My partner’s stories: relationships between personal and vicarious life stories within romantic couples

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we examined relationships and differences between personal and vicarious life stories, i.e., the life stories one knows of others. Personal and vicarious life stories of both members of 51 young couples (102 participants), based on McAdams’ Life Story Interview (2008), were collected. We found significant positive relationships between participants’ personal and vicarious life stories on agency and communion themes and redemption sequences. We also found significant positive relationships between participants’ vicarious life stories about their partners and those partners’ personal life stories on agency and communion, but not redemption. Furthermore, these relationships were not explained by similarity between couples’ two personal life stories, as no associations were found between couples’ personal stories on agency, communion and redemption. These results suggest that the way we construct the vicarious life stories of close others may reflect how we construct our personal life stories.

KEYWORDS:

• Life stories
• close others
• agency
• redemption sequences
• APIM

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants for sharing their stories and Marie Lundorrf Kristensen and Anne Mai Pedersen for coding the narratives. We are also grateful to Kate C. McLean and Jonathan M. Adler for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript and CON AMORE for their feedback. Both authors are affiliated with CON AMORE, which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF) Grant DNRF89.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Both authors are affiliated with CON AMORE, which is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation [grant number DNRF89] .