Romantic Competence and Courtship Skills: From the First Romantic Impulse to the Management of Mutuality

When adolescents have their first romantic experiences and start to form couples for the first time, these are normative practices which provide them with company, support and intimacy. However, the protagonists can also find them stressful and, at times, complicated. Romantic competence (RC) consists of a set of individual and mutual skills which are used to facilitate our emotional and social lives. In this study, we aim to deepen our knowledge about how RC is used, and the patterns or profiles present in the use of these skills.

2,400 Spanish adolescents (47.7% girls) between the ages of 12 and 18 took part in the study. A confirmatory factor analysis divided RC into individual or mutual competences, and, using cluster analysis, established three clearly defined profiles to describe the protagonists: ineffective in procedural and mutual management skills; ineffective in procedural skills and competent in mutual management skills; and competent in procedural and mutual management skills. The main discriminating factors for defining these profiles were age and romantic experience.

The results show that older adolescents with more romantic experience perceive themselves as being more skilled in both individual and mutual competences, and that there is a progressive development of RC skills from initiating a relationship to its later stages.

Our discussion of the results hopes to shed more light on the complexity of adolescents' intimate romantic lives, as well as to illustrate the importance of this knowledge for improving educational practices and helping prevent problems such as the psychogenesis of gender-based violence.