
much more kind of hedonistic, live - today culture
because we dont know what tomorrows going to bring.
I also think, by the way, that early retirement and an
increase in life expectancy also explains why more and
more older people are choosing to break up and to live
alone. In the past, a couple would be living together, the
man would work until he was sixty-five and would
probably die two or three years later. Now men retire in
their late fifties and theres often a thinking amongst
couples, well, cant put up with him around the house for
the next thirty years, hes going to live until his late
seventies, early eighties, so lets split up. In other words,
were in a much more hedonistic, live now, enjoy, enjoy
society.
MALIK: Relationships have become
part of the consumer society. Since there is less need to
enter relationships for economic reasons, many people,
especially many women, have greater choice as to how
they live. Both men and women now choose partners,
and living arrangements, as they might choose their
Mediterranean holiday or the colour scheme for their loft
apartment. And they often come to people like Mary
Balfour when they want to find those partners. So what
are her clients looking for?
BALFOUR:
Everybody says the same
sort of thing.
They all talk about things like I want to meet someone
whos independent, whos curious, whos playful, who
shares all my values and my outlook, and Im looking for
a permanent relationship. So I think everybodys
looking for the quality of the emotional connection much
more now than they would have done in the old days.
Then I think they do look for something that is very
romantic in the sense of it being about emotional
tenderness, closeness, being a best friend and a lover.
MALIK: According to Mary Balfour,
then, we seem to have - or at least to want - the best of
all possible worlds. Freedom and independence on the
one hand, and emotionally sustaining relationships based
on real intimacy, on the other.

But for Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of

Sociology at Leeds University, the very fact that our
culture seems fixated by questions of relationships and
lifestyles tells a very different story.
BAUMAN:
Tell me what you are
obsessively thinking about and I will tell you what you are
afraid of - what creates the most awesome difficulties in
your life, what you need most energy to actually
overcome or even to face up to. It is a question of a
certain deregulation of the environment in which we
operate. There are no hard and fast rules, there are no
lasting principles of action, and tussling in this awful net
of contradictory precepts on the one hand, the need of
a relationship because I must have some support, I cant
be alone, I need a life jacket in this turbulent sea; on the
other hand, the fear that once I get it, that I am finished,
my freedom is over and I wont be able to properly react
to the new opportunities, new chances and so on.
MALIK: And theres the rub. The
same social changes that are leading to the singleton
society are creating a yearning for durable relationships but also make us worry that such relationships will
undermine the very freedoms we hope single living will
bring.
MACVARISH:
Theres a strange
combination at the moment of this kind of high ideal of
what should be achieved for relationships in the sense of
fulfilment that we demand at any present moment, but at
the same time very low expectations of actually achieving
that and also a very cautious approach and a fearful
approach to actually really getting involved in the work of
intimacy.
MALIK: Jan MacVarish, a sociologist
at the University of Kent, who is currently conducting a
major research project on the changing lives of single
women.
The talk about single living providing new kinds of
freedoms, she argues, misses the point.
MACVARISH:
The problem emerges really
in the way we as society make sense of the increasing
number of single people. Theres a danger in the way we
make sense of it in that we tend to redefine what
freedom means, and I think increasingly freedom is
understood as being freedom from other people rather
than the freedom to do things, which might well mean
that we need to be involved with other people. So the
redefinition of freedom, which in some ways has
happened through the discussion of the singleton, is
something thats a cause of concern for me because I do
think that were starting to have a sort of assumption that
freedom means a freedom from the emotional
entanglements that necessarily go along with fulfilling
relationships.
MALIK:

