Intimacy and the New Sentimental OrderT housands of stories have in past centuries crystallized romantic love into an archetype which we recognize as such, with the result that we are not always conscious of the existence of various love categories. Many historians (e.g. de Rougemont, 1963) retrace the emergence of romantic love back to the Middle Ages, to the time of troubadour culture. Whether these claims of its origin are true or not, the more essential fact is that romantic love has survived and that people still feel an irresistible attraction towards it. Romantic love is a narrative that has been constructed in a fictive form, in songs, poems, dramas, operas, fairy tales and films, but which also appears in reality-based stories told in the form of biographies in a range of media. The growth in popularity of romantic stories may stem from the promise inherent in romanticism: that if something happens to someone else, it may happen to me also. Therefore, romantic love is not only a matter of imagination but holds the promise of a potential experience.The situation today is far more complicated than it was during the early stages of romanticism. As Anthony Giddens (1992) writes, the influence of traditional sources of authority and of social bounds has increasingly receded in favour of an endless and obsessive preoccupation with personal identity. Romantic love, it is argued, provides a case study of the origin of the 'pure relationship' which today increasingly describes the nature of intimate relationships. Ideals of romantic love have long affected the aspirations of women more than those of men, although men have also been influenced by them. The ethos of romantic love has had a double impact upon women's situation: on the one hand it has helped to put women in 'their' place -in the home; yet on the other hand, romantic love can be seen as an active and radical engagement with the 'maleness' of male society. Romantic love in its ideological narrative presumes that a durable emotional tie can be established with someone on the basis of intrinsic qualities, qualities that serve as the tie itself.

Until the end of the 1970s, the sociology of the family neglected the vertical relationships between generations in favour of horizontal links between parents. The family was liberated from the weight of kinship and the nuclear model became the inevitable reference. But, with steady political, social and demographic changes, the horizontal relationships collapsed as sole model. Links between generations are becoming more and more important. With the crisis of the welfare state, increasing responsibility is being moved into the private arena. The lack of commitment and the progressive withdrawal of public institutions in the matter of social assistance has foregrounded family solidarity. Since the 1980s, many authors have warned of the dangers of considering private and public flows in solidarity as substitutable. Indeed, we have to regard them as complementary.

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Under the influence of the process of individualization in western societies, privatization and plurality of families forms have become dominant. Family is, however, presented as a value rather than a structure as defined in Parsons’s terms. Family is listed by most Europeans as the place where they first seek shelter from the ills of social life, and most Europeans place fidelity as the most important factor to keep couples together. Although family has become a private matter, it remains a political stake for its two most important remaining functions: intimacy and solidarity. Although areas like adoption and the role of step-parents are still regulated by the state, due to the crisis of the welfare states and the ageing population in the western world, family solidarity is called on to partly replace state solidarity and intimacy. The article refers to data from a large-scale national Belgian survey to illustrate this.

While American sociology, in the wake of Talcott Parsons's work, foregrounds the nuclear family, European sociology focuses on solidarity. In fact, the concept of family solidarity is essential to the French sociological tradition. The French-speaking world has become one of the most dynamic grounds for this kind of sociology, with the development of longitudinal methods and biographical methods, which have progressively brought along a new approach to the notion of family and prompted the use of another methodology.