Keywords

1 Introduction

My intention in this chapter is to explore couples and coupledom with Scandinavia as a background and frame.

It might be sound to claim that when it comes to adult intimate life, the longing for belonging and attachment is universal and central to desire. However, that which decides the content of our dreams of love is also socioculturally inspired and informed by the different discourses available for people to take up. As an example, 50 years ago in Scandinavia, marriage between homosexuals was impossible, and “homophilia” was a diagnosis and a taboo. Now, same-sex marriage is allowed and in Norway, it is also possible for couples to be married in the Church.

1.1 Scandinavia as Context

Geographically, “Scandinavia” refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These countries are similar linguistically, and there are two main coexistent language groups, Scandinavian and Sami. The geography of Scandinavia is extremely varied. In Norway, there are the fjords and the Peak Mountains. In Denmark, the landscape is open, flat, with long sand dunes along the coast, and in Sweden, there are lakes and moraines. The climate is cold, wet, and rainy in the North and West, and in the mountains, one finds an alpine tundra climate. Despite this ruggedness, in the south of Scandinavia, it can quite be mild, thanks to the Gulf Stream (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia).

Do different cultural landscapes, climates, and nature form the dreams, the expectations, the relationships, and attitudes of different populations? Is love a different experience in a Norwegian fjord far from next-door neighbors and a long way to hospitals, banks, schools, and workplaces than in a city?

I think the answer is yes. Once, many years ago, I lived and worked in the North of Norway, a small place with borders to Russia and Finland. The population consists of Norwegians, Sami, Russian, and Finnish people. When I later became a leader of Family Therapy Guidance Center in a small city close to Oslo, the capital of Norway, I found myself wondering about differences in attitudes, values, and practices concerning coupledom.

As a simple observation, in the North, there was more quarreling around gender issues, housework, and child-raising, whereas in the South, it was more common for existential questions to arise around the themes of quality of life and living a successful life as a couple: do we want to be in this relationship, if we don’t understand each other?

However, in this chapter, I am not aiming to be an anthropologist or ethnographer, claiming universal truths about or pointing out traits of the Scandinavian population. As a family therapist, novelist, and researcher, I am preoccupied with narrative and how narratives form people’s lives and are in turn formed by them. I have selected readings of famous Scandinavian novels and film; fictional sources, as fiction and narratives do not present the information of manuals or textbooks on how to live love, but rather it is possible to think, believe, act, and feel when the various expectations of love become difficult. Fiction is a fruitful resource through which to gain insight into the lives of ordinary people.

1.2 A Scandinavian Discourse About Scandinavians?

The famous Danish author Hans Christian Anderson wrote the poem, “I am a Scandinavian” in 1839 after a visit to Sweden. Andersen became a supporter of early political Scandinavism. He declared after his visit that he understood how related the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians were: “I sensed the beauty of the Nordic spirit, the way the three sister nations have gradually grown together. We are one people, we are called Scandinavians!” (Andersen, 1846/2000).

What kinds of qualities and peculiarities represent the community Andersen held up as an inspiring entity? It is said that the author was walking in the Swedish woods when he became enlightened by the notion of the Scandinavian. Clearly, nature played a role, and the familiarity of language. But was there more? A mentality? A profound understanding of brave, solitary people who can survive cold climates, harsh storms, and modest harvests?

When asking colleagues and friends informally about myths and prejudices concerning Scandinavians and Scandinavia, they all respond the same way: Scandinavians are “blonde,” and in keeping with the familiar metaphor, also naive. Scandinavians are also reserved and “cold,” distant (quite like the Nordic landscape) so they need time before they warm up and become inclusive and warmhearted.

I have read articles about Scandinavia claiming that the weather is terrible, and it is very expensive. Scandinavians are also spoken of in terms such as sexually liberated, feminist, hardworking, and attached to nature and traditions. The soul of the people is one of frugality, and well known for its humanism, charity, and adventurous spirit, as witnessed by such famous representatives as Fridtjof Nansen, Alfred Nobel, Henrik Ibsen, and Tor Heyerdahl.

