Caribbean matrifocal family research contrasts the close and enduring bond between mother and child with the weak, brittle and unstable dynamics of conjugal relations. This, despite the campaigns of the Church and other moral authorities to promote the marriage-plus-nuclear-family ideal of monogamous love (absolute, exclusive and for ever), patriarchal authority, wifely “respectability”, and conjugal co-residence and stability. If anything, recent social and legal changes appear to be undermining their mission even further.

In Barbados, for example, young women in contrast to their mothers and grandmothers, experience significant occupational and social mobility along with personal autonomy. Furthermore, divorce is now based on the sole grounds of “irretrievable breakdown”. It is socially acceptable, and the rates have escalated.

But marriage rates have also increased in recent years and there is evidence that the younger generation of newly-weds are restructuring conjugality by factoring in romance, fidelity and equality. It appears that it is modern wives who are negotiating for change, while their men-folk continue to define love, sex and infidelity differently, to resist intimacy, to claim control, and to cling tenaciously to their space “outside”.