Abstract

While young people today expect gender equity in relationships, inequality persists. In this article, we use interviews with 25 young adults to investigate the link between gender meanings, age meanings, and continued inequality in relationships. Middle-class young adults tell relationship stories in a gender and age context that both reflect and perpetuate ideas about adult masculinity and femininity. While women often tell stories of poor treatment in relationships, they are able to reclaim agency over their experiences and believe that they can solve their relationship problems by understanding their experiences as part of the normative path to adult womanhood. In contrast, men are able to explain their bad relationship behavior by attributing that behavior to youth and immaturity. By telling these stories, both women and men imagine that growing up will fix gender inequalities, obfuscating the persistence of gender inequalities in later adulthood. This work sheds light on the way narratives of age contribute to the persistence of gender inequality in romantic relationships.