What is driving the singleton

society, in other words, is not just the greater personal or

economic freedom that many people now enjoy. It is also
the greater fragmentation of society and the breaking
down of wider social networks. This leads to a kind of
paradox. On the one hand, as Mary Balfour suggests
from her vantage point as director of a number of dating
agencies, people look for relationships based on
emotional bonding. On the other hand, as Jan MacVarish
implies from her empirical work on single women, people
seem frightened by emotional attachments, often viewing
them as a prison. Its a paradox personified by Bridget
Jones - a woman who is free and independent and yet
frustrated that she cannot find the kind of partner she is
looking for. Heres Mary Evans, Professor of Womens
Studies at the University of Kent.
EVANS: Both men and women in
various kinds of relationships have developed ideas about
relationships which are becoming increasingly impossible
to meet. I think the things that people are looking for are
essentially, first of all, the kind of intimacy very often that
children have with their parents, particularly with their
mothers. So what were looking for is a curious kind of
thing. We want to return to the kinds of intimate
relationships which we had or we think we had or we
would like to have had when we were children, but at the
same time we want to achieve that intimacy within the
context of greater autonomy and greater independence.
Now theres clearly a conflict here between these two
things, its very, very difficult to meet these two things,
but of course were driven all of us by the need for
intimacy.
MALIK: Are you saying then that the
kinds of intimacy to which we aspire has changed over
the last fifty, hundred years?
EVANS: Yes, I am saying that and I
think theres a considerable amount of evidence to
support that. I think were looking for, for example,
much higher degrees of sexual satisfaction than we used
to. People arent content any longer to live in
relationships in which they dont find sexual satisfaction,
in which they dont find long-term romance.
MALIK: But perhaps the conflict
between a desire for greater autonomy, on the one hand,
and a childlike intimacy, on the other, is more apparent
than real. What a child seeks from its parents is total
reassurance and comfort - for its every need to be
catered to. Children may be naive or innocent - but they
are also selfish and demanding.
And thats exactly what our hedonistic, enjoy, enjoy
culture seems to be fostering - an almost child-like
selfishness in our assessment of relationships.
Relationships exist to provide people with enjoyment and
satisfaction, and when they no longer do so, people move
on to the next photo in the dating agency folder.
And, as Professor Deborah Cameron a socio-linguist at

the Institute of Education points out, the growth of the

me society has helped transform our understanding of
what intimacy means.
CAMERON:
Intimacy, as we conceive it
in modern Western societies, is no longer just about
sharing physical space or social experience with other
people. Its about being able to share their inner lives,
their thoughts and their feelings, and to do that you need
language more especially a particular way of using
language where youre continually revealing to other
people what your innermost thoughts and feelings are.
And that has changed what we value in communication,
so if you look at advice literature even as recently as the
1950s, youll find, for instance, that it contains
prohibitions on talking about yourself thats immodest,
rude, not of interest to other people. Today in advice
books on communication, the focus is really all on talking
about yourself.
MALIK: Do you think relationships
today then possess a therapeutic character?
CAMERON:
I think the sort of talking
that youre supposed to do in them possesses a highly
therapeutic character. I think that one of the places we
got this notion of intimacy as dependent on a particular
sort of talking is from the popularisation of what
originated as therapeutic techniques that were used in
clinics by psychiatrists and psychologists.
Were talking about the kind of talk where someone says
honestly what they are feeling, where they use the
techniques of say assertiveness training: instead of hiding
their feelings or stating them indirectly, theyll say to
someone you know I feel hurt when you talk to me in
that way or when you do this or that; I statements,
emotional self-disclosure where you lay bare experiences,
thoughts or feelings that in polite society you might be
encouraged to hide. Thats the kind of talk that is
thought of as leading to intimacy. And I do think that
thats a misguided belief that relationships break down
not because of material problems or incompatibilities of a
non-linguistic sort, but because people couldnt
communicate.
MALIK: You only have to watch
Oprah or Jerry Springer to realise that emotional selfdisclosure may not necessarily be a good thing. But a
whole relationship industry has sprung up to tell us not
just that its good to talk but good to talk about
ourselves. Obsessively.
Even tough guy Tony Soprano wants to bare his soul. And
as our ideas of intimacy have changed, so it has come to
mean not just a greater honesty about our emotions but
also making public what once might have been thought of
as private feelings. Deborah Cameron.
CAMERON:
Im a feminist, so I wouldnt
want to turn back the clock to a time where there were

