More-than-relationship quality: A feminist new materialist analysis of relationship quality and the potential of digital couple interventions

Long-established studies and scales have advanced understandings of family function, marital satisfaction, and couple relationship quality. The underpinning constructs nevertheless remain under-conceptualized and largely removed from the heuristic of everyday life and the dynamic of contemporary coupledom. We propose that a paradigm shift is required to sufficiently engage with the digital worlds of 21st century intimacies. Ideas in feminist new materialism revitalize the epistemology and ontology of relationship science. This enables a new look at how relationship quality is manifest in and created through human-technology intra-actions. The research tools of feminist new materialism are, however, typically creative and intentionally exploratory. We demonstrate how using a practices approach, which focuses on everyday lived experience, facilitates investigation of multidimensional public-private worlds. We deploy this to build a feminist new materialist analysis of a digital couple intervention. Through this, we develop the concept of more-than-relationship quality.