An autoethnographic study of the rise and fall of intimacy: an embedded journey of discovery

Karen Upton-Davis

Research output: ThesisDoctoral Thesis

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Abstract

The loss of intimacy is a pervasive tale, felt especially poignantly when the particular story, with its plot lines of love and betrayal, soaked as they are in rage and grief, is my own. By inverting the research process, whereby I call upon friends, and strangers who become friends, to assist me in the meaning-making process, this autoethnographic account of the twenty year downward spiral of my now defunct marriage makes tangible the shared project of making sense of intimacy, love and loss. It connects the personal to the social, cultural, and (most especially) the politically gendered nature of heterosexual relationship experience. It speaks of the process that makes it possible for me to tell my story and of the ethical tensions involved in telling a story of "us". While holding notions of feminism, emotionalism and postmodernism, I enter the forest of interpretation. As I wander the pathways and gaze at the trees and thick vegetation, I ask what I brought with me to my relationship with my ex-husband, who I was and what was happening within me. I question the interpersonal interactions between us and the ways in which these influenced the outcome of the relationship. Lifting my gaze I ask how the world around us pressed in, sometimes enabling and sometimes constraining our relationship choices. I use these within-self, between-selves and beyond-self lenses to navigate my way back to the forest's edge. From there I perch on a mossy rock and reach toward the thin sunshine. I contemplate love, intimacy, loss, forgiveness and moving on. I imagine a better world where awareness is greater and relationships are easier, where we live them better, where love is kinder; a world where resistance is no longer needed.
Original languageEnglish
QualificationDoctor of Philosophy
Publication statusUnpublished - 2009

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