What Does It Mean to be an Established Adult?
I got married when I was 24.
And that was only because my ex and I fought like crazy to ensure that we wouldn’t become a Christian university marriage factory statistic and get married at 22, when many of my friends made their decision to have church sanctioned sex weddings.
Side note: There were significant wounds from that decision as well, but that’s for another article.
In EMPish (Evangelical/Mormon/Pentecostal) Christian contexts, weddings are rites of passage into adulthood. The rules of Purity Culture no longer apply to you, and you can have all of the amazing sex that you were never taught how to have.
And because weddings are rites of passage into adulthood, the goal of dating as a young adult is to find your spouse—the person with whom you’re spending the rest of your life with. If someone isn’t marriage material, why are you dating them?
Which in theory, isn’t a bad question to ask.
But it does miss the very important goals of emerging adulthood that I mentioned in yesterday’s article: identity exploration. We discover our identities in relationships with other people—through friendships, sexual experiences, and romantic partnerships.
Every relationship has the opportunity to teach you something about yourself.
I proposed yesterday that young adults in EMPish Christian contexts are encouraged to skip over the exploration and ensuing insecurity of the emerging adulthood phase and jump right into established adulthood, the phase where your identity becomes solidified (not only in Christ, whatever that means, but also in marriage, occupation, etc.), and the possibilities for success become more narrow due to the increased responsibilities of marriage, parenthood, and professional demands.
As I mentioned yesterday, I stumbled upon “Established Adulthood: New Perspectives on Ages 30 to 45”, the newest issue of the Journal of Adult Development. (All of the articles are open access! I’m such a geek.)
Dr. Merrill Silverstein and colleagues wrote an article for this issue called “The Relationship Between Religiosity and Marriage from Emerging to Established Adulthood”. In summary, they polled a small but statistically viable portion of people in two timeframes—2000, when people were in the “emerging adulthood", and 2016, when participants were in the “established adulthood” phase.
Not surprisingly, they found that 97% of men who identified as “highly religious” and 87% who identified as “doctrinally religious” were married as established adults. (65% of nonreligious men were married as established adults.) 70% of women who identified as “highly religious” were married as established adults, while 56% of doctrinally and nonreligious women were married as established adults.
This was not a great research project. There’s a ton of gaps and unaddressed variables.
For instance, there was no documentation of how many highly religious people who got married as emerging adults ended those marriages.
There’s some interesting correlations about the role of marriage for men and women, and the ways that Purity Culture screws men and women over in different ways, that Julia and I will reflect on in future articles.
But my biggest frustration was this:
The field of psychology, in this article anyway, is colluding with the church’s understanding of relational and developmental success and progress: Are you married?
Marital status has no marking on the quality of communication, conflict resolution, and sexual satisfaction of a two-person relationship. Couples who experience higher quality of communication and sexual satisfaction are more likely to be in a long-term relationship, but there’s plenty of long-term relationships who have poor conflict resolution and sexual communication skills.
Please don’t misinterpret me as being anti-marriage. I encourage couples to make decisions that reflect their relationship they want to have, so long as the decisions are mutually consensual.
However, what if we adapted the relational skills needed to transition through emerging and established adulthood from “Are you married?” and “Do you have kids?” to the following:
What communication skills do you use to make collaborative decisions with other people?
What is your process for communicating what you want in a way that your partner(s) can effectively receive it?
How do you navigate your own emotional experience if you don’t get what you want?
What are ways that you name and celebrate the positive things about yourself and the people in your life?
How do you know that you’ve effectively solved a problem with the important people in your life?
Let’s make these the new rubric for relational and developmental success.