1.3 Sociopolitical Structures

A contemporary sociological gaze on Scandinavia focuses on political processes and progressive movements such as state feminism, secularization, and globalization. These political discourses are important influences in understanding changes in romantic love and coupledom in Scandinavia. For instance, in Norway, the Church is no longer the official religion as in 2012 laws were passed dividing the State and the Church. The ideal of romantic love has been traditionally rooted in Protestantism and a common understanding of marriage as instituted by God.

In a Nordic context, structural egalitarianism has deep historical roots from after the Second World War to the present. The Nordic countries are characterized by a strong welfare state and highly structured working life. In 1987, a politician and researcher described the concept of State feminism (Hernes, 1987). State feminism underlies political and normative assumptions about gender equality and social justice, producing woman-friendly policies that focus on parental leave, childcare, and minimum age restrictions for marriages involving foreigners from cultures in which child marriage is common. State feminism is explored in relation to women’s political participation and representation and women’s ability to influence policies of gender equality. Also, feminist processes are not only structurally organized to support equal rights to work and economic equality, but also mental models that promotes equal access for women to forms of intimacy and emotional dynamics.

2 Courtly Love in Conflict with a Passionate–Romantic Discourse

The Danish–Norwegian author, Sigrid Undset received the Nobel Prize for the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter in 1928. The novel follows Kristin Lavransdatter, a woman living in Scandinavia in the Middle Ages, from her birth to her death. It is a love story and it is a story about obligation, pride, honor, and shame.

When I was 11 years old, I read the book for the first time. The reading experience was marvelous, and I could not stop; it was a page-turner—and it demonstrated for me the meaning of love in life. This was strange in many ways as the trilogy portrayed a family life in Norway in the middle ages with descriptions of customs, beliefs, the environment, and nature, which were quite unlike the existences of adults in a nuclear family in the 1970s.

Sigrid Undset wrote primarily historical novels, and although she portrayed her characters in a medieval context, she wrote about existential, moral, religious, and psychological phenomena that are equally valid and recognizable throughout all eras. Once Sigrid Undset commented that times change, so do customs and beliefs, but the hearts of men do not change. My reading of that quotation is that people will always long for closeness and love.

In Kristin Lavransdatter, Christianity provides the backdrop and the arrangement of marriage was in the form of alliances between significant men and their families to increase status and property. For the couple, the marriage was founded on expectations for and combinations of economic convenience and courtly love. By definition, courtly love is “a highly-conventionalized code of conduct for lovers” (http://americanheritage.yourdictionary.com/courtly-love).

The hero in the novel is Kristin’s father, Lavrans Bjorgulfson, the master of Jorundgaard. He belongs to a highly regarded lineage in Norway known as the Sons of Lagmand. His greatest joy is his daughter Kristin. About his marriage to his wife Ragnfrid, Undset writes that “Lavrans was married at a young age; he was only 28…but after his marriage he lived quietly on his own estate…rather moody and melancholy and did not thrive among the people in the south” (Undset, 2014).

2.1 Historical Courtly Love and a more Contemporary Discourse of Love as Virtue

In my study, Some call it love (Øfsti, 2008), I identified the discourse love as virtue, which talks about love as a way to mature together. This discourse is inspired by Evans (2003) who engaged with philosophers from the Enlightenment as well as classic novelists such as Jane Austen in describing the path of our culture away from unstable sensitivity toward trustworthy sense and rationality. The love ideal of Austen is recognizable as a discourse framed in terms of love as a virtue one must refine; love means to mature together in a sense of shelter, and as a stance in opposition to erotic passion and the dangers of falling in love (Øfsti, 2008). The notion of virtue was and is relevant for three important reasons. First, it is a spiritual value and thereby permits a connection between ideological perspectives and life crises. Second, virtue is a well-known and inherited concept in traditional marriage counseling as the first therapists were often priests. Third, virtue also reflects the use of a practice or a method; being virtuous is doing virtuous acts. Virtuous love, then, fits well as a discourse when narrative friction is experienced, because it reconciles the discursive needs of the romantic pull, as for instance in monogamy, and the pain and doubt that can be encountered and that can challenge faith in, and motivation for, continuing love. A discourse constructing love as a virtue, then, arises in a context in which the act of love demands an active effort and sacrifice by the partner/s.

