Distant Love (PDF)

Love and family life in the global age: grandparents in Salonika
and their grandson in London speak together every evening via
Skype. A U.S. citizen and her Swiss husband fret over large
telephone bills and high travel costs. A European couple can
finally have a baby with the help of an Indian surrogate
mother.

In their new book, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim
investigate all types of long-distance relationships, marriages and
families that stretch across countries, continents and cultures.
These long-distance relationships comprise so many different forms
of what they call 'world families', by which they mean
love and intimate relationships between individuals living in, or
coming from, different countries or continents. In all their
various forms these world families share one feature in common:
they are the focal point in which different aspects of the
globalized world become embodied in the personal lives of
individuals. Whether they like it or not, lovers and relatives in
these families find themselves confronting the world in the inner
space of their own lives. The conflicts between the developed and
developing worlds come to the surface in world families- they
acquire faces and names, creating confusion, surprise, anger, joy,
pleasure and pain at the heart of everyday life.

This path-breaking book will appeal to a wide readership interested
in the changing character of love in our times.