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Interviews are reported in which heterosexual women construct unmarried status as a temporary stage, preparatory to marriage, or the consequence of failure to maintain heterosexual relationships. Remaining single in later life is constructed as a threat, and older single women are constructed as lonely and isolated. Women construct themselves as responsible for the ending of past relationships, and report having been held to account in this way by significant others. It is argued that these accounts reflect the discourses of heterosexual romantic quest, and the gendered division of emotional labour in marriage. Participants' accounts are characterized by heterosexism and ageism, and the authors discuss issues of collusion with these in the collection of data.

This article draws on interviews discussing relationships with 25 heterosexual women aged 20–87 from a variety of relationship status groups. Divorce was portrayed as a negative consequence of flawed individual skills and investments, reinforcing the marriage ideal and obscuring any advantages of this transition for the increasing numbers facing single-again life. Those interviewees who had been divorced did not endorse these attributions and negotiated their social lives around feedback from others employing these interpretations. The ways in which discourses of divorce reinforce dominant marital models of heterosexual relationships are examined alongside the implications of this for the growing population of single-again women.

This article proposes a methodological stance, an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) of participants’ drawings as one that is useful for research into people’s experiences of seizure consciousness. Using empirical examples located in an original, larger study, this article offers a rationale for, and illustrates the analytic potential of, this combination. It also considers that elicitation interviewing techniques and methods from the field of neuro - phenomenology could take this work further in terms of deepening the analysis by reaching people’s pre - reflexive conscious experiences. This theoretical and practical combination has the potential to develop this work significantly.

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