As the reader will see, love as a virtue differs from courtly love, as courtly love emphasizes emotions and a contract based on romantic love more than the arrangement of alliances and a conduct of behavior in the more aristocratic sense. It is a more literary script from the Middle Ages portraying knights and kings and lawful men as courtly.

Lavransdatter takes his responsibility seriously in getting his daughter properly married, and she is expected to marry Simen Darre, heir to the neighboring estate:

And after Kristin had grown accustomed to his round face and his way of speaking, she was entirely satisfied with her betrothed and pleased that her father had arranged the marriage for her. Fru Aashild was invited to the banquet. Ever since the people of Jørundgaard had taken up with her, the gentry of the nearest villages had once again begun to remember her high birth, and they paid less attention to her strange reputation; so now Fru Aashild was often in the company of others. After she had seen Simon, she said, “He’s a good match, Kristin. This Simon will do well in the world-you’ll be spared many types of sorrow, and he’ll be a kind man to live with. But he seems to me rather too fat and cheerful. If things were the same in Norway today as they were in the past and as they are in other countries, where people are no sterner toward sinners than God is Himself, then I would suggest you find yourself a friend who is thin and melancholy-someone you could sit and talk to. Then I would say that you could fare no better than with Simon.”

2.2 The Intrigue: Courtly Love in Conflict with Passionate Being-in-Love

Despite her Christian upbringing and her love for her father, Kristin is drawn away from her father’s beliefs and values. She falls in love with the handsome, playful, and irresponsible knight, Erlend Nikolausson. Through an unfortunate sequence of events, the sweet and innocent child is emboldened and takes on a semi-reckless approach to her relationship with Erlend. While away from home at a nunnery and while she is betrothed to Simon Darre, Kristin and Erlend become lovers and Kristin forces her will to marry Erlend despite her father’s wishes. Without ruining the end of the story for those who have not yet read it, their relationship becomes dangerous and devolves into catastrophe. I read this novel primarily as a sad love story. The loving couple get into violent conflict and become destructive toward one another. This becomes a tale of a love story destroyed. However, in this text, Undset ultimately paints a picture of the ideal of a love inspired by humility, duty, and virtue blessed by God.

As a couple therapist, I have seen this struggle played out as a conflict between the ideals of virtuous love (self-sacrifice, obligation to promises, and shared care of children) and a more romantic discourse, emphasizing the notion of not being able to withstand falling in love, love at first sight, and the dream of the “only one,” or the one true love.

2.3 The Romantic Dream—Encountering Modern Times, Liberation, and Progress Toward the “Pure Relationship”

The Swedish moviemaker and author Ingmar Bergman has been one of the most influential Nordic artists, narrating and displaying the Scandinavian temperament, attitudes, and inner struggles on the big screen. He captures, presents, and represents family life, dysfunctional relationships, and individual struggles in the cultural environment and atmosphere of living in Scandinavia.

In 1974, the drama Scenes from a Marriage was broadcast on television in Scandinavia. The film is a portrait of a failing marriage consisting of 5 h of searching dialogue between the two protagonists, Johan and Marianne. The drama takes place over a 10-year period, each episode of the TV series providing a snapshot of their relationship during that time. When we first see Marianne and Johan they have been married for 10 years. The married couple seem happy, at first. Their union looks both extraordinary and comfortable. We see Marianne and Johan go about their domestic routines, affectionate and tender with one another. In the first episode, Marianne and Johan have another couple round for dinner. The guests descend into bitter arguments and a hurtful slanging match. But Marianne and Johan, although shocked by the terrible state of their friends’ marriage, can calmly say, “That will never happen to us.” It is a middle-class dream: Johan is a professor, and Marianne is a lawyer, they have two daughters and their relational dynamic is built on respect and independence.

