Completely Blinded by Love: Women, Men, and Gendered Maturity in Relationship Stories

• In Event: 578 - Section on Social Psychology Paper Session. Social Psychology of Sex, Sexualities, and Romantic Relationships

Abstract

While young people today expect gender equity in relationships, inequality continues to prevail. In this paper, we use interviews with 24 “emerging adult” women and men in order to investigate the gendered meanings attached to their stories of intimate relationships. We find that women’s and men’s relationship accounts differ in three ways: levels of emotional detail in stories, the nature of relationship experiences, and the potential for relationships to influence or “change” identity. However, rather than use gender to understand their relationship experiences, our participants draw primarily upon age-related norms and expectations. Yet, explaining the evolution of the gendered self through relationship experiences as primarily about age obscures the ways in which gender matters in relationship experiences. For each gendered group of people, focusing on age accomplishes different tasks. For women, focusing on age allows them to reclaim agency over their experiences, and to believe that they can solve their relationship problems by growing up. For men, focusing on age lets men escape responsibility for their bad relationship behavior by attributing that behavior to youth and immaturity. Men tell stories about sexual conquest while distancing themselves from the consequences of that behavior. Ultimately, the stories told by young adult women and men shed light on how the meanings attached to experiences in relationships obscure gender inequality.

Authors

• Cristen N. Dalessandro, University of Colorado-Boulder

• Amy C. Wilkins, University of Colorado-Boulder