"Just Talking": The Making and Unmaking of Emotionally Intimate Relationships through Verbal Contract

Background: The capacity to establish intimate relationships, including romantic and sexual connections, has long been considered essential for healthy young adult development (Erikson, 1963). However, cultural shifts and technological innovations have radically altered both the process of forming relationships (courtship) and relationship structure itself. In the United States, the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s inaugurated a series of ruptures between modes of intimacy that were once normatively entwined. First was the separation of marriage and sexual intimacy, as premarital sex within the context of loving relationships became socially acceptable; this was followed by the rise of emotionally-detached sex, evident in college hookup culture. For critics of casual sex, the severing of sexual and emotional intimacy was the death knell for courtship. But is courtship dead? Recent scholarship on “just talking” troubles this assertion, arguing that this now-common euphemism describes a novel courtship strategy through which emerging adults simultaneously develop emotionally-intimate, dyadic relationships and downplay their significance through a linguistic sleight of hand, “we’re just talking” (Hardesty et al., 2024). Building on preliminary cultural-level understandings of “just talking” as a revitalized courtship strategy, this interpretive study asks what actually happens when emerging adults are “just talking.” The research was guided by two questions: 1. What is the trajectory of “just talking” dyads over time? and 2. What does “just talking” tell us about the social values and relationship aspirations of emerging adults?

Methods: We recruited a diverse convenience sample of 20 college students who were “just talking” to one or more people. All participants were interviewed 3 times over the course of 3-4 months (60 total interviews); interviews were 30-70 min in duration. Researchers identified and refined key themes throughout the data collection process; these were used to develop a final codebook for analyzing all transcripts.

Results: “Just talking” has three common trajectories: a short-term series of interactions fizzle, regular interactions build into a committed relationship, or “just talking” continues without participants agreeing to an exclusive relationship. Significantly, most participants viewed non-monogamy as the default assumption in all amorous interactions, regardless of the level of emotional intimacy within particular dyads. The only way one could presume monogamy was through explicit verbal agreement via, “the relationship conversation.” Long-term “just talking” dyads spiraled in and out of “the relationship conversation.” In such cases, the relationship conversation rolls back the threat of monogamy by verbally proclaiming that even emotionally-intense bonds are casual. Talking to the researchers about “just talking” sometimes swayed participants to change their relationship status. Finally, most participants anticipated having monogamous relationships later in adulthood, but many viewed such arrangements as developmentally-inappropriate and overly-constraining for college students.

Implications & Conclusions: Emotional intimacy and resistance to monogamy in “just talking” suggest that this courtship strategy is a rejection of both traditional relationship structures and the anti-relationship ethic of hookup culture. Likewise, the “relationship conversation” suggests a contract-like approach to intimacy in which expectations and emotions can be contained and controlled through rational choice and explicit agreement.