  • Marianne 1: Do you think it’s possible two people can spend their entire lives together?

  • Johan 1: That’s just an insane convention we inherited from God knows where. There should be 5-year contracts. Or an agreement that remains valid for 1 year that you can also terminate.

  • Marianne 1: For us, too?

  • Johan 1: No, not for us.

  • Marianne 1: Why not for us?

  • Johan 1: Because you and I are the exception to the rule. You and I won the Fools’ Lottery.

  • Marianne 1: So you think we’ll stay together our entire lives?

  • Johan 1: What a strange question. (Mann, 2017)

Then the story takes a different turn. Johan confesses that he must leave her as he has fallen in love with another woman. After he leaves, the tone of the dialogue changes, becoming more bitter, more accusing, and mutually hurtful. This struggle between liberation from bonds and holding onto the union begins to be a private fight about intimacy.

When Scenes from a marriage was shown on Swedish television, the streets of Stockholm and Oslo were empty of people as an overwhelming majority prioritized viewing it. Ingmar Bergman’s popular television series was said to have doubled divorce rates in Sweden. How can we understand the influence of this drama on Scandinavian culture? Bergman hit a nerve among Scandinavians; he had insight into how a well-functioning marriage and family life should be constructed and lead. However, the popularity of the drama lies nevertheless in the curious ways such a marriage can fail. Its popularity lies in both a recognition of and a desire to understand the modern move toward divorce as a choice. More than encouraging divorce, the series most likely touched on crucial changes appearing in society in the 1970s in the wake of the sexual revolution and developing conceptions of love and marriage. Divorce and the choice of several potential constellations in the love relationship occurred in the late-modernist or postmodern era. In Scandinavia, gender issues, equality, and movements toward postfeminist stances were on the agenda. On the one hand, couples were expected to form families and “nest”; on the other hand, expectations of self-realization of the individual had become more acceptable, as well as something of an imperative.

Below, I have presented excerpts from the dialogue. Reading them closely, one can see the emergence of a kind of reflexivity. Johan says that they are emotional illiterates, and this signals a sub-discourse of romantic love and expectations of intimate, emotional discussions. Marianne speaks about loneliness in an existential manner when she says that people are not strong all on their own. Marianne argues around expectations related to gender issues and sex. Arriving with the wave of feminist thought and liberation processes, it has now become possible to argue and negotiate about equality, role-play, and how sex and desire can be constructed. In Scandinavia, there has been a distinct feminist move characterizing reflections around gender issues and the varied positioning available to women. This is reflected in the discussions about sex between the partners and Marianne’s immediate defensiveness, as if she is being blamed for her occasional lack of desire:

  • Johan: We’re emotional illiterates. We’ve been taught about anatomy and farming methods in Africa. We’ve learned mathematical formulas by heart. But we haven’t been taught a thing about our souls. We’re tremendously ignorant about what makes people tick.

  • Marianne: I think about you… and I think about myself and about the future. I can’t see how you’re going to cope without me. Sometimes I think in desperation, “I must look after Johan. He’s my responsibility. It’s up to me to make sure he’s all right. That’s the only way our lives will be worthwhile.”

  • Johan: I don’t believe people are strong all on their own. You have to have someone’s hand to hold.

  • Marianne: I felt inadequate at work and at home, and I was a washout in bed too. I was hedged in by all the griping and endless demands! Goddamn you! Was it so strange that I used sex for leverage? I was outnumbered, having to fight you, both sets of parents and society! When I think about what I endured, I could scream! I tell you this: never again! You sit there whining about conspiracies. Well, it serves you right! I hope you’ll have it rammed down your throat that you’re a useless parasite.

  • Johan: You’re being utterly grotesque!

