Love, sex, and commitment: relationship choices and trajectories among unmarried youth in India

Abstract

There is limited research in India to understand young people's decision-making processes about intimate relationships before marriage. This paper, adopting a life course perspective, explains relationship choices and diachronic trajectories of relationships from adolescence to young adulthood. Retrospective data were collected from 1240 never married 20–29-year-old men and women living in Pune using a relationships history calendar. All the relationships from 10 years of age onwards were plotted on the calendar, and information on predictor variables was collected through structured questionnaires. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Sequence analysis approach was used to identify different typologies. Overall, 76% of the participants reported having at least one relationship. More women compared to men (84% vs 70%) ever had a relationship. The median age of starting the first relationship was 17 years for women and 18 for men. Different relationship types were reported, such as “serious”, casual, “friends with benefit”, and “exploring”. The level of emotional involvement, commitment, and physical intimacy significantly differed in different relationship types with significant gender differences. Four typologies of relationships were observed, labelled as (1) Commitment–No sex ( N = 187); (2) Commitment–Sex-Some exploration ( N = 189); (3) No commitment–Exploration ( N = 281), and (4) No relationship ( N = 583). Compared to men, women were more likely to follow the trajectory of “Commitment-No sex” (RR 2.13, CI 1.5–3.03). Family environment was significantly related to young people's relationship choices. The findings strongly suggest the need to adopt a developmental perspective towards intimate relationships to understand and address the vulnerabilities of young people across the life course.

Romantic relationships and attitudes in Asian emerging adults: Review and critique

“…They were also more likely to attribute their attitudes toward sexual intimacy to family characteristics, whereas males reported individual traits as influencing factors (Blair & Scott, 2019). This finding aligns with results obtained from an Indian sample, where the likelihood of adhering to the “commitment‐no sex” dating style was higher for women than for men (Darak et al, 2022). These gender differences in sexual attitudes among Asian emerging adults show variations compared to research conducted in the Western context.…”

“…Among these participants, 82.3% were from East Asian regions (e.g., China, South Korea, Japan, etc. ; Chen & Wu, 2017), 15% were from Middle and South Asian regions (e.g., India, Iran, and Pakistan; Darak et al, 2022; Farahani & Cleland, 2015), and 3% were from Southeast Asian regions (e.g., Singapore, Malaysia; Cho et al, 2022). In addition, 27.4% of the total participants were drawn from cross‐cultural samples, which involved comparisons between different regions, such as Australia and Hong Kong (Moore et al, 2012), China and the United States (Kim et al, 2018), and India and the United States (Bejanyan et al, 2014).…”

“…Unlike the variable‐centered approach, which assumes homogeneity in attitudes toward dating and premarital sex within a population, employing a person‐centered approach recognizes the existence of subgroups that may hold distinct attitudes, including both liberal attitudes and conservative attitudes. Indeed, Darak et al (2022) found four typologies of relationships among Indian emerging adults, namely commitment‐no sex, commitment‐sex‐some exploration, no commitment‐exploration, and no relationship. A person‐centered approach would also allow investigation into variations in romantic relationship dynamics across these typologies.…”

“…Moreover, self-report surveys were utilized in most studies as the primary source of data. Only one study incorporated open-ended questions within their survey format (Kline et al, 2012), and another study incorporated a relationship history calendar (Darak et al, 2022). Furthermore, only six studies used a dyadic approach in data analyses to investigate relationship satisfaction (Johnson et al, 2015a(Johnson et al, , 2015bLi et al, 2020;Marshall, 2012).…”