Adulthood’s Commitments

1. Adulthood’s Commitments Lauren Ballard & Brandon Beshay

2. Adulthood’s Dominate Aspects • Erikson’s terms: • Intimacy: Forming close relationships • Generativity: Being productive and supporting future generations • Researcher’s terms: • Affiliation and achievement, attachment and productivity, commitment and competence • Sigmund Freud put it most simply: • The healthy adult is one who can love and work

3. Love • Evolutionary Perspective: Parents who cooperate to nurture their children to maturity are more likely to have their genes passed along than parents who don’t • 93% of American mothers feel an overwhelming love for their children unlike anything they feel for anyone else • Adult bonds of love are most satisfying and enduring when marked by a similarity of interests and values, a sharing of emotional and material support, and intimate self-disclosure • Marriage bonds are also likely to last when couples marry after age 20 and are well educated, yet they are twice as likely to divorce • Expectations are higher and demand: an enduring bond, a wage earner, caregiver, intimate friend, and a warm and responsive lover • Both Canada and the United States now have about one divorce for every two marriages

4. Love (Cont.) • People who cohabit before marriage tend to be less committed to the idea of enduring marriage, and they become even less marriage-supporting while cohabiting • 9 in 10 heterosexual adults marry worldwide In Western countries, 3 in 4 who divorce will remarry • Since 1972, surveys if more than 40,000 Americans reveal that 40% of married adults, though only 23% of unmarried adults, report being “very happy” • Lesbian couples also report greater well-being than those who are alone • Neighborhoods with high marriage rates typically have low rates of social pathologies such as crime, delinquency, and emotional disorders among children • John Gottman: At lease a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions in order to achieve marital success

5. Love (Cont.) • When children begin to absorb time, money, and emotional energy, satisfaction with the marriage itself may decline • Likely among employed women who carry the traditional burden of doing chores at home • And equitable relationship can establish a more satisfying marriage, which breeds better parent-child relations • Compared with middle-aged women with children at home, those living in an empty nest report greater happiness and greater enjoyment of their marriage • Many parents experience what sociologists Lynn White and John Edwards call a “postlaunch honeymoon”

6. Work • Freud believed work, including a career, contributes to self-fulfillment and life satisfaction • Researchers who have studied the work-satisfaction relationship have concluded that what matters is not which roles (paid worker, wife/mother) a woman occupies but the quality of her experience in those roles • During the first two years of college or university, most students shift from their initially intended majors and change careers