  • Marianne: So what? That’s what I’ve become! (Mann, 2017) Bergman, (1973).

Another of the central themes of this drama is the issue of guilt. Bergman admits in his autobiography that he felt a tremendous weight of guilt for leaving successive wives and families and this guilt is transferred to Johan’s character. Remember also that Bergman was the son of a Lutheran Priest. When Marianne tries to help Johan pack for his trip to Paris, saying that he was never any good at it, he lashes out and is abusive toward her. He cannot face the guilt of having her help him while injuring her. Then, after a calm and business-like breakfast, as he puts on his raincoat and prepares to leave the house, she begs him to reconsider, asks him how he can be so cruel, and he pushes her away, literally prying her arms from around his neck, and rushes out.

2.4 The Romantic Discourse Squeezed Between the Demands of Nostalgia and Desire for Liberty and Choice

A romantic discourse encompasses marriage, monogamy, and love and invoking one invokes them all (Willig, 2001). Romantic love is expressed in the following terms: “if you love me, you will want to marry me and remain faithful forever.” Johan and Marianne approve and confirm one another this way in the initial scene. Here, marriage and monogamy are necessary conditions in a romantic discourse, which takes much of its force from expectations of harmony and stability, as seen in a happy and unthreatened couple/family structure. In Scenes from a marriage, Johan falls in love with another woman, and thereby breaches the contract of monogamy, and this leads to divorce.

“Oh, how romantic!” is an exclamation that immediately invites us into a framework of love in which roses, champagne, and candlelight are natural symbols of an appealing, old-fashioned style of courtship. In the sequence below taken from my thesis, one of the informants is contrasting contemporary couples’ social behavior with how things were “back then” when T was young, a kind of nostalgia:

T: I think nowadays young people…. they go out separately. They have different needs. So, she goes with her friends and he gets jealous and then he goes to a pub with his friends […] Unlike in my time, when they either went together or stayed at home [together]. [Going out] separately to the pub… It’s become very common. I don’t think it’s healthy (Øfsti, 2008).

The reason I address this excerpt from my analysis with the screenplay from Scenes from a marriage is that I think it demonstrates the deep-seated nostalgia of romance as we know it, the “good old days,” and the process toward “pure relationship.” In Scandinavia, I think these two processes go hand in hand: sentimentality, the desire for stability and safety along with acknowledgment of the forces of individualization and the desire for freedom.

As a couple therapist, I find these dilemmas highly relevant for the various dialogues that occur among couples, especially the questions about the experience of how difficult it can be to develop long-term relationships. Here there is conflict between the traditional romantic promise, forever yours, with the individual’s doubt about what the “glue” of the relationship consists in when the choice of leaving is always present. Øfsti, (2010).

3 The Pure Relationship, the Plot, and Longing Depicted in the Swedish Novel, Willful Disregard

This novel by the Swedish author Lena Andersson published in 2013 has been broadly discussed among booklovers in Scandinavia. The protagonist is a 31-year-old essayist Ester Nilsson. Ester is described as a successful modern woman living with an unexciting but reliable boyfriend, Per, and is contentedly devoted to intellectual pursuits. She is bright, thoughtful, and rational.

One day she receives an invitation to give a lecture about the renowned artist Hugo Rask, with whom she immediately develops a fascination. Immediately after her lecture, Rask declares, “no outsider has ever understood me so profoundly and precisely” and suggests they should go for a drink. Ester falls in love. She knows in an intuitive way that the two of them will relate. As an early strategy of self-defense (so as not to let this fascination threaten her relationship) she tells herself that she thinks she would like her partner, Per, to socialize with Rask.

How can we understand this first moment of attraction? The encounter between Hugo and Ester cannot be explained by physical desire for him, as in traditional romantic narratives where the male hero is usually tall, dark, and handsome. Rather, Ester is determined to dazzle him with her lecture, believing that men like him were “receptive to the power of intellectual formulations and their erotic potential” (Andersson, 2016). Rask delivers a perfect flirtatious statement when he says, “no outsider has ever understood me so profoundly and precisely,” and emphasizes that Ester is particularly competent in her special view of him.

