Intimate relationships in early adulthood

Intimate relationships

▪ Need for strong, close, stable and committed relationships→ important motivation for human behaviour.

▪ Increased proximity:

• Mutual disclosures.

• Sensitivity to the needs of the other person.

• Acceptance and mutual respect.

▪ Skills needed for good relationships:

• Self-awareness.

• Empathy.

• Emotional intelligence: Skill in communicating emotions.

• Conflict resolution.

• Respect commitments.

▪ Powerful relationship between personality and relationships

Early adulthood and friendships

▪ Greater sense of well-being→ people who have friends feel good/people who feel good are more likely to make friends.

▪ Closer friendships for women: they share information and activities vs. they talk about problems and receive support and advice.

▪ Friends as fictitious relatives → psychological family of the individual.

▪ Today, social networking as a way to maintain and strengthen connections with friends and family.

▪ Fewer and fewer early adults have close confidants.

Triangular theory of love

3 elements of love → intimacy, passion and commitment:

• Intimacy: emotional element including self-disclosure → bonding, warmth and trust.

• Passion: motivational element based on internal drives → physiological stimulation in sexual desire.

• Commitment: cognitive element → decision to love and stay with

the beloved.

 Patterns of love:

✔ No love: all 3 components are missing. Most relationships.

✔ Liking: only intimacy (friendship).

✔ Infatuation: only passion ("love at first sight")

✔ Empty love: only commitment (arranged marriages).

✔ Romantic love: there is intimacy and passion (but no commitment).

Patterns of love:

✔ Companionate love: there is intimacy and commitment (they

decide to stay together without passion).

✔ Fatuous love: there is passion and commitment, without intimacy

(they commit out of passion without knowing each other).

✔ Consummate love: there are the 3 components. "Complete love".

It is easier to attain it than to sustain it.

Early adulthood and adult relationships with parents

 Influences on relationships with parents.

• In emerging adulthood, need for acceptance, empathy and parental support.

• Attachment to parents as a Core element of well-being.

• Financial support from parents as a possibility for success in adult roles.

• Positive parent-child relationships during early adolescence > a more cordial and less conflictual relationship in emerging adulthood.

• Even better relationships when they establish adult roles.

• Mother-parent relationship—> quality of relationship with adult children: early adult caught between two conflicting parents, increased risk of depressive thoughts.

Inability to become independent

• Thirty-somethings who avoid taking responsibility.

• Adults forced to maintain some dependency due to economic hardship, need for higher Degree.

• Problems in redefining their relationship with parents.

• Habituation and positive view of the situation of early adult children remaining in the parental home > new developmental stage: adulthood at home.

Empty nest syndrome

• Supposedly difficult transition that occurs when the youngest child leaves home.

• Difficulties compensated by a sense of liberation with the departure of children.

• Greater difficulties when children have little success → if financial

problems, parents torn between wanting them to be independent and wanting to help them.

• In these cases, → greater stress when there was already tension in

the relationship or the older children return home.

• Consequences of empty nesting depending on the quality and duration of the parental relationship:

- Second "honeymoon", as it increases the couple's satisfaction

as there is more time to spend with each other.

- More difficult if partner identity depends on their role as

parents or if there are previous relationship problems.