Although the raw number of adolescent romantic and sexual involvements is well documented, the actual experience and meaning of these relationships for adolescents receives little attention. As a result, these relationships are frequently classed together on the basis of surface similarities, despite important structural and functional differences. Attention to these differences, however, reveals how young men and women craft adaptive constellations of peer relationships to meet changing needs for intimacy and social support during the multiple transitions of adolescence. In this chapter we put forth a typology of intimate peer relationships based on the motives prompting adolescents to pursue them, their specific characteristics, and the functions they serve. We specify four varieties of adolescent relationships – sexual relationships, dating relationships, passionate friendships, and romantic relationships – representing prototypical combinations of some of the most salient motives, characteristics, and functions.

Three qualifications are in order. First, our use of this typology is primarily heuristic. We do not suggest that all adolescent intimate relationships can or should be shoehorned into one of these categories or that such a task has any intrinsic value. Rather, we elaborate these relationship categories to demonstrate how an analysis of the motives, characteristics, and functions underlying adolescent intimate relationships elucidates their developmental significance better than an analysis of surface features alone.