Manifesting maturity: Gendered sexual intimacy and becoming an adult

Largely because of the increased difficulty in achieving the “traditional” markers of adulthood (such as marriage, home ownership, financial stability, etc.), many sociologists and psychologists argue that young people today are just as concerned, if not more concerned, with individualistic cognitive processes and assessments in determining their statuses as fully adult (Arnett, 2004; Blatterer, 2007; Hartmann and Schwartz, 2007; Silva, 2012). The newfound cultural significance of subjective adulthood, combined with the continued relevance of concrete traditional markers (Andrew et al., 2007), complicates the definition of adulthood for young people in the USA. Changing understandings of adulthood are also significant in the wake of young people’s changing expectations related to gender. US women’s economic and social gains have increased young people’s expectations of gender egalitarianism (Gerson, 2011; Lamont, 2013). Yet, gender inequality persists in the lives of many young adults, perhaps most palpably in their intimate lives (Bell, 2013; Bogle, 2008; Lamont, 2013; Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013). In this article, I explore two questions. First, how might a class-advantaged group of US young adults make sense of the coexistence of objective and subjective definitions of adulthood in order to define themselves as adult, or as adults in progress? Second, how might gender complicate this process?

First, I explore one practice through which a group of young, class-advantaged adults in the USA bridge subjective and concrete understandings of adult status: their own attempts to make sense of their intimate, romantic, and sexual relationships. I use interviews with 28 college students and recent college graduates in order to explore young adults’ understandings of maturity and immaturity through relationship preferences. I find that these emerging adults use emotionality in relationships to help them understand, symbolically, their progress towards adulthood. Young adults conflate being ready to share an emotional relationship with a partner with not only monogamy and eventual marriage, but also maturity. Conversely, they view a deliberate rejection of emotionality, and by extension monogamy, as immature.

Next, I demonstrate how understandings of maturity in relationships based on emotionality are complicated by gender. The content of women’s accounts reveal women’s difficulty with applying to their own lives the idea that emotionality comes progressively with age and experience. While inside relationships women continue to be seen as emotional gatekeepers (Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013), even outside of relationships, a naturalized mastery of emotions continues to be associated with femininity (Schrock and Knop, 2014). Masculinity, especially young adult masculinity, is not held up to a comparable standard. Young men are sometimes even expected to be emotionally disconnected (Kimmel, 2008). Though women and men agree on what it means to reach maturity through relationships, gender impacts women’s ability to make sense of this cultural story in their own lives.

The phrase “emerging adulthood” (Arnett, 2004) is increasingly used to describe the changing nature of life experiences for those in between adolescence and full adulthood, as the “traditional” markers of normative adulthood (financial independence, getting married, etc.) become progressively more elusive for young adults due to widespread economic and ideological change (Berlin et al., 2010; Henig and Henig, 2012; Settersten and Ray, 2010). The standard of achieving adulthood through concrete markers has not completely disappeared (Andrew et al., 2007). However, the increased difficulty associated with achieving these markers corresponds to an amplified emphasis on the importance of symbolic understandings of adulthood (Arnett, 2004; Côté, 2000; Silva, 2012). Symbolic understandings of adult identity draw heavily on emotionality (Silva, 2012). One example of an emotional assessment of adult status would be if young people “feel,” or believe, they have reached adult status despite not having achieved the concrete markers of adulthood.

In a western cultural context more generally, emotionality has become important to individuals’ understandings and assessments of themselves (Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2008). However, the use of emotionality as a sense-making tool is not free of gendered meaning. Connections between femininity and emotionality are supported by much historical evidence (Schrock and Knop, 2014), and constructions that attest to the inseparability of womanhood with emotionality continue to persist (Lutz, 1996; Schrock and Knop, 2014). The conflation of femininity with emotionality often contributes to the perpetuation of gender inequalities. These inequalities play out in intimate arenas such as heterosexual married couples’ divisions of household labor (Hochschild, 1989), parenting (Hays, 1996; Walzer, 1998; Zaman and Fivush, 2013), as well as dating and sexual encounters (Bell, 2013; Sassler and Miller, 2011; Schrock and Knop, 2014).

