Gender and the Meanings of Adolescent Romantic Relationships: A Focus on Boys

Abstract

Many studies of the adolescent period have focused on peer interactions and relationships, but less is known about the character of adolescents' early dating experiences. Researchers have recently explored girls' views of romance and sexuality, but studies of boys' perspectives are noticeably lacking. Theorizing in this area leads to the expectation that as adolescents cross over into heterosexual territory, boys will do so, on average, with greater confidence, while being relatively less engaged emotionally (i.e., the notion that boys want sex, girls want romance), and ultimately emerging as the more powerful actors within the relationship. This article develops a symbolic interactionist perspective to examine the experiences of adolescent boys and girls in the context of the romantic dyad. It focuses on the nature of communication, emotion, and influence within adolescent dating relationships. Findings based on structured interviews with over 1,300 adolescents provide a strong contrast to existing portraits: among those adolescents who had begun dating (n = 957), boys report significantly lower levels of confidence navigating various aspects of their romantic relationships, similar levels of emotional engagement as girls, and greater power and influence on the part of their romantic partners. In-depth relationship-history narratives, elicited from a subset (n = 100) of these respondents, provide additional support for the quantitative findings and are useful in the process of reconciling our perspective and results with the emphases of prior research.