What We Think About Love

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How We, the People in the Emerging Adulthood Think about Love

‘The emerging adulthood refers to a hypothetical life span between adolescence and

fully-fledged adulthood, which encompasses late adolescence and early adulthood’ (Arnett

469). Specifically, the emerging adulthood focuses on the age bracket between 18 years and

25 years. For us in this age bracket, the term emerging adulthood defines us as people with no

children, people with less income to become independent, and people who don’t have our

own homes (Arnett 469). The age bracket between 18 and 25 years, therefore represents an

important period where we are going through profound change from dependent and less

responsible adolescents to independent and responsible adults. We are being transformed into

people who can raise our own children, earn our own money, and build and manage our own

homes. According to Arnett, this age bracket represents a period during when people struggle

with self-focus, identity exploration, instability, and feelings of being in-between (Arnett

469). It is a life span when people explore more about work, worldviews, and love than any

other life span in the whole life of people. This essay argues that we, the people in the

emerging adulthood perceive love as a process of identity exploration.

For most of the people in the world, love starts during the tender age of twelve to

fourteen. People in this age bracket have little to worry about because most of them depend

on their parents and other adults entirely. What they think about is mostly concerned with

their personal growth. For this reason, they have less concerns about romantic love

responsibility because this kind of responsibility is far ahead their years. According to

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Waters, Carr and, Kefalas, adolescents have very little considerations for marriage, which

means that the love they feel and practice is mostly meant for recreational purposes (49).

Essentially, adolescents date for the purpose of sexual experimentation, companionship, and

the excitement of the first experience of romantic love (Waters, Carr and Kefalas 51). They

do not know much about love and do not want to know much about it as they only need it for

recreation. In this regard, adolescents’ love experiences last for short periods such as weeks

and days. They date mostly in groups as they pursue most of their recreation activities in

groups such as parties, hanging out, and dancing (Arnett 473). Dating in groups makes

adolescents to become less responsible for their partners because dating issues are solved

among the groups rather than individually. For this reason, adolescents do not care much

about the things that affect their partners.

For us in the emerging adulthood, however, love is more serious because our minds

are grown with higher curiosity (Scott, Schelar and Manlove 2). We view love as an

exploration process in which we are supposed to know how to love and who to love. Instead

of seeing love as a group thing, we think of it as an independent thing since our minds are

transitioning towards becoming more individually responsible (Arnett 470). We view

ourselves with more responsibilities for the things that our partners are going through. We

have interests of learn how we can propagate love on our own without the help of our friends.

Also, we want to know how love can relate to us as individuals rather than as a group. We

think of how we can experience love alone and manage it individually. By having such

perceptions of love, we become more serious and involved in love issues than we used to be

when we were adolescents.

Upon entering emerging adulthood, we stopped viewing love as a form of recreation

and started viewing it as something that we need to explore and learn more about. According

to Arnnet, we, the people in our emerging adulthood view love as something that is supposed

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to give us emotional and physical intimacy rather than just make us happy for a short while

(470). Therefore, we try to secure as much of this intimacy from love as we can. However,

we don’t understand fully how we can get these satisfactions from love since our previous

pursuance of love was only meant for recreation (Lynn Morrison 150). Therefore, as the

people in the emerging adulthood age bracket, we pursue love for the purpose of identity

exploration, whereby we want to find out how love can give us the highest emotional and

physical satisfaction.

Entering into the emerging adulthood age group also made us to start perceiving love

as a long-term rather than a short-term commitment. As we continue learning about how love

can give us emotional and physical satisfaction, we continue to learn that the maximum of

these satisfaction can only be achieved through long-term commitment (Scott, Schelar and

Manlove 4). With a short-term love relationship, it is hard for one to get too much involved in

his/her partner’s emotions since he/she does not even fully understand them. On the other

hand, a long-term commitment to love allows one to learn about his/her partner’s feelings and

emotions, thus making it possible to interact with them. When we learn this fact through our

exploration, we want to make our love commitments long-term so that we can experience

more emotional satisfaction and continue to explore love deeper (Scott, Schelar and Manlove

4). In essence, the more we get emotional and physical contact with our partners, the more it

becomes easy to explore things about them.

Unlike the adolescents, we, the people in the emerging adulthood explore love with a

deeper level of intimacy. The implicit question guiding our exploration is more focused to the

kind of a person we would like to have as our love partners for the rest of our lives rather than

who will make us happy at the moment (Arnett 471). Therefore, unlike adolescent love

relationships, our love relationships more likely include sexual intercourse and cohabitation.