In collegiate dating and sexual environments, the connection between emotionality and appropriately gendered action continues to create dilemmas for women in particular (Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013). While women, like men, are expected to be interested in hookups (Reid et al., 2011), they must also safeguard their sexual reputations and provide the emotion work in relationships (Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013). Usually, women who engage in “too much” casual sex pay a social price by being labeled a “slut” and otherwise being stigmatized (Sweeney, 2014). These confusing, contradictory expectations continue to plague women’s intimate lives post-college as well (Bell, 2013). Yet, how the persistence of women’s gendered dilemmas might be connected to the work of becoming an adult largely remains to be uncovered.

Though connections between becoming a gendered adult and experiencing gendered inequality in relationships remain under-articulated in research, existing research finds that gender inequality characterizes collegiate young adult sexuality in the USA (see Bogle, 2008; Glenn and Marquardt, 2001; Grello et al., 2006; Holland and Eisenhart, 1990). Hamilton and Armstrong’s (2009) research finds that even if women are able to use “hooking up” to their advantage, such as by finding intimacy without having to commit to a time-consuming relationship, they must still navigate the hookup scene carefully so as to avoid the “slut” label. Sweeney’s (2014) research on college men finds that men do, in fact, evaluate and scrutinize college women based on women’s sexual practices. Sweeney’s research on college men sits alongside evidence that women also scrutinize each other for their sexual practices (Hamilton, 2007; Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013). Though both women and men are expected to desire hookups in college (Reid et al., 2011), women sometimes report mixed feelings surrounding their experiences with hookups (Bogle, 2008; Stepp, 2007). Committed relationships might seem to be the solution to reducing women’s experiences of inequality in intimacy, yet researchers have documented that for college-educated women, gender-based inequality is present in women’s committed relationships as well both during college (Holland and Eisenhart, 1990) and after college ends (Bell, 2013).

The continuation of gender-based inequality in intimacy may be surprising given that many young people in the USA idealize and desire egalitarian intimate relationships (Gerson, 2011). However, some theorists suggest gender inequality in intimacy should be expected in the current sexual, cultural climate in the West. Chrys Ingraham (1994) argues that it is in large part the continued cultural dominance of heteronormativity that accounts for why researchers struggle to understand gender inequality. As long as heteronormativity itself remains unchallenged, gender inequality will continue, since inequality is inherent in a patriarchal heteronormative system (1994). Even mainstream intimacy-related social movements lauded as progressive, such as the “marriage equality” movement, may in fact be repackaged heteronormativity (or “homonormativity”) because of the application of state-sanctioned, heterosexual monogamous rules to same-sex couples (D’Emilio, 2014 [2006]; Duggan, 2003). The continued cultural dominance of monogamous relationships rooted in the acceptance of heteronormativity is mostly unchallenged in mainstream US society. Owing to the acceptance, and expectation, of normative relationship arrangements in their own lives, most of the young adults I interviewed for this article are (perhaps unconsciously) invested in heteronormativity. Given that these young adults are trying to find their way in such a system, the presence of gender inequality makes sense.

In addition to understanding the influence of heteronormativity for making sense of the gendered patterns in my research, social class must also be considered. The participants in this study are all either middle to upper-middle class, or on middle-class life trajectories. Their understandings of finding adulthood through relationships are not just rooted in gender, but rooted in the meanings attached to intersecting gendered, classed, and sexual identities and social locations.

While historically gender has been left out of social class analyses, the intersection of social class and gender matters (Bettie, 2002). An intersectional lens (Collins, 1990) highlights how gender can disrupt a seemingly cohesive class-based story by treating identities as intersecting with each other. For example, a particular classed experience is likely not uniform across all gender identities, but rather, the experience of class is fundamentally changed by its intersection with gender. The intersection of social class and gender, then, can complicate and change the classed experience and understanding of coming to maturity through relationships. For the class-advantaged young adults in this study, the current cultural importance of subjective, “therapeutic” or emotional assessments of the self (Furedi, 2004; Illouz, 2008; Silva, 2012) combines with the continued importance of the concrete markers of adulthood (Andrew et al., 2007) to influence these young adults’ own understanding of how to manifest adulthood vis-à-vis intimate relationships. Despite this, persistent ideas about gender complicate women’s application of the young adults’ cultural story of how to come to maturity through intimate relationships.

