There is increasing recognition of the importance of social and cultural differences in shaping the diversity of the ageing experience in contemporary Britain. Various social and cultural factors, such as those associated with class, ethnicity, gender and disability, influence people's living circumstances and sources of support in later life. While they have been the subject of considerable speculation, ageing in a non-heterosexual context remains remarkably under-studied. This paper examines the difference that being non-heterosexual makes to how people experience ageing and later life. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data gathered for a British study of the living circumstances of non-heterosexuals aged between the fifties and the eighties. Previous work has overwhelmingly emphasised how individuals manage their sexual identities, but this paper focuses on the factors that shape the non-heterosexual experience of ageing and later life. Particular attention is paid to the relational and community contexts in which non-heterosexuals negotiate personal ageing. This not only provides insights into the specific challenges that ageing presents for non-heterosexuals, but also offers insights into the challenges faced by ageing non-heterosexuals and heterosexuals in ' detraditionalised ' settings.

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This article draws from a British empirical study of older gay men and lesbians that explores intimate, family, and community relationships at mid-and later life. The study included a survey of 266 women and men, qualitative interviews with a subsample of 10 men and 10 women, and eight focus groups (with a total of 16 men and 14 women). The article examines how gay men and lesbians over 50 years old structure and negotiate their relational lives and the factors that limit negotiation. Chosen relationships are important to many participants (Weeks, Heaphy, & Donovan, 2001;Weston, 1991). However, focus-group and interview narratives also highlight the limits of choices with respect to relationships. The article argues the case for a situated understanding of the relational options available to older gay men and lesbians. This involves acknowledging how relational choices and their limits are shaped by access to combined economic, social, and cultural resources.

In this paper we explore some of the negative aspects of friendship. In so doing we do not seek to join the debate about whether or not friendships are more or less important than other relationships but rather to explore precisely how significant friendships can be. Based on written accounts submitted to the British Mass Observation Project, we analyse how friendship, when it goes wrong, can challenge one's sense of self and even produce ontological insecurity. Friendship, it is argued, is tied into the process of self-identification and so staying true to friends, even when the relationships becomes uneven or tiresome, can be a sign of ethical standing. Meeting 'old' friends can also become very challenging, especially if one does not wish to be reminded of the self one once was. The paper contributes to the growing interest in relationships beyond kin.

Couple studies generally focus on heterosexual relationships where partners are interviewed together or apart. This article discusses a study of same-sex couples’ Civil Partnerships that interviewed partners together and apart. It considers the methodological and analytical challenges raised by our approach by discussing how the different interactional settings of the interviews shaped the stories that couples and partners told, the links between relationship narration in interviews and their ‘doing’ in practice and the insights generated into the sociocultural factors that shape relationship scripting. The joint interviews produced couple and marriage stories. They illuminated couples’ scripting agency and factors that enable and constrain partners’ scripting authority in interviews and beyond. The individual interviews produced biographically embedded narratives of ‘relating selves’. These contextualized and complicated couple stories of (non-)negotiated relationships. Our approach enabled us to make links between relational scripting in interviews and the flow of power in situated research, relational and sociocultural contexts.