Guidepost 1: Does personality change during adulthood, and if so, how?

• Whether and how personality changes during adulthood is an important issue among developmental theorists. Four important perspectives on adult personality are offered by normative-stage models, the timing-of-events model, trait models, and typological models.
• Normative-stage models hold that age-related social and emotional change emerges in successive periods sometimes marked by crises. In Erikson's theory, the major issue of young adulthood is intimacy versus isolation. In Levinson's theory, transitions lead to reevaluation and modification of the life structure. In the Grant study, mature adaptive mechanisms were associated with greater well-being.
• The timing-of-events model, advocated by Neugarten, proposes that adult psychosocial development is influenced by the occurrence and timing of normative life events. As society becomes less age-conscious, however, the social clock has less meaning.
• The five-factor model of Costa and McCrae is organized around five groupings of related traits: neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Studies find that people change very little in these respects after age 30.
• Typological research, pioneered by Jack Block, has identified personality types that differ in ego-resiliency and ego-control. These types seem to persist from childhood through adulthood.
• Recently there have been attempts to synthesize various approaches to adult personality development.

Guidepost 2: What is intimacy, and how is it expressed in friendship, love, and sexuality?

• Young adulthood is a time of dramatic change in personal relationships. Young adults seek emotional and physical intimacy in relationships with peers and romantic partners.
• Self-disclosure and a sense of belonging are important aspects of intimacy. Intimate relationships are associated with physical and mental health.
• While the Internet offers expanded opportunities for communication, it may lead to a weakening of intimacy and a decline in psychological well-being.
• Most young adults have friends but have increasingly limited time to spend with them. Women's friendships tend to be more intimate than men's.
• According to Sternberg's triangular theory of love, love has three aspects: intimacy, passion, and commitment. These combine into eight types of love relationships.
• People tend to choose partners like themselves.
• Attitudes toward premarital sex have been greatly liberalized, but men and women are less promiscuous than is sometimes believed. Disapproval of homosexuality has declined but remains strong. Disapproval of extramarital sex is even greater.

Guidepost 3: Why do some people remain single?

• Today more adults than in the past postpone marriage or never marry. Reasons for staying single include career opportunities, travel, sexual and lifestyle freedom, a desire for self-fulfillment, women's greater self-sufficiency, reduced social pressure to marry, fear of divorce, and difficulty in finding a suitable mate.

Guidepost 4: How do homosexuals deal with "coming out," and what is the nature of gay and lesbian relationships?

• For homosexuals, the process of coming out may last well into adulthood, and complete openness about their sexual orientation may never be fully achieved. Both gay men and lesbians form enduring sexual and romantic relationships. Gays and lesbians in the United States are fighting for rights married people enjoy.

Guidepost 5: What are the pros and cons of cohabitation?

• Cohabitation has become common and is the norm in many countries. Cohabitation can be a "trial marriage" or a substitute for marriage. Couples who cohabit before marriage tend to have weaker marriages.

Guidepost 6: What do adults gain from marriage, what cultural patterns surround entrance into marriage, and why do some marriages succeed while others fail?

• Marriage (in a variety of forms) is universal and meets basic economic, emotional, sexual, social, and childraising needs.
• Mate selection and marrying age vary across cultures. People in industrialized nations have been marrying later than in past generations.
• Frequency of sexual relations in marriage declines with age and loss of novelty. Fewer people appear to be having extramarital sexual relationships than in the past.
• Success in marriage may depend on strength of commitment and patterns of interaction set in young adulthood. Age at marriage is a major predictor of whether a marriage will last. Resilience in facing economic hardship, compatibility, emotional support, and men's and women's differing expectations may be important factors.

Guidepost 7: When do most adults become parents, and how does parenthood affect a marriage?

• Family patterns vary across cultures and have changed greatly in western societies. Today women are having fewer children and having them later in life, and an increasing number choose to remain childless.
• Fathers are usually less involved in child raising than mothers, but some share parenting equally and some are primary caregivers.
• Marital satisfaction typically declines during the childbearing years. Expectations and division of tasks can contribute to a marriage's deterioration or improvement.

Guidepost 8: How do dual-earner couples divide responsibilities and deal with role conflicts?

• Nearly 2 out of 3 families with children are dual-earner families. Dual-earner families show several patterns. They offer both benefits and drawbacks.
• Women and men are equally affected by the stress of a dual-earner lifestyle, but they may be affected in different ways. Family-friendly workplace policies may help alleviate stress.
• In most cases, the burdens of a dual-earner lifestyle fall most heavily on the woman. Whether an unequal division of labor contributes to marital distress may depend on how the spouses perceive their roles.
• A new theory of gender roles proposes that both men and women generally benefit from combining multiple roles, but this depends on the number of roles they carry, time demands, and satisfaction derived.

Guidepost 9: Why have divorce rates risen, and how do adults adjust to divorce, remarriage, and stepparenthood?

• The United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. Among the reasons for the rise in divorce are women's greater financial independence, reluctance to expose children to parental conflict, and the greater "expectability" of divorce.
• Divorce usually entails a painful period of adjustment. Adjustment may depend on the way the divorce is handled, people's feelings about themselves and their ex-partners, emotional detachment from the former spouse, social support, and personal resources.
• Adjusting to divorce is a long-term process that tends to reduce well-being.
• Most divorced people remarry within a few years, but remarriages tend to be less stable than first marriages.
• Stepfamilies may go through several stages of adjustment. Women tend to have more difficulty being stepparents than men do.