However, it is not only gender and class that structure how the young adults in this article understand finding maturity through their relationships, but sexuality as well. That sexuality has been largely absent in class analyses (Taylor, 2011) is especially true for heterosexuality (Jackson, 2011)—the sexual identity with which most of the participants in this study identify. Though sometimes overlooked in research on class and gender intersections, sexuality is important to note due to the ways in which gender and class contribute to structuring individuals’ sexual lives and intimate arrangements (Jackson, 2011; Ward, 2015). The acceptance, and anticipation, of monogamous marriage in these class-advantaged young adults’ futures is structured by normative gender and heterosexual expectations that are not necessarily shared by young adults from less privileged class positions (Cherlin, 2014; Edin and Kefalas, 2005; Silva, 2012). These class-advantaged young adults seem to take for granted the expectation that they will find themselves in monogamous marriages, and understand monogamous marriage as the obvious intimacy arrangement of adults. Social class, gender, and sexuality structure their stories and understandings of intimate life.

While some studies that build upon intersectional analyses of social class focus on how class intersects with gender and race, sexuality is another component of identity that deserves attention in conversations of identity intersections (Jackson, 2011). The intersection of heterosexuality (and the heteronormativity and homonormativity it structures) with social class and gender helps structure the intimacy stories told by the participants quoted later in this article.

The data for this study come from two different sets of interviews, both conducted between 2011 and 2012. The first set includes interviews with 22 undergraduate students, and 1 recent graduate, between the ages of 18 and 24 who were enrolled at a large state university (pseudonym “Mountain University” or “MU”) in the western USA. The second set of data includes 5 more recent college graduates between the ages of 22 and 24. I conducted all interviews locally on, or near, the MU campus. The first group of 23 participants was originally part of a larger study investigating both college life and identities, with a set of questions on Catholic religious identities. Through analysis and comparison with the second group, religious background turned out to be an insignificant differentiator in how participants made sense of their intimate experiences. I dropped one participant from this study because he was a non-traditional student and was a few years older than the rest of those recruited.

I recruited the first group of participants primarily through advertisements in introductory sociology courses on the MU campus, with some snowball recruitment. I provided $10 gift cards as an incentive payment. I recruited the second group of college graduate participants through snowballing. They were not paid and agreed to participate based on interest in the topic. The five included here were part of an original group of 18, but only those 22–24 years old were included in order to represent those less than two years out of college. Most interviews lasted from 45 to 90 minutes. I recorded and later transcribed all the interviews. Tables 1 and 2 break down the ages, racial/ethnic identities, university class statuses (US classifications), and social-class origins of each participant. All names are pseudonyms. Most participants self-identified as white (20), while two participants identified as black, five participants identified as Hispanic, and one identified as both Hispanic and white (northern European origin).

I discerned social-class origins based on descriptions of neighborhoods of origin and parents’ occupations. I divided participants into three classed categories: lower-middle class, middle class, and upper-middle class. None of the participants identified as coming from poor or working poor homes. Rather than focus on these young adults’ social-class origins, I treat class as aspirational. Though class origins are important, aspirational classed actions can have an impact on classed outcomes (Bettie, 2003). All of the young people interviewed anticipated class-advantaged adulthoods thanks to their educational achievements, regardless of their families of origin. All these young adults were confident about their ability to participate in class-advantaged adult life, and were planning for classed-advantaged futures.

It is also important to note that along with being specifically gendered, classed, and rooted in heteronormativity, the cultural story in my findings may also be most representative of whiteness. Many of the participants did not discuss race at all in their stories of intimacy, which is reflective of the invisibility of whiteness in a broader US context (Ward, 2015). Those few who did discuss race were participants of color. Their discussions of race were not incompatible with the patterns I found, though more participants of color could have added nuance to the findings.

There were only two exceptions to the general patterns I observed in my data. The first exception was Iris, who came from a lower-middle-class background and was radical in her rejection of conventional relationship forms. Iris came from the first (undergraduate) set of interviews. The other exception was Patrick, a graduate from a middle-class background who also rejected relationship conventions. However, that Iris and Patrick were the exceptions may have more to do with their sexual identities than their other identities: both self-identified as queer. With the exception of only two other young people—Nathan, who identified as homoflexible, and Christina, who identified as gay—the remaining 24 participants identified as heterosexual. In addition, with the exception of Iris and Patrick, all the participants planned that their relationship futures would include monogamous marriage.