Rask’s statement correlates with Anthony Giddens’ description of the “pure relationship.” While romantic love as an ideal has had a huge impact on how intimacy is organized in late modernity, it has at the same time been challenged by what Giddens has called the “pure relationship” (Øfsti, 2008), The “‘pure relationship’ […] refers to a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only in so far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfaction for each individual to stay within it” (Giddens, 1992, p. 58). The ideal of the pure relationship tends away from the traditional model of marriage toward a post-traditional form in which the relationship is seen as a means to self-development; the expectation is rather that, when the relationship no longer serves the purpose of self-realization, it will be terminated.

For Ester, hearing that she has seen and grasped Hugo Rask as no one else has done, is a relational invitation that makes Ester and Hugo special for one another. This ideal of seeing the personality of the other and the striving for a unique identity is interwoven into an understanding of the importance of being perceived as an individual, in-depth, in the struggle to be someone special and in intimacy as a self-development project.

Another concept of Giddens describes emotional ties, “confluent love”:

Opening oneself to the other, the condition of what I shall call confluent love, is in some ways the opposite of projective identification, even if such identifications sometimes set up a pathway to it. Confluent love is active, contingent love, and therefore jars with the ¨for-ever¨, and ¨one and only¨ qualities of the romantic love complex. […] Confluent love presumes equality in emotional give and take, the more so the more any particular love tie approximates closely to the prototype of the pure relationship (Giddens, 1992, pp. 61–62).

The pure relationship and the confluent aspect of love as representations of intimate relationships correlate with a contemporary development I refer to as “a call for emotional peak experiences.” This development focuses on the individual’s need to be entertained and to maximize fulfilment. Philosophically speaking, we could say that the individual orients herself relationally toward pleasure and satisfaction more than duty and virtue. In such a trend, the couple’s compass points toward frequent and rapid emotional events rather than lasting and cyclical experiences. In this light, being in love is the “jewel in the crown” of emotional peak experiences (Øfsti, 2008).

In the novel, Ester leaves her boyfriend and throws herself into an imaginary relationship with Hugo. She believes they are a couple, because the intensity of their chain of meetings and shared events is compelling and increasing. From an outsider, it seems that Rask consumes her thoughts. Ester is struggling between rationalizing and analyzing the relationship, and at the same time, helpless in the face of her overpowering feelings for Hugo. She throws herself into a love that starts to direct all her waking movements. With classic, torturous uncertainty, she puzzles over the meaning of every encounter and the crushing blank of Hugo’s frequent absences.

In terms of the pure relationship, reflexivity is necessary, producing questions such as, “Is everything all right in our relationship?” and “How is this relationship contributing to my self-development?” Ester submits to a reflexive loop throughout the story. She notices the power imbalance early on: “Hugo never followed up anything Ester said. Ester always followed up what Hugo said. Neither of them was really interested in her but they were both interested in him.”

“Let’s be in touch later,” he said cautiously.

“Only if you feel like it.”

“Or if you feel like it.”

“No, I’m afraid that’s not how it works. It’s if you feel like it that we’ll be in touch.”

He dashed out after a quick, harassed kiss (Andersson, 2016).

Although romantic love has its foundation in housekeeping, economic concerns, gender differences, children and, for some, moral and religious commitment, the pure relationship is instead a relationship based on sexual and emotional equality, embarked upon solely for its own sake and for the mutual satisfaction of the partners.

Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995) explore the dilemmas and challenges concerning love that arose in late modernity through individualization and secularization. They explore the gap between the Old Era and the New Era, where New Era refers to “a collision of interests between love, family and personal freedom.” Characteristic of the Old Era was that definitions of roles and functions were clearer; men and women of middle-class upbringing anywhere in the Western world desired to marry, and to bear and rear children. The New Era refers to a condition in which almost everything is a matter of choice: relationships, jobs, and marriage, with the possible consequence of a conflict of interests between couple relationships, family/children, and personal freedom. However, common to both the old and new eras is the importance of displaying a good “self-biography” and this involves showing off one’s relational status.

