While these schemas are relatively new, they have roots in earlier theories of development. Several important theoretical schemas have emerged to help make sense of how adolescent romantic relationships fit into the existing social relationship order and how they develop over time. Finally, we integrate our findings with those of other studies and assess future research needs.Adolescent Romantic Relationship Theories Our contribution with these data is unique because we test developmental theories and empirically follow adolescents into young adulthood by utilizing all three waves of the data. Our analyses use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), data that has proven useful in other studies of adolescent romance ( Joyner and Udry 2000 Giordano et al.
Next, guided by theory we conduct prospective empirical analyses that describe patterns of relationship involvement, assess their correlates, and estimate the associations between relationship progression and both qualitative aspects of adolescent relationships and the formation of young adult relationships. We then review findings from empirical forays into the romantic lives of adolescents. In this paper we review and integrate existing theories on the development of romantic experience through adolescence and into adulthood. Thus, understanding adolescent romantic relationships becomes a timely and compelling research objective. Empirical research to test new theoretical propositions has begun to appear in the literature, yet gaps remain in the evidentiary base. Not only is this a significant span of time, it is also dense with regard to individual and interpersonal development ( Dornbusch 1989).įinally, theories have developed and adapted to more fully account for romantic experience in adolescence ( Furman and Wehner 1994 Brown 1999 Connolly and Goldberg 1999 Allen and Land 1999 Collins 1997 Collins and Sroufe 1999 Giordano 2003 Giordano et al. This means that on average, adolescents have ten to twelve years of romantic experience prior to marriage. At the same time, half of all adolescents report romantic involvement by the age of 15 ( Carver, Joyner, and Udry 2003). Especially relevant for the study of social development, young people are delaying marriage so that the average age at first marriage is 25 for women and 27 for men ( U.S. Second, the transition to adulthood has become elongated and less orderly such that young people take longer to “become” adults and they do so by passing various markers of adulthood out of the standard sequence common to prior generations ( Settersten, Furstenberg, and Rumbaut 2005). Thus, researchers have aimed to identify the age, stage, and social conditions under which such relationships are pro-social or maladaptive. First, romantic relationships have been implicated both in negative behaviors ( Neeman, Hubbard and Masten 1995) and psychosocial well-being ( Joyner and Udry 2000 Davies and Windle 2000) and cited as imperative for development ( Giordano 2003 Giordano, Longmore, and Manning 2001 Erikson 1968). This increase is driven by a number of factors. The past decade has seen a marked increase in studies on adolescent romantic relationships. The paucity of research in this area can be attributed to several factors including skepticism regarding the importance of perceived short-lived or trivial relationships, research and funding focus on sexual (not romantic) relationships, and difficulty of both measuring adolescent romance and accounting for romantic relationships using existing theories of social or interpersonal development ( Brown, Feiring, and Furman 1999 Collins 2003).
Prior to the mid-1990s virtually no research considered the developmental currency provided by adolescent romantic relationships.
Much of the literature on social development during the transition to adulthood has focused on the role of key earlier relationships with parents and peers in constructing the social landscape on which young adult relationships will develop.