The life course anticipated: gender and chronologisation among young people1

Drawing on qualitative data from young men and their female partners in their twenties, this paper critically reviews debates about young people's perceptions of their futures. It argues that the anticipation of either a ‘destructured’ or a ‘standardised’ life course does not simply vary between different categories of young people; rather, it shows young people's experience of tension between these two trajectories. Moreover, in the case of estate agents and firefighters, interviewing both members of a couple revealed gendered differences in how future trajectories were being realised, women tending to direct and ‘manage’ young men's orientations towards ‘adulthood’, often by asserting chronologised milestones. In that our sample drew young men from three occupations with cultures seen as more or less stereotypically masculinised or feminised (firefighters, estate agents and hairdressers), our data also show class and occupational differences and, among estate agents and firefighters, their reflection in the gendered negotiations that contributed to couples’ everyday heterosexual lives. At the intersection between gendered patterns of work, consumption, and fertility, then, young estate agents and firefighters and their female partners sought to plan shared lives that nonetheless cleaved to sometimes competing priorities.