Digital technologies play an increasing role in intimate couple relationships, prompting new approaches to better understand the contemporary digital relationship landscape. This article uses feminist new materialist assemblage thinking to explore the functioning and processes of a relationship support app, Paired. Deploying diffractive analysis, it presents three composite narratives that explore the temporality of couple relationships, relationship work and situated practices of coupledom.
Composite narratives retain the emotional truth of original accounts through combined participant voices, enabling attention to be focused on the user—relationship—app assemblage. Findings suggest that routinised app notifications prompt meaningful everyday relationship maintenance behaviours. Human—technology intra-actions thus generate positive relationship health and wellbeing behaviours which may have lasting benefits.
A lasting romantic relationship is a cultural marker of successful adulthood in Western societies Giddens, Emerging from 19th-century discourses on marriage, the ties that bind couples have continued to evolve Langhamer, and now incorporate technological and digital intimacies Elliott, Whereas digital dating has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, apps that focus on sustaining relationships remain relatively few and are often short-lived.
Couple relationship education and support reside at the periphery of long-term relationships in both the material real-world and online and are very much the poor relation in intervention and self-service provision Markman et al, In contrast, the need for relationship support is clear. There is then a burgeoning rich culture around digital intimacies Elliott, and a space for technologically mediated relationship care may be a consequential progression Gabb et al, The proliferation of evaluation and analyses of dating apps and their impacts on diverse relationships is robust; however, we contend more research is needed to understand how technologies generate new relationship practices and forms.
Digital intimacies remain under-theorised in terms of how the human—digital interface shapes the interaction of all parts — individual users, the couple, and the digital technologies they use.