The young adults in this study use relationship desires and preferences to make sense of progress towards maturity. They use the language of emotionality symbolically, as emblematic of growth towards adulthood. They express this language through using words and phrases such as: progress, connection, health, emotional fulfillment, love, and sometimes even the word “maturity” itself. These young adults usually use these words to contrast emotionally mature relationships (almost always monogamy) with supposed emotionally destitute, immature relationships (casual sex or hooking up). Young adults’ use of this symbolic language allows for flexibility in understanding progress towards adulthood, especially when perceived desires do not line up with the aged expectation that desires for monogamy temporally follow desires for hookups as young people move through college. This language allows young adults a way of constructing and making sense of their own progress towards maturity when compared to others in their peer group. It also allows for individual fluidity, since young adults use emotionality in relationships to perceive “readiness” for mature commitment.

Most of the young adults in this study claim that casual sexual encounters (otherwise termed “hooking up”) are not equally prevalent throughout all four years of college. The young adults here categorize these encounters as almost exclusively popular among freshmen and sophomores (or first- and second-year university students). According to first semester freshman Jamie, “I’d say it’s strictly hookup with the younger kids, that’s how I feel but I don’t know; like freshmen, sophomores … I dunno junior, maybe senior year is when you can kind of pretty well say people are probably looking for something a little bit deeper maybe.” Jamie is not an upperclassman, but she is still able to discuss what is “typical” for the MU campus for both freshmen and seniors.

Brian also believes that an increased desire for “serious,” emotional relationships comes along with age. However, unlike freshman Jamie, Brian is a junior in his third year of school. Brian admits that he used to hook up, but that as a junior, he and his friends have a different attitude: “Almost everybody I know has been there, done that [with hookups].” Despite hooking up, Brian does not necessarily see hooking up as an ideal situation and says, as a junior, that he would not do it again in the future and is effectively finished with casual sexual encounters:

I wouldn’t. I don’t think that much comes out of it. My opinion of it, as contradictory as it is, I don’t necessarily like it even though I’ve been there. I don’t necessarily think it’s the healthiest thing. I don’t, you know, everybody needs to get laid I guess, but there’s not much other connection going on there, so, I don’t see it as a good thing … I think as people progress in school and get older they realize where they wanna be in five years, or what they want out of life, and then they can start making better decisions or examining the person that they’re dating more to what they want rather than just, this person likes to go out with me and get drunk. So yeah, the more progression in school, the more development in relationships.

According to Brian, though casual sex has a time and place, eventually it should give way to a sexual relationship that includes emotions as well. Nathan’s desire for casual sex also gave way to what he perceives to be a superior desire: emotional attachment. Yet these attachments are specific to committed, monogamous relationships. For Nathan:

When I was younger, I wasn’t really looking for—as cliché as this sounds—I wasn’t looking for love. And now that I’ve been in a more serious relationship lately, [hookup sex is] not something that I yearn for. It just isn’t important. I was with my previous partner for four months before we ever had sex, and we were together for six and a half [months].

In Nathan’s story, the importance of casual sex above all else differentiates his emotional relationship from his casual hookups of the past. Primarily seeking out sex is less important than realizing the importance of an emotional connection. Recent college graduate Phil agrees with Nathan. As an undergraduate, Phil joined a fraternity specifically to meet women for sex. While he was successful in that endeavor, he eventually grew tired of unemotional sex: “I thought all I wanted at first was, like, sex! [laughs]. [But] it just wasn’t fulfilling. Physically you feel good, but I wanted that mental connection with someone, that emotional connection … I’d say for me, more of an emotional attachment is important.” Phil reasons that his preferences shifted over time to committed monogamy because after he experimented with casual sex, he came to realize the value of an emotional connection. These quotations reveal how unemotional sex and hookups are specifically tied to youth and a lack of emotionality (and fulfillment), while coming to realize the importance of emotions signifies maturity and appropriate growth.

However, it is important to point out that while the foregoing stories follow the normative pattern of coming to maturity through realizing the importance of emotional relationships, only men tell these first-hand accounts. While women and men both agree that desiring monogamous relationships follows from hooking up, only men’s autobiographical accounts match the cultural story told: that emotions take center stage only after experimentation with casual sex. While women recognize the general story, their own biographies do not reflect the story in the same ways.

For the young adults in this study who envision conventional relationship futures (monogamous marriage), relationship preferences are one realm through which they can understand themselves as adults in progress. Only two cases, Iris and Patrick, break from this pattern. The main factor that causes Iris and Patrick to stand out as different from all the other participants is their deliberate rejection of monogamy, which is perhaps related to the queer sexual and political identity they both claim for themselves. In the interviews, Iris and Patrick both consider themselves mature based primarily on economics: both are completely financially independent, which they believe constitutes adult status. While neither was affluent at the time of the interviews, both took financial independence as a sign of maturity. Perhaps because of their rejection of convention in the realm of relationships, in their accounts they rely on the successful achievement of a different marker of adulthood to explain their claims to adult status.

