Because emerging adulthood is a culturally constructed period of life course, it is interesting to explore whether it exists in Argentina, a Catholic Latin American country of Southern European descent.

— This article examines the nature of emerging adulthood in Argentina. Arnett defines emerging adulthood as the period of development bridging adolescence and young adulthood during which people are no longer adolescents but have not yet attained full adult status. This period ranges from the late teens through the 20s, with a focus on ages 18 through 25. This period is characterized by frequent change as young people explore various possibilities in love, work, and worldviews. According to studies carried out in the United States, emerging adults do not view themselves as adolescents but many of them do not view themselves entirely as adults either.

Few studies have jointly examined the development of love and work in emerging adulthood and even less so in the majority world. This article provides data about how love and work are related within each domain, across domains, and to life satisfaction in emerging adults from an understudied ecology, Argentina. For this purpose, 272 randomly selected Argentineans reported on romantic relationships, work satisfaction, and life satisfaction at age 23 and 27. On both occasions, satisfaction in the romantic domain was a better predictor of concurrent life satisfaction than work. At age 23, love but not work added modestly to the prediction of life satisfaction 4 years later. A much stronger stability was found in love than in work domain. Consistent with the segmentation model, but not with the spillover model, no cross-domain associations were detected over time. Results are discussed in light of important features of the Argentinean macrosystem.

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