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This chapter examines the question: Under what conditions, how, and with what consequences do people combine monetary transfers with intimate relationships? It suggests that intimate relations involving monetary transfers include a variety of social relations, each marked by a distinctive pattern of payment. First, people routinely differentiate meaningful social relations; among other markers, they use different payment systems to create, define, affirm, challenge, or overturn such distinctions. Second, such distinctions apply to intimate social relations, including those having a sexual component. People regularly differentiate forms of monetary transfers in correspondence with their definitions of the sort of relationship that obtains between the parties. They adopt symbols, rituals, practices, and physically distinguishable forms of money to mark distinct social relations. The chapter shows that when payments within intimate relations become matters of legal dispute, lawyers and judges apply their own differentiating categories, which also turn out to be relational. It explores how this application of categories leads to a problem of translation, as participants in disputes go from categories of everyday life to legal classifications and back.

Intimate partners are a crucial source of support for survivors of traumatic injury, but partners may vary in the support they provide. When are partners most likely to provide support after a traumatic injury? To address this question, this chapter first reviews the consequences of traumatic injury and the role of social support in recovery. The second section summarizes existing models of social support provision, which highlight elements of the situation, relationship, recipient, and provider. The third section offers a critique of the existing literature, identifying limitations that prevent strong generalizations from previous work in other populations. The fourth section describes recent research that examines multiple predictors of support provision in a sample of trauma survivors and their partners. The final section explores the implications of studying couples that have experienced a trauma for understanding social support processes more generally.

This chapter focuses on social support effectiveness, which emphasizes the extent to which support attempts meet the needs of recipients in terms of their quantity and quality. They provide a framework for understanding what contributes to support effectiveness and report evidence for their model in the context of partner support in pregnancy.

The developmental psychopathology perspective posits that one of the primary stage-salient developmental tasks of emerging adulthood is the formation of healthy intimate relationships outside the family. However, researchers are still trying to ascertain the specific developmental building blocks that facilitate mastery of this task, and the qualities of parent-child relationships that contribute to adaptive functioning during this transition. This chapter focuses on the development of the capacity for a balance of separation and connection in relationships, termed mutuality of autonomy, and investigates ways in which problems involving parent-child boundary dissolution—particularly, parental psychological control—might compromise the emergence of mutual autonomy during the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Chapter 11 provides an overview of the developmental period of emerging adulthood in the context of aging out of care. Central tasks of young adulthood are establishment and consolidation of work and relationship identities and further development of ethnic and sexual identities. The transition to adult roles for foster youth is abrupt and often made without financial or emotional support, and research describes the resulting poor outcomes. The chapter reports on educational and career outcomes, and suggests factors that may help to improve them. A section on relationships with significant others—birth families, caregivers, peers, mentors, and romantic partners—concludes with a discussion of the effects of maltreatment on intimate relationships. Key practice principles relating to education, employment, and relationships are provided.

This chapter introduces participant narratives about the types of abuses they experienced. As participants’ stories unfold, this chapter begins to describe the salient themes in the patterns of abuse and how they uniquely affect transgender individuals. Participants detailed a combination of physical violence that was accompanied with more frequent emotional and psychological abuses. As an important theme across the stories, these attacks often targeted trans status as an aspect of control and domination over victims. Two prominent forms of abuse are discussed: genderist and transphobic attacks.

This chapter examines a group of curses that are concerned with hindering or encouraging the appetites of both genders for intimate relationships. At least two of the eight tablets discussed here were certainly written by women and it is possible that others were as well. After examining extant treatments of this category of curses, the chapter briefly considers the historical context and possible circumstances for the creation of relationship curses. It argues for the importance of reading these curses without making assumptions about the nature of the relationships involved, and suggests that, in turn, these texts may provide insights into changes over time in ancient gender relations.

Social, cultural, and historical factors set the stage for concepts that define intimate relationships and that are internalized by intimate partners. In turn, the forms of intimate relationships, in an ongoing way, help change the societies and cultures and thus, ultimately, change the history of a given period. This is an ongoing evolution. Social forces influence concepts of intimate relationships and are influenced by them. Social forces in turn interact with evolving local cultures. Evolving cultures influence and create the nature of a historical period with its ideas of relationships. Feedback among these elements influences the ongoing relationship creation and interpretation.

This chapter is designed to tie the pieces of the book together, both within and across sections. The goal is to situate the diverse sections of the book into a more coherent framework that helps clarify points of convergence and divergence in the field and that highlights and stimulates opportunities for future research.

