Thanks for the response - I like the sentence about the web of responsibilities multiplying, and I think that's kinda what I'm getting at. Maybe I'm weird, or

Thanks for the response - I like the sentence about the web of responsibilities multiplying, and I think that's kinda what I'm getting at. Maybe I'm weird, or doing it wrong, but in my life so far, I just don't see a real tie between romantic relationships and those familial/aging/life responsibilities. My partner and I each have our webs of responsibilities; the edge between us goes both ways, and I can't see how it being labelled "romantic partner" has any bearing on the rest of the web. Sometimes that edge makes dealing with a particular family situation easier, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think it's even possible to say whether there's any net effect, since of course there's more to it than this, and the experiment only gets run once. There are two straightforward contributors to younger people being more interested in that sort of romantic fluidity: hormones and energy.