Disentangling meanings of safety: Young women's emotional resilience in sexual relations

Background: The sexual health paradigm is imbalanced and relies on biological and social drivers to explain soaring rates of HIV, sexually transmitted infections, and unintended pregnancies among young women. Sexual health includes complex processes that often occur within emotional relationships. Few investigations examine emotional mechanisms undertaken by women to maintain sexual health.

Purpose: I aimed to describe ways young women interpreted meanings of sexual safety within narratives of their sexual experiences.

Methods: I recruited a diverse (socioeconomic, skin color, and geographic) sample of 25 Black women ages 18 to 25 years old and conducted in-depth interviews. I used Nvivo9® to organize interview transcripts, field notes, and memos. I then performed critical narrative analyses using structural approaches to examine the data.

Results: Participant stories revealed emotionally-driven behaviors, meanings, and conclusions. Three typologies of emotional resilience emerged from the young women's narratives that demonstrated ways of achieving physical and emotional well-being within the context of sexual relationships. Typologies resembled: 1) A roller coaster, 2) A springboard, and 3) A revolving door, demonstrating variations in resilience behaviors within and outside normative biological descriptions of sexual risk. Emotional vulnerabilities, relationship experiences, and an evolving authentic self structured sexual identities and behavioral patterns.

Discussion: These findings illustrated the importance of understanding the influence of emotional dispositions in sexual decision-making. It is imperative to expand sexual health discourses by including emotional resilience as a pathway to sexual health outcomes. Integrating these principles into sexual health interventions that serve young women could improve future prospects for prevention.