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Family relationships have become less dependent on marriage and blood
ties, with bonds and commitments usually going beyond the nuclear co-
resident family and extending across households linked by friendship,
vicinity, dissolved marriages, step-parenting, workplace bonds, and care
arrangements.
This intertwining between familial and non-familial ties has been
acknowledged in recent research on family and personal networks (Allan
2001 , 2008 ; Edwards and Gillies 2012 ; Finch 2007 ; Jamieson et al. 2011 ;
Morgan 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ; Williams 2004 ). The configurational
approach, for example, has highlighted the large array of relationships
included by individuals in their family networks (Widmer 2010 ). The
importance of bonds beyond the central family dyads (the conjugal or
the parent–child dyads) has been shown to be particularly significant for
individuals dealing with the impact of critical life events, such as divorce,
dependency in illness, unemployment, or moving across borders (Aboim
and Vasconcelos 2009 ; Widmer and Jallinoja 2008 ). Evidence on post-
divorce families shows that they tend to build up specific family networks
including a variety of step-kin, half-brothers/sisters, and ex-kin (Cherlin
and Furstenberg 1994 ). New family forms such as same-sex families also
point to fluidity in the structuring of family bonds, with rainbow families
of couples with children stressing both blood and non-blood relation-
ships, both biological filiation and adoption as well as step-parenting
(Weeks et al. 2001 ).
Moving beyond the well-known generative mechanisms of proximity
linked to partnership, biological filiation, co-residence, and lineage,
recent literature on personal relationships has focused on the crucial
importance of acquaintanceship, friendship, and extended kinship such
as aunts, uncles, and cousins (Allan 1998 , 2008 ; Milardo 2010 ; Morgan
2010 ; Pahl and Pevalin 2005 ). A further challenge of this approach has
been to reflect on the underlying nature of closeness. Straightforward
dichotomies which oppose given (kin) and chosen (non-kin) ties tell us
little about the social processes building up personal proximity. Seeking
to move forward this analysis, Pahl and Spencer ( 2004 ) refer to the chang-
ing nature of close ties as a process of suffusion, meaning the merging or
blurring of different types of ties within networks. Their exploratory find-
ings, based on qualitative research in the United Kingdom, show that the
K. Wall et al.