Yet, for the rest of the young adults with normative future relationship goals, newfound desires for emotionality in relationships serve as a signal of progress towards adulthood. While both women and men agree on this cultural story, gender complicates these meanings for women. In the following section, I detail how women’s accounts reveal a conflict between the normative cultural story of coming to adulthood in relationships and normative understandings of gender. Gendered ideologies complicate the classed story of coming to adulthood in relationships, which influences the outcome of using emotionality as a gauge of progress towards adulthood.

Previous research, such as that conducted by Bogle (2008) and Stepp (2007), demonstrates young US women’s ambivalent relationships with different forms of intimacy. Reflective of these previous findings, while the women here stress the importance of individual choice and freedom, their accounts of unemotional, casual sex are often cautionary. The women discuss casual sex using words and phrases such as: emotionally dangerous, sad, insulting, and empty. The women characterize other women who hook up frequently as making mistakes or having emotional “problems” or insecurities. Women’s accounts demonstrate the problem of coming to realize the importance of emotions due to gendered ideas connecting emotionality with femininity. Women cannot come to realize the importance of emotions if they are already expected to be emotional, just by being women. Women who reject emotionality do not just reject maturity, they reject appropriate displays of femininity.

Men’s accounts of relationships do not mention negative emotional or self-esteem consequences resulting from hooking up. The pursuit of casual sex or emotional attachment is a personal choice for men. In contrast, freshman Sabrina frames her friend’s hooking up in dire terms. Sabrina has a friend who frequently engages in hookups, and what Sabrina perceives as this other woman’s sexual recklessness puts their friendship in jeopardy: “She’s been around a lot, just around school, and she doesn’t even know these guys! And, I hope it stops, ‘cause I don’t know … I hope it’s just a freshman thing.” Though Sabrina’s friend is a freshman, and should have license to hook up based on age, Sabrina believes this other woman’s actions distasteful. Sabrina thinks her friend hooks up so much because her friend wants “attention,” and characterizes her friend’s behavior as risky, “just with STDs and with even like, dangerous emotionally.” While STDs are cited as a cause for concern, Sabrina believes that at the root of her friend’s casual behavior is a disregard for emotions—a disregard that could prove dangerous. Her friend’s behavior is a problem, despite the cultural story that stipulates the acceptability of hooking up during freshmen year.

Sophomore Stephanie shares a similar opinion, “When I hear about the girls that have been with, like, twenty plus guys in the same frat, [and] they just, like, make the rounds; it’s just sad that they don’t care more … If it’s, like, your routine, it’s kind of sad.” For Stephanie, hooking up too much is a characteristic of women who are neglectful of their emotional and physical health, a situation she characterizes as “sad.” Bailey also perceives her roommate and friend this way, “She’ll have this problem with this guy and she’s like, ‘I’m hurt because I did this, and I allowed myself to do this.’ And, I’m kind of consistent in her life, ‘cause I’m not making the mistakes in that way.” Bailey characterizes her roommate as making “mistakes,” and sees herself as a sort-of mentor for her friend because in her own monogamous relationship, emotional intimacy is more important than sex. Bailey provides a shoulder to cry on when her friend feels pain as a result of choosing to hook up too much.

Similar to Bailey, junior Leigh is in an emotionally intense monogamous relationship. Leigh compares herself to another woman she encountered on campus two years before:

I just remember freshman year, my roommate, we got along really well but she had this friend … She had problems, I guess! Like, she would come over and we would just talk about, like, some horrible date that she had, and I remember this one time she was like, “I had a date with this guy, and he was such a jerk, and he made ME pay for dinner, and then I slept with him anyway!” and then she was just going on about how she hated herself for sleeping with this guy anyway, and like, that’s just the one moment that sticks out that was kind of really surprising. I would think [sleeping with someone] through so much that it’s surprising that some people don’t.

Leigh makes sense of this woman’s decision to hook up by saying this woman had “problems,” which are revealed to be emotional, self-esteem issues based on her willingness to be taken advantage of by a “jerk.” It is also surprising to Leigh that her roommate’s friend would fail to demand from her date appropriately gendered displays of behavior and emotionality in exchange for sex. Failing to do so is evidence of her emotional issues.

