Patterns of Intimacy and Distancing in Young Women’s (and Men’s) Romantic Relationship Stories
Social Sciences
Senior Thesis - Psychology 195A
Considerable theory and research suggests that women generally converse more intimately than men; however, the picture might not be so straightforward. This study examined how 33 pairs of heterosexual young women friends constructed intimacy when exchanging romantic relationship stories during casual conversations. Analyses centered on the emergence of two types of conversational positions: intimate positions and distancing positions. Intimate positions constructed young women as warm, caring, and emotionally vulnerable towards their own or others’ male romantic partners, while distancing positions functioned to move women away from relational intimacy. These analyses were then compared to prior findings from 32 pairs of young men friends, which were drawn from the same data set. Confirming that young women friends tend to be less resistant than young men about constructing intimacy, runs of intimacy positions were more prevalent in the young women’s storytelling than in a companion study of young men (Korobov & Thorne, 2006). However, women’s romantic relationship discourse was generally sprinkled rather than saturated with intimacy positions. Furthermore, like the male sample, intimacy was not women’s dominant orientation in constructing romantic relationships. For both genders, the most prevalent patterns were distancing saturation and oscillations between intimacy and distancing. These findings complicate assumptions that young women generally talk more intimately about romantic relationships than do young men, and suggest that working out ambivalence about romantic relationships and complaining about romantic troubles are concerns that are par for young adults regardless of gender.