experiences or feelings that just couldnt be talked about

in public discourse at all. But I do think that the excess
of it, the constant exhortations to emote in public may
cheapen the private, the more private and personal
expressions of emotion. I think they also make people
feel very anxious and insecure about whether theyre
doing it right in their private life. I think there is
immense anxiety.
MALIK: Nowhere is the erosion of
the distinction between public and private more apparent
than on the internet. Mary Balfour runs not just a
conventional dating agency, but is also a pioneer of
internet dating, with over 30,000 members signed up to
her site, Love and Friends dotcom. Other sites boast up
to a million members. The secret of their success, as
Mary Balfour acknowledges, lies in the willingness of
people to make public their most intimate thoughts on
the world wide web.
BALFOUR:
For some people the
medium of using the internet is actually encouraging
them to express themselves better, particularly men who
perhaps dont express themselves verbally so easily.
They feel more confident and more safe on the internet.
Probably they find it easier to flirt. And I think women
find it confidence boosting in another way that perhaps
its much more easy for them to take control, be more
assertive, take the initiative and this sort of thing on the
internet. So for them, its more positive and I think it
brings out the best of both men and women. I think for a
lot of people the internet allows them to actually get in
touch with that side of themselves which is ready for a
relationship.
MALIK: But is that not a kind of
virtual relationship? Isnt part of what you are the way
you look, the way you are and so on, and in presenting a
false image of yourself or potentially a false image of
yourself arent you creating a false basis for a
relationship?
BALFOUR:
I think for those who exploit
the internet dishonestly and give out false signals about
themselves, I think that would be wrong. But we find
with Love and Friends dotcom that ninety-nine percent of
the members are genuinely out there looking for a real
relationship and they are looking for love.
SCASE: I personally know one or
two people who do use the internet, who have registered
with on-line dating agencies. It does become, I think,
rather a dehumanising experience - that they go through
website after website of photos and self-descriptions.
And the whole thing is becoming, I think, rather
commoditised. That is the downside of the internet
dating agency business.
MALIK: Richard Scase. The
internet, and other new technologies such as mobile
phones and texting provide new means of meeting people

and communicating - not to mention of ending affairs.

But they also express the conflicts and problems of
contemporary relationships. Internet dating and chat
rooms allow people to pick and choose, to move from one
target to the next, to play at relationships. They allow for
relationships emptied of the sweat and blood of real life.
Thats why they can appear so attractive - but also so
dehumanising.
Thats also why, as the eminent sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman suggests, they provide perfect metaphors for the
shallowness of our social lives. He entitled his latest book
Liquid Love to describe the quicksilver, always-on-themove approach that many people have these days both
to life - and love.
BAUMAN:
The currently fashionable
expression is surfing. We surf, we are surfing
everywhere we are surfing from one job to another;
one project to another; from one place, geographical
place to another; from one set of connections, one
network to another. Even the idea of network is like that
because network, you know, connects the two notions
connecting and disconnecting. You are guaranteed to be
able to disconnect at any moment, as one of the objects
of a very interesting investigation about the
contemporary manners of dating put it why he likes
internet dating: because when you use internet, you can
always press delete. Now you know to be assured that
there is a way out without reproach, without guilty
conscious, without acrimony, that is the secret of moving
fast. When you are skating on a thin ice which can break
or which can melt at any moment, your salvation is in
speed so you have to hurry not leaving behind you
traces, very deep traces.
MALIK: So youre saying that we
live in a culture in which we want to keep all our options
open all the time?
BAUMAN:
Thats precisely the point,
yes. Top-pocket relationships. Keep them in your top
pocket. If you need it, you pick it up; if you dont, you
put it back, you know. So you are just surfing over the
network, and the wider the network not the deeper the
network, the wider the network the better.
MALIK: It shouldnt surprise us
then, that the latest fad is speed dating. Several hundred
strangers meet up in a room, have a maximum of three
minutes to talk to someone, and decide whether they
want to hook up with them. A perfect way, perhaps, to
find a top-pocket relationship. So whats happened to
old-fashioned romantic love in all this?
EVANS: I think romantic love was
initially, say two hundred years ago, a form of
emancipation.
MALIK:

Professor Mary Evans, from

the University of Kent.

EVANS: What romance gave to
women was the right to say I wont marry this person
because I do not love him. Now thats a form of
emancipation, thats a step forward from a situation in
which women were simply told youll marry this husband
because he will support you. So romance, a sense of
personal choice, I think for the West was an
emancipatory discourse. And what I think has happened
has been that something which was an ideal, and
recognised as such, has become generalised into our
usual expectations. And I think its now become almost a
fantasy, and I wouldnt quite go so far as to say a
dangerous fantasy but certainly a misleading one.
MALIK: Are you not really saying
that we should have lower expectations of what we can
get out of a relationship?
EVANS: Actually I am, which sounds
awful and grim and despairing. But I think not so much
lower expectations but I think we should have more dilute
perhaps expectations expectations which we can
achieve.
MALIK: This might seem sensible
advice, but it also fits in with the zeitgeist: Dont expect
too much, keep all your options open. The fantasy of the
perfect partner often goes hand in hand with an
instrumental, almost business-like approach to
relationships. A culture that encourages us to cultivate
the self at the expense of all else, leaves little room for
notions such as commitment or self-sacrifice - notions
that traditionally have been at the heart of any
discussions of relationships.
Whats clear from all this is that the growth of the
singleton society is both a major demographic change possibly the biggest since the Second World War - and an
expression of a dramatic cultural shift. Yet, every single
one of our interviewees thought that policy makers
havent even begun to think about the significance of the
changes taking place. For business forecaster Richard
Scase, society needs to adapt - and adapt fast - to the
Home Alone phenomenon.
SCASE: The ramifications of more
men and women living alone is absolutely enormous. For
example, its projected by 2015 we will need another four
and a half million new homes. Eighty percent of that
demand is generated by the increase in single person
households. Where are those houses going to be
constructed? Further ramifications, of course, in terms of
health and welfare. If youre ill or if you have to go into
hospital for an operation, the aftercare costs are much
greater if you live alone compared with if youre living
with somebody where theres the mutual care and
support. And then also, of course, theres the very
simple kind of consequences in terms of leisure and
recreation. Leisure and recreation in Britain are still