Women’s accounts reveal that despite intimacy being a personal choice, rejecting emotionality in intimate relationships and pursuing emotionless sex is thought generally bad for women; doing so signals some underlying emotional or self-esteem issue. The apparent conflict between ideas about women and the classed story of becoming mature through realizing the importance of emotionality changes the outcome of attempting to use emotions to make sense of maturity. Casual sex, by nature of being unemotional, runs contrary to ideas of acceptable, normal femininity. Reconciling unemotional sex with healthy womanhood is difficult. As a result, women engage in a particular kind of gender policing through their accounts in the context of the gendered constraints they face.

Despite this, some of the women do have a history of casual sexual encounters. In conveying these experiences, women have to reconcile these actions with gendered ideas about women who have sex outside of committed relationships. Women’s main solution is to convey their sexual relationships as emotional, or rooted in desiring an emotional commitment, even if they are having casual sex. As women frame their own casual sex experiences, hookups supposedly happen with the ultimate goal of obtaining (or maintaining) commitments from men. Following from this, according to the women’s stories, men are usually left to decide whether or not to make the relationship “official.”

Hannah admits to hooking up with her on-again, off-again boyfriend until they eventually broke up for good. However, she believes that her casual sex was different from a regular hookup due to the emotional commitment she and her boyfriend once shared:

After me and my ex-boyfriend broke up, we still hooked up, but I wouldn’t call it friends with benefits because we were together for a long time … I’ve never been the person to be like, ‘oh we’re just friends but let’s hook up;’ that’s weird. I think it’s a different attachment to somebody, it’s not like emotional, it’s all physical. I feel like if I hook up with my ex-boyfriend … there’s still emotions.

Hannah and her boyfriend originally broke up because he accused her of cheating, which she claims she did not do. Hannah saw her hooking up as “different” due to the emotional commitment she once had, and was trying to maintain, with her ex. However, they stopped hooking up for good once he started dating someone else and decided to end the relationship.

Like Hannah, Meredith understands her hookup as different because it was with someone she cares about emotionally. Though they hooked up often, Meredith’s hookup ultimately never asked her to be his girlfriend. Meredith herself was originally unsure of making an “official” commitment, but after their relationship persisted, “I just feel like he should’ve tried to make it more official and he didn’t. It wasn’t my responsibility to do that. I think it was his to, like, speak up.” Despite that, she says, “I still really like him! And I think he likes me but he doesn’t live here anymore.” Meredith’s hookup ultimately did not turn into the relationship she’d hoped for, yet despite two years of hooking up outside of a committed relationship, she still felt her hookup situation was atypical due to the emotions she felt (and still feels). Meredith stresses in her story the importance of emotions, even though the relationship was never “official.” Even though Meredith did hook up, Meredith believes the emotional involvement she felt makes her different from the “other women” in the stories cited earlier.

Alice provides another example. In her interview, Alice discusses three different hookups that she engaged in with the eventual goal of having a relationship. In one case, someone pursued her whom, she believes, was clearly interested in monogamy. Though initially Alice thought he was not attractive enough for her, after a few months of casual sex, Alice indicated an interest in a committed relationship. However, her hookup then changed his story:

So with the guy, he was like, “I don’t know if I want a relationship.” But then we were still hooking up because I had this idea in my head that I could change his mind. And, and so we were still hooking up, and this was like a month-ish after, and I also took him to a really nice Cheesecake Factory dinner for his birthday [laughs]. And then for MY birthday in April he just didn’t do anything! I think he texted me “happy birthday”? … This guy I didn’t even think was good enough is, like, I wasn’t good enough for him.

Even though her hookup told her he was not interested in a monogamous commitment, Alice continued to pursue him. She did so despite her own admission that she initially thought she could do better. Hannah, Meredith, and Alice acted in an appropriately gendered way by acknowledging emotionality. However, this emotionality is incompatible with the expectation of unemotional hooking up. The result is that because of their violation of the norm that hookups and emotions don’t mix, all three women lost power in their hooking up relationships. In all three examples, the men ultimately decided the fate of the relationships.

Ideas about women as inherently emotional clash with the idea that desires for emotionality in relationships simply happen as one grows up. While coming to maturity in relationships through realizing the importance of emotionality is an idea that seems to work for men, it does not apply well to women’s lives, and leaves questions regarding how women do achieve maturity through their intimate relationships in the absence of a clearly-applicable cultural story.

