Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Amy J. Amy J. Rauer and Gregory S. The delayed entry into marriage that characterizes modern society raises questions about young adults' romantic relationship trajectories and whether patterns found to characterize adolescent romantic relationships persist into young adulthood.
The current study traced developmental transitions into and out of romantic relationships from age 18 through age 25 in a sample of young adults. The developmental antecedents of these different romantic relationship experiences in both distal and proximal family and peer domains were also examined. Analyses included both person-oriented and variable-oriented approaches. Findings show 5 distinct clusters varying in timing, duration, and frequency of participation in romantic relationships that range from those who had only recently entered into a romantic relationship to those who had been in the same relationship from age 18 to age These relationship outcome trajectory clusters were predicted by variations in competence in early relationships with family and peers.
Interpersonal experiences in family and peer contexts in early childhood through adolescence thus may form a scaffold on which later competence in romantic relationships develops. Findings shed light on both normative and nonnormative developmental transitions of romantic relationships in young adulthood. Keywords: romantic relationships, young adulthood, developmental antecedents, family relationships, peer relationships.
Though this goal is laudable, researchers face two challenges in trying to operationally define normative romantic development in young adulthood. Census Bureau, Efforts to identify a normative romantic relationship profile for young adults today are therefore inherently difficult, as there is likely no single typical pattern. This is particularly true for establishing intimacy, because, unlike other developmental tasks, few individuals initially feel up to this challenge Prager, The nature of the experience required before one can achieve a committed relationship, however, remains unclear but is likely to vary based on groundwork laid earlier in the life span Conger et al.
Thus, the premise of the current study is that understanding the nature of young adult romantic relationship progression requires drawing upon both a person-centered approach that acknowledges the likelihood of variability of romantic relationship experiences during this period and a variable-centered approach that helps identify the developmental antecedents associated with these different experiences. Theorists have proposed that the development of early romantic relationships follows a phase-based approach, whereby adolescents begin with fairly short-term, shallow romantic connections primarily occurring in peer groups that develop into multiple shorter relationships that occur less in the group context and are defined more by emotional intimacy.