We are ready to learn the things that our partners hold dearest and their deepest secrets

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because we want to determine whether we can live with them for the rest of our lives

(Waters, Carr and Kefalas 55). As partners, we want to explore everything about each other

because we wish to commit to loving each other in the long-run. Fortunately for us, we have

the opportunity to do this kind of exploration because we are having less supervision from

our parents and guardians. Most of us are studying in institutions of higher learning where the

instructors do not involve themselves so much with students’ love matters and where the

parents have less control of our lives. This gives us more freedom to explore love issues, even

those issues that the society had restricted us from exploring.

The goal of our exploration of love is, however, not limited to the direct preparation

for adult love roles. It is in part an exploration of its own kind, aimed at giving us a broad

range of life experience before we commit ourselves to adult responsibilities (Arnett 472).

Because we are not yet committed to adult responsibilities, we feel that we have an

opportunity to experiment love as much as we can, which is less likely to happen when we

attain our thirties or late twenties. Therefore, we establish as much romantic and sexual

experiences as possible while at this age because we anticipate that we will not be able to do

this during our late twenties and early thirties. We also have less parental surveillance than

the adolescents, which makes it possible for us to experiment more than they can (Waters,

Carr and Kefalas 60). In these regards, it is apparent that although we are interested in

forming long-term relationships, we live a probability of making these relationships short

through experimentation. In other words, we are not settled at whether to stick to single

partners for long-term involvement or whether to experiment love with a variety of partners.

This aspect of us makes us less concerned with holding on to our partners than our older

adults are.

Despite having a better opportunity to experiment, however, we view love with more

importance than the adolescents do (Lynn Morrison 152). For instance, even though we are

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experimenting, we care more about hurting the feelings and emotions of those we are

experimenting with. This aspect of us is probably in us because we have a more grown mind

that understands the significance of hurting the emotions and feelings of others than the

adolescents have (Lynn Morrison 152). Arnnet, however, argues that this aspect exists in us

because we still have the mind of preparing for adulthood love responsibilities even when we

are experimenting on love (473). He argues that this mind of responsibility is what

contributes more to our caring for our partners’ emotions and feelings than our grown state of

mind. This means that even though we may want to experiment more and more about love,

we are limited from doing this by our notion that we will become responsible adults soon.

Therefore, we cannot navigate freely through love because we know that we have to train on

how to become husbands, wives and parents in the near future.

Unfortunately for us, the love exploration process is not an enjoyable process as we

have to put up with recurrent rejections, disappointments, and disillusionments (Scott,

Schelar and Manlove 7). In essence, we are exploring love among ourselves and this

exploration is meant to determine the best partners who we can live with for the rest of our

lives. Therefore, we often reject and disappoint each other because we have different views of

the people we want to live with.

In conclusion, we, the people in our late teens and early twenties think of love as an

identity exploration process (Arnett 469). We want to explore how we can have more

appreciation of love and how we can gain maximum emotional and physical satisfaction on a

long-term basis. We want to learn how to select a partner we can live with for our whole lives

rather than a partner who will make us happy at the short run. The greatest purpose of this

exploration is to prepare us for adulthood love experiences, but we also explore in order to

have a broad range of love experiences before we reach to adulthood age. Unlike the

adolescents, our exploration of love is deeper even when we are exploring for the sake of

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having more varieties of love experiences. This deepness in our exploration is guided mostly

by our need to become more responsible in love as we move to adulthood, and partly guided

by our grown-up mind. Unfortunately, despite us having the best opportunity for exploration,

we do not always enjoy it because it mostly involves disappointments, rejections and

dissolutions.

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Work Cited

Arnett, Jeffrey Jensen. Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach. New York:

Pearson Publishers, 2013. Print.

—. “Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties.”

American Psychological Association (2000): 469-480. Web .

Lynn Morrison, Sepali Guruge, Kymberly A. Snarr. “Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants in Toronto: Gender,

marriage patterns, and sexuality.” Gender and Immigration Journal (1999): 144-162. Web.

Scott, Mindy E., et al. “Young adult attitudes about relationships and marriage: Times may have

changed, But expectations remain high.” Child Trends Research Brief (2009): 1-8. Web.

Waters, Mary C., et al. Coming of Age in America: The Transition to Adulthood in the Twenty-First

Century. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Print.

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What we think About love

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