Relationship satisfaction in the data wasn’t primarily about money or romance; it was about “intimate couple knowledge” and its expression in daily life.
In one young couple’s diary given to them for the project, Sumaira describes her partner coming home, the dinner she has cooked, the hug in the hallway, the two of them eating together at the table.
“It’s perfect,” she writes in her research diary. “Just us and food. What more could I want?”
Then there is a spontaneous dance in the living room, a walk in long grass where she gets scared of the dark, and a photo her partner loves so much he makes it the background on his phone.
It reads like a lovely every day tale, not a fairy tale: no glass slippers, but wellies.
Yet Gabb points out that woven through the sweetness are money worries, family obligations and a history of depression that the couple are learning to manage together.
“The soulmate feeling here doesn’t float above life; it is made, inch by inch, by life, in the way the pair meet those pressures,” she says.