The purpose of our studies as a whole was to explore whether there is some degree of significant positive relationship between postformal thought and relationship quality and satisfaction. We found our hypothesis to be supported by paper-and-pencil test results. But while individuals might state on tests that they use complex thought in a relationship setting and have quality intimate relationships, how do they actually demonstrate these behaviors in a realistic life setting? Does behavior in real life demonstrate that individuals in relationships use complex thought in attaining satisfying relationships? The three studies described in this chapter provide a preliminary step in exploring these questions and provide the first descriptive and empirical evidence for the positive relationship between the ability to use complex reasoning problem-solving skills and relationship satisfaction.

Chapter seven explores the initial impacts of re-entering a world these lifers left many years ago. The chapter highlights specific roadblocks to re-entry. These include the ‘felon label’, the implications stigma, labeling, and the widespread availability of criminal background checks. These factors prevent lifers from obtaining housing and employment. The chapter discusses how interviewees managed the stigma of being an ex-offender. Deriving indicators from life-course theories, the chapter further details how relationships with family, intimate partners and children influenced the interviewees over the years. By being in prison for decades, these lifers have been removed from structures that favor maturation and provide sources of informal social control, such as employment, intimate relationships, family relationships and parenthood. Prison, in this view, has disrupted their journey of going straight.

This chapter summarizes the outline of the book, which describes some underlying cognitive processes that interact with emotional and social factors to support satisfying interactions in close relationships. The book offers a new way of thinking about relationships and may be a rich starting point for research and applications in many settings, for example, in therapy. The information presented explains one way in which complex problem-solving skills can make intimate relationships richer and more satisfying. It develops an extension of the author’s theory and research program on the development and uses of complex postformal thought during adulthood and aging.

This chapter explores the question of why fatherhood and violence in intimate relationships are, in Finland, so seldom treated simultaneously within the same context. The goal is to reflect upon this theme on the basis of literature and to accumulate the reasons for this silence in the Finnish discussion. The chapter begins by examining the Finnish research on violence in intimate relationships. What features can be found there that make it difficult to notice the fatherhood of violent men? Second, the chapter focuses on motherhood and fatherhood – which features in the conception of these two phenomena prevent the discussion of fathers' violence? Finally, it considers problems relating to child custody and contact visitation practices, where, as also indicated in relation to Denmark and Sweden, the problems connected with fatherhood and violence are particularly acute. The chapter is based on violence research and parenthood studies in the field of social sciences in Finland. It draws mainly upon monographs and scientific articles written in Finnish from the 1990s to the present.

The comprehensive approach of studying nonverbal behavior is exemplified best in observational studies assessing dyadic interaction in intimate relationships, such as between couples and parents with their children. The study of couple and parent–child relationships within the family are important because they are some of the most influential and defining relationships human establish in people–s lives. This chapter focuses on various nonverbal behavioral coding systems used in the laboratory when studying committed relationships. Various coding system such as Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF), Triadic Interaction Coding System (TICS), and psychophysiological assessment were used in this study. The discussion of each coding system is organized into sections providing information about the background and evolution of these coding systems, equipment required to implement these systems into the laboratory used for this study, guidelines for training, some significant findings as a result of the implementation of these coding systems, and some recommendations for future research.

The archetypal image of care is that of a mother and child. Care giving is probably most immediately understood in the context of personal relationships where one person has greater needs for support than the other. These circumstances most usually apply at the start and end of life, but intimate caring relationship are experienced throughout the life course. This chapter considers what we have learnt from research that has considered care ethics in the context of three types of caring relationships within families: during times of change and difficulty; relationships between parents and their disabled children, and the impact of ageing on older people themselves and on care relationships within families. In each case the focus is on the negotiation of the relational dimensions of care and the difficult ethical decisions that are integral to this.

According to attachment theory, the availability of caring, supportive relationship partners and the resulting sense of attachment security are crucial for the formation and maintenance of mutually satisfying intimate relationships throughout life. In the present chapter, we review research applying attachment theory to adolescents and adults, consistently showing that attachment security encourages positive, pro-relationship virtues, such as the capacity for love, forgiveness, gratitude, respect, tolerance, and compassion. We will also review findings showing that attachment security promotes reliance on more constructive strategies of conflict resolution, provision of more sensitive and effective support and caring to a needy partner, and the experience of more positive relational emotions, which in turn contribute to relationship quality and stability. The literature as a whole clearly indicates the relevance of attachment theory to both understanding and fostering “fully functioning relationships.”

Whilst everyone agrees that contractual obligations are voluntarily undertaken, agreements, not (as traditionally claimed) promises are the form of voluntarily undertaken obligations that underlie contracts. Agreements and promises have different normative functions, and through an examination of Shiffrin’s discussion of voluntarily undertaken obligations between persons in intimate relationships, it is shown that agreements, not contracts, are the sorts of obligations intimates typically enter into, and that securing or making promises is typically “pathological” or “dysfunctional” in intimate relationships. Finally, it is claimed that there is no need of a convention for agreements to be entered into; all that is required are the capacities of practical reason and interpersonal communication.