This chapter considers the variety of living arrangements that are found in contemporary Swansea, contrasting them with the findings of the 1960 survey. We noted in Chapter 3 that there has been a striking increase in single-person households between 1960 and 2002 as well as a substantial increase in married or cohabiting heterosexual couples living alone. In this chapter we examine the nature of these categories in more detail and ask what these household types mean in terms of contact with kin. We do this in part to show that, although people may not live in so-called ‘traditional’ family households consisting of a heterosexual couple with dependent children, they continue to be embedded in kinship networks which are linked to their families of origin and/or to previous partnerships. They also often have other family-like ties with friends and/or neighbours and in what follows we consider the nature of these overlapping relational categories of family and friendship. Furthermore, even the ideal-typical ‘traditional’ family only assumes its defining form for one phase of the life cycle: there is usually a phase prior to the birth of the first child, as well as another after the departure of children, during which the household consists only of a heterosexual couple. These two phases form an increasingly longer segment of the life cycle as the birth of the first child tends to come later in the woman's reproductive years, numbers of children decline and life expectancies increase. There is also likely to be a phase where only one parent remains and, as we shall see, this type of household accounts for a sizeable proportion of single-person households.

We also explore the ways in which people talk about those who are closest to them, whether they include friends and/or neighbours in their definitions of family and, if so, how they perceive these family-like relationships. Some of our interviewees spoke about the way friends had come to replace family in their lives and this suggests that friendship networks can take on some of the characteristics of networks based on kin. Such developments have been understood as indicating the emergence of ‘families of choice’ (Weeks et al, 2001) or ‘elective families’ (Beck-Gernsheim, 1998) and as being ‘pioneered’ by gay men and lesbians but by no means confined to them (Giddens, 1992; Roseneil, 2005).