Ester’s expectations after she and Rask have finally had sex once or twice are that they are now in a steady, defined relationship. The problem is that Hugo seems to be more interested in her thoughts and their communication, while Ester is longing for security and emotional and erotic exchange. Traditionally in a romantic, heterosexual discourse, the male erotic lust is taken for granted. Nevertheless, in the novel, Hugo is uninterested. In the shed of the new discourse, how do people attract one another? In romantic role-play one falls in love. What must the contract become for getting into a relationship? The question this novel is asking is: can a woman win a man solely with intellectual firepower?

3.1 Dialogical Love and the Emphasis on Being Seen as a Psychological–Relational Being

Psychological language and knowledge have become incorporated into folk knowledge, and I find it interesting that the emphasis on emotions, the value of good dialogues, the needs for self-government and reflection, and to a certain degree confession, permeates the discourse of coupledom (Madsen, 2009). Madsen proposes that there are problematic aspects with this development that are seldom recognized due to a widely held assumption that “the more psychology, the better for everyone” (Rose, 1989/1999).

In the relationship between Ester and Rask, the uncertainty and vague dynamics between them upsets Ester, and she becomes emotionally trapped, as in a kind of addiction, such as that of gambling: win a little 1 day, lose dramatically the next. However, what I find interesting when discourses about coupledom get entangled in this struggle is that the solutions become therapeutic. A recurring concern with psychological solutions however, is that they often provide individual solutions to structural problems such as unemployment, poverty, inequality, and social mobility As a result, psychologists may be inadvertently increasing the burden on the shoulders of the people they are meant to help and, at the same time, our capacity to understand individual suffering in the light of major historical and political changes in society is becoming increasingly clouded (Madsen, 2009).

The novel can also be read in a moralistic framework, as asking whether human beings are responsible for vulnerabilities in others. When you involve yourself emotionally and intimately with another toward whom you do not intend to commit yourself, are you morally responsible for the impact this might have on the other person? This is what Ester claims of Hugo in the novel, since he has offered attention to her, as if they were going to have a steady and intimate relationship.

This novel is also written in the context of a postmodern, individualistic discourse, in which the persons involved are free to choose; at the same time, they are also very alone in deciding what it is that should qualify as a compass for being a couple.

4 Scandinavia Today: A Crucible of Discourses and Experiences and the Movement Between Nostalgia and New Ways of Being Intimate

In this chapter, I have presented different discourses of coupledom in Scandinavia. There may be some experiences representative of Scandinavia that differ slightly from those common to other countries and continents. I am not sure. Looking again at the history of Scandinavia, one can see a certain geographical isolation from the European continent. However, with globalization and processes of migration, and economic growth, Scandinavia resonates closely with impulses that are common worldwide. It is not my intention to argue for a unique Scandinavian discourse. Rather, I want to remind the reader how important it is to understand the interchange between different aspects such as geography (the topographic landscape), historical traditions, religion and values, the structural and economic conditions and the cultural landscape, and the contributions these make to discourses.

The crucible or in the words of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, the normal chaos of love, is an apt description. In Scandinavia, as in the Western World, it is difficult to dictate the ways how family, marriage, parenthood, sexuality, or love should have significance, what they should or could be. As seen in this chapter, these vary in substance, exceptions, norms, and morality from individual to individual and from relationship to relationship.

In a collision of ideals, the meaning of love and of the way of being a couple, are being squeezed between old and new ideals and practices. For the Scandinavians, the new era represents diversity, and possibility and at the same time, anxiety, and risks. Being aware of the cultural and historical context, we might get a better understanding of the personal dilemmas, which can occur, since in the end, love and forms of intimacy are essential for human beings—and the complexity of intimate relationships needs to be understood and further explored by politicians, writers, therapists, and the individual people themselves.