Through making sense of their intimate lives, these emerging adults—nearly all of whom, with the exceptions of Iris and Patrick, see monogamous marriage in their futures—make sense of their progression towards maturity in relationships in distinctly patterned ways. An individualized realization of the importance of emotionality is the dominant narrative through which these young adults measure their maturity in intimate relationships. This allows young adults to gauge their progress toward adulthood and to manifest maturity in relationships through specific relationship choices in the absence of the immediate attainability of the concrete markers of adulthood. These class-advantaged young adults draw upon subjective, emotional definitions of maturity while they take time to accomplish the concrete measures of adulthood. However, young adults’ use of subjectivity and emotionality to describe their relationship lives accomplishes something else as well: it helps to obscure the extent to which this particular cultural story of coming to adulthood through relationships is specifically classed, gendered, and rooted in heteronormativity.

Despite gains made in gender equity in the last century, young women continue to be overwhelmed by a sexual double standard (Bell, 2013; Hamilton and Armstrong, 2009). Women’s worth is still judged, in part, by evaluations of their sexual activities (Sweeney, 2014). In concurrence with these judgments, many women continue to opt in to monogamous relationships in college even if these relationships are not advantageous to them (Holland and Eisenhart, 1992; Wilkins and Dalessandro, 2013). Those women who do elect to pursue casual, non-committal intimacy face scrutiny from both men and other women (Bogle, 2008; Hamilton and Armstrong, 2009; Stepp, 2007; Sweeney, 2014). However, while women’s ambivalence around their own casual sexual activities is well documented (Bogle, 2008; Stepp, 2007), questions remain as to how to make sense of women’s often contradictory opinions on sexuality. Many women believe in women’s general right to have casual sex relationships, yet at the same time, they continue to join men in policing both their own, and other women’s, sexual and intimate lives (Hamilton, 2007; Sweeney, 2014).

Because these class-advantaged women and men agree on the path to maturity through relationships, this cultural story itself obscures women’s specifically gendered dilemma. Due to the conflations of emotional callousness with hookup sex, emotional monogamy with maturity, and femininity with emotionality, women struggle with making sense of the presence of sex without emotions in women’s lives. Women unknowingly grapple with the idea of “discovering” the importance of emotions, since women are expected to be naturally emotional. The intersection of gender and social-class changes the outcome of the project of “manifesting maturity” for women. It becomes not about becoming mature through realizing the importance of monogamy, but about policing the boundaries of femininity. Though women attempt to reconcile the cultural story with their own biographies by bringing emotions into their casual sex relationships, these attempts often fail due to men’s understanding that hookups are supposed to be unemotional, casual, noncommittal fun. Knowing they transgress this norm, women often put the burden of defining a relationship on men, which provides men with decision-making power. Gender also constrains women in choosing to pursue casual sex without emotions in the first place, since doing so clashes with the idea that women are always most interested in emotional connections.

My findings are largely possible because of the continued cultural dominance of heteronormativity, which on a systemic level upholds gender inequality. Since heteronormativity is both rooted in gender power differences, and remains largely unchallenged outside of certain circles, its continued influence sets the stage for experiences of inequality. In addition, that these young adults uphold marital monogamy as not only mature, but as normal and desired, is important. Doing so provides a culturally accepted means of finding maturity through relationships that also potentially discounts “alternative” or non-monogamous relationship forms. These young adults’ process for making sense of maturity in relationships upholds monogamy as the relationship form signifying adulthood. Because monogamous marriage is increasingly accessed by and large by class-advantaged people (Cherlin, 2014), the normative hold of monogamous marriage has the potential to increase social and family inequality in the future, despite popular belief that the acceptance of different family forms is reaching its historical apex (Stacey, 1997).

This research suggests that monogamy maintains its normative hold as the relationship choice for mature, class-advantaged adults, making it difficult for those who reject the implicit association between emotional maturity and monogamy. Iris and Patrick, the two exceptions here who reject monogamy, claim their difficulty with finding partners is specifically due to the normative expectation of emotional monogamy. How non-monogamous young adults, or those who reject relationship conventions, make sense of themselves as adult through relationships is a potential next step for future research.

I would like to thank Amy C Wilkins, Catherine Bowman, Nicole Lambert, and Jennifer Pace for their comments on earlier drafts of this article.