structured around the idea of the couple. Holidays, for

example. Single people still have to pay a scandalous
single person supplement. Well all this is going to
change, I think, very significantly over the next few
years.
MALIK: Such changes will clearly
have an enormous impact on both our physical and social
landscape. But perhaps the biggest change will be in the
very way we think of what constitutes a society or a
community. Heres Rebecca ONeill, a researcher at the
right-leaning think tank Civitas and the author of a recent
report on family breakdown.
ONEILL: Every time they break up
and live alone, theyre breaking networks. Some people
argue that friendships - you know these people who live
alone have wonderful networks, but I think that recent
research shows that thats not really the case in most
instances.
MALIK: What do you think the
consequences are for the social fabric?
ONEILL: People who live alone, even
if theyre living alone just a portion of their lives, arent as
integrated into the community and they arent able to
monitor the neighbourhood as well. There was one study
in the U.S. on neighbourhoods where it said just living in
a neighbourhood that had a high rate of single people
living there - controlling for the level of income, even if
you control for that - just living amongst a bunch of
single people meant the crime rate was going to be
higher, much more likely to become a victim of crime. If
youre living alone, its just a matter of, you do have to
go out and look for people, but unfortunately these kind
of people dont usually you know volunteer, they dont
usually get involved in organisations like churches or
voluntary organisations or even sort of join clubs like they
used to. Nowadays, its all very individual. They go on
more holidays, they go away for the weekend and they
go to clubs which is fine for a point in your life, but it
doesnt make for a strong community.
Marriage and partnerships are institutions and ways of
living that dont have to be the same way they were in
the 1950s. The important thing is the promise to stay
together to work through things. Theres a range of
benefits that can be acquired for the individuals in a
marriage, for their children and for society as well.
MALIK: This might sound like an
old-fashioned plea for the return of traditional social
mores. But Rebecca ONeills warning that single living
raises broader questions about the viability of social
networks and institutions is surely right. As the sociologist
Jan MacVarish suggests, a debate about singleton society
is far more than a debate about singletons.
MACVARISH:
Our ambivalence about
relationships, I think is a problem for everybody whether

were in relationships or not because anything that

encourages us to hold back or to distance ourselves from
other people, I think is a problem. Anything that
encourages us to take a cautious approach to emotional
entanglements and to see emotional entanglements as a
threat to our sense of self, I think will lead to a society
thats reconciled to isolation. I think if we place a high
premium on individuals being self-contained or on
individuals being independent of other people, we ignore
in fact the social reality which is that our lives are
intertwined. The danger of the notion of a society as a
singleton society is that we deny ourselves the
opportunity to really experiment with those relationships
and those encounters and instead are sort of preequipped with a rationale of caution.
MALIK: Just as we are building
gated communities, so we are developing gated
individuals.
While people tell dating agencies that they want
relationships with greater intimacy, they also tend to
understand autonomy as keeping others at arms length.
This is true not just of singletons, but of those in couples,
too. For Zygmunt Bauman, this corrosion of personal
relationships mirrors the corrosion of our social
relationships.
BAUMAN:
50 years ago our fathers,
our grandfathers thought also about happiness they
wanted happiness as much as we do but they thought
that the road to happiness leads by making society a
better, more hospitable place for human beings.
Now it is the question of the contrary: I want more
space thats the war cry which you hear most. I want
more space means you keep away.
One would say that in the old system there was a lot of
security and very little freedom. Now we have another
system in which we have a lot of freedom and very little
security.
MALIK: We havent simply swapped
security for freedom. Insecurity has led to a greater
disengagement from other people, in both our social and
personal lives. The singleton society certainly expresses
greater possibilities of individual choice, particularly for
women. But it also expresses the narrowing of what we
mean by freedom, and the greater fragmentation and
atomisation of society. Its time we began to address the
consequences.
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