American culture values “rugged individualism” and “going it alone”; our need for warm human relationships is sometimes denied or viewed as a sign of weakness. Nevertheless, most of us try to achieve close personal ties with relatives, friends, and sexual partners, and some of us choose to have children as well. Such relationships can help give us a sense of our own value as human beings. They can also help satisfy a number of emotional needs. Each of us needs intimacy: A close, loving relationship allows us to express our thoughts freely and to feel that we can trust another person with our deepest feelings. Each of us needs reassurance of worth, the feeling that we are valued and considered special by the meaningful people in our lives. Each of us needs a sense of support the knowledge that there are people to whom we can turn for help. And each of us needs nurturance; we need both to care for other and to be cared for by others.
No one relationship can fill all of a person’s emotional needs. Regardless of whether a person is married or single, he or she also needs the special closeness and sense of sharing that can develop between friends, siblings, parents and children, and other relatives, sometimes even between coworkers. We are going to focus on marriage and parenthood, because they are options that are selected by many people in our culture who want to devote attention to other phases of long term relationships, including courtship and cohabitation (“living together”). And we will discuss the single lifestyle: today, not everyone assumes that the heterosexual married couple is the only natural and vital adult lifestyle, and the United States has a larger, more vocal and more political influential population of single people ever before.
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