What is the role of relationships in sexuality education? To begin, it is at times part of the terminology. In the UK, Relationships and Sex Education is a statutory subject in primary school. Sweden recently updated the name of the knowledge area to Sexuality, Consent and Relationships (Skolverket 2023-01-31). Relationships is mentioned as the seventh (out of seven) central components of Comprehensive Sexuality Education according to the organization International Planned Parenthood Federation. When working with the concept of ‘family’, a teaching resource developed for the Health and Wellbeing division in Ireland (2023-01-31) discusses the importance of including non-traditional examples of what family means. They use critical approaches to gender and sexuality and argue that these are relevant for understanding family relationships – however, critical approaches to relationships are limited to inclusion.

There has been a thorough debate in international sexuality education scholarship around critical approaches to aspects of gender and sexuality drawing on theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) and Kevin Kumashiro (2002). Such studies have introduced critical and norm aware ways of teaching sexuality education and contributed to keeping the area alert on societal changes (Jones 2011; Lundin 2014; Bengtsson & Bolander 2020). A corresponding critical discourse on the topic of relationships is emerging lately in academia; however, it is rarely or never seen in the sexuality education practice.

What does it mean then to pursue a critique of normative assumptions on relationships? Relationships need to be placed into a context. Sociologist Eva Illouz (2012) argues that since the beginning of the 20th century, the marriage market has slowly been deregulated in the Western world in tandem with societal changes such as secularization, industrialization, and individualization. This means that today, there is a new cultural pattern where people can organize their close relationships more freely. However, it does not mean that individuals are free from norms, opinions from family members, or from implicit socio-economical structures.

Sociologist Catrine Andersson (2015) shows how the Swedish state regulates intimate relationships through sanctioning marriages and divorces. The former idea of monogamy is today more realistically termed “serial monogamy”: being with a partner, until you are with a new one. If you stick to one partner at the time, your intimate relationships are sanctioned by the state. However, many adults are engaged in consensual non-monogamy in different ways (not to be mistaken for infidelity). Andersson (2022) maps out a multitude of practices in her informants’ non-monogamous lives, such as open relationships, polyamory, swinging, and relationship anarchy. Research has shown how individuals practicing consensual non-monogamy are stigmatized and suffer from minority stress (Mahar et al. 2022). This is thought to be a result of the normative assumptions on relationship structures society bears today.

Two other aspects of relationships which are highly politicized are the variety of ways of how to start a family (IVF, adoption, surrogacy) and organizing domestic life (collective living, intergenerational living arrangements, the increase of single households). Less politicized – but equally relevant for people’s lives – are aspects such as friendship, online communities, and loneliness (Ceder & Gunnarsson, 2021).

Sexuality education is a knowledge area where societal topics are raised; for the knowledge aspect of them, and for the importance this knowledge might have in students’ lives. This paper aims to explore how relationships as a topic can be taught with an awareness of critical approaches. The research questions are: What aspects on relationships appear in sexuality education in Swedish secondary school? How can these aspects be understood through literature on critical approaches to relationships? How can the topic of relationships be developed as a part of the knowledge area of sexuality education?

This paper is part of a broader practice-based research project on sexuality education in Swedish secondary school. In the project we worked with teachers in research circles at schools to develop the teaching about sexuality, consent, and relationship. Further, we participated in the teaching, co-planned parts of the teaching, and interviewed teachers. Students were interviewed in focus groups shortly after a sexuality education theme week had taken place. About 5-13 teachers participated at each of the four schools included in the study. For this paper, I have extracted empirical materials of when relationships appear as a topic in the teaching, interviews, and in the research circles. The empirical materials were analysed with a focus on the topic of relationships and what happened in that teaching: the teaching methods and the student reactions. In the second step of the analysis, I read the empirical materials through the literature on critical approaches to relationships. Thirdly, I explored possible contributions from the critical relationship discourse to the area of sexuality education when teaching about relationships. The analytical approach is based on an affirmative critique, which is not primarily locating dominant discourses and criticizing these, but explores potentialities in the material and building on these (Staunes 2016).

In the study, the most common mentions of relationships were aspects related to sexual encounters, such as meeting someone at a club, prevention of venereal diseases, and pregnancy. Consent has also become – since the term was included in Swedish curriculum – a common aspect of teaching about relationships. At one school, a documentary on loneliness was screened, which was followed by discussions on the importance of social networks. The screening was discussed in one of the student group interviews, in which the students expressed concern regarding the fact that many elderly people in Sweden die alone, but they displayed reluctance regarding discussing strategies to disrupt social patterns of loneliness. There were no mentions of ways of organizing relationships outside of monogamous structures, nor were this term mentioned. The teachers expressed difficulties in talking about topics outside the norm when they themselves were inside the norm. This shows the need for more knowledge about normative structures involving relationships. In his discussions on heteronormativity, Kumashiro (2002) argues that both students and staff must develop an awareness of how society creates norms and suppresses what deviates. When it comes to critical approaches to relationships, a similar framework can be attended to. Apart from teaching about the less common ways of organizing relationships, teaching can be about the current normative structures, how they came about and what societal challenges they have ahead of them. Finally, there is a useful term called ‘sexuality literacy’ (Alexander, 2008) which derives from literacy studies and language education. It is aligned with the strive for students to guide themselves towards lives with more healthy sexuality. Based on this study, I would add that a ‘relationship literacy’ could be a productive tool for teachers when teaching on the topic, based on the discussions this paper displayed.

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