How Vietnamese-American Young Adults Navigate Love Between Two Cultures

Romantic identity rarely forms in a cultural vacuum, but for the children of immigrants it is forged at a particularly charged crossroads. A new qualitative study published in Trends in Psychology offers an intimate look at how Vietnamese-American emerging adults construct a sense of who they are as romantic beings while standing between the expectations of their parents and the pull of their own aspirations. The research, led by Srija Halder of Clark University together with Si Wang of the American University of Paris, Laura Tran and Juan Zhong of Springfield College, uses narrative methods to reveal that romantic identity development is not a solitary journey from independence to partnership. Instead, it is a negotiated passage, one the authors describe as a movement from “I” to “we” through “us”—a shift in which parents, culture, and personal desire are all active participants.

The study focused on two female Vietnamese-American college students, aged 20 and 21, whose stories were drawn from a broader investigation of sexual and health development among Vietnamese-American emerging adults. Each participant completed a semi-structured interview, and the transcripts were subjected to positioning analysis, a discourse-based method rooted in the work of Rom Harré and Luk van Langenhove. Rather than asking what identities participants possess, positioning analysis examines how people actively position themselves and others within the stories they tell—how a speaker casts herself as obedient daughter, autonomous young woman, or committed partner in different narrative moments. This lens allowed the researchers to capture the fluid, sometimes contradictory ways the young women made sense of romance in relation to family and culture.

The theoretical scaffolding for the study draws on the concept of emerging adulthood, the life stage spanning roughly the late teens through the twenties that Jeffrey Arnett has characterized as a period of identity exploration and instability. Arnett himself has emphasized that emerging adulthood is not culturally uniform, and the present study builds on that insight. For second-generation immigrants, developmental scholars have long noted, the transition to adulthood involves negotiating normative conflicts between the heritage culture of the family and the mainstream culture of the society at large. Romantic relationships sit squarely at the center of this negotiation: they touch on dating, mate selection, sexuality, religion, and ultimately marriage—all domains in which parental expectations tend to be most pronounced.

The findings highlight three interlocking processes in the participants’ stories. The first was religious influence transmitted through parental belief systems. The researchers found that parents’ religious commitments did not merely function as a set of rules to follow or reject; they operated as an interpretive backdrop against which the young women evaluated their own romantic feelings and choices. In this sense, religious and cultural expectations were inherited not simply as doctrine but as a vocabulary of meaning, shaping what felt like an appropriate partner, an appropriate pace, and an appropriate future for a romantic relationship.

The second process involved societal values and the construction of one’s own context. The participants did not experience their cultural worlds as two rigid blocs in conflict. Rather, they selectively drew on culturally available expectations—both Vietnamese and American—as resources for interpreting their experiences. When these expectations clashed, the young women engaged in what the authors describe as reconciling competing ideals of closeness and autonomy. They wanted to remain emotionally connected to their families while also claiming the right to author their own romantic lives. The study suggests that this reconciliation is an active developmental achievement, not a passive accommodation.

Perhaps the most striking finding is the role of graduated disclosure in how romantic identity was constructed. Rather than presenting parents with a completed decision—a boyfriend, a relationship, a plan—the participants moved through carefully staged revelations, testing the waters and calibrating how much to share and when. Disclosure functioned as a developmental tool: each incremental act of telling reshaped the relational field between daughter and parents, gradually transforming a private “I” into a shared “we.” The word “through us” in the study’s title captures this insight. Romantic identity, on this account, is not achieved inside the individual and then announced to the family; it is co-constructed through the very conversations that bring it into family awareness.

Technically, the study’s narrative approach treats identity as something performed in storytelling rather than reported as a stable trait. Positioning analysis attends to the discursive production of selves: who is positioned as agent, who as authority, who as beneficiary in each narrative episode. This methodological choice matters because it lets researchers track identity in motion. Instead of coding participants as either “traditional” or “acculturated,” the analysis reveals how a single speaker can occupy multiple positions across a single interview—deferring to parental wishes in one moment, asserting personal preference in the next, and often blending the two into hybrid accounts that honor both heritage and self.

The implications reach beyond Vietnamese-American communities. Asian Americans represent one of the fastest-growing populations in the United States, and prior research has documented that parent–child acculturation gaps—differences in how strongly each generation endorses heritage versus mainstream values—are associated with tension around dating and mate selection. Studies of Asian American emerging adults have linked parent–adolescent relationship quality and ethnic identity to romantic attachment patterns, and recent reviews have called for deeper, process-oriented accounts of how Asian young people actually navigate romantic development rather than snapshot measures of attitudes. By focusing on process, the new study answers that call in a way that quantitative surveys cannot.

The authors also see direct applications for clinical practice. Therapists working with second-generation immigrant clients often encounter conflicts that surface around romance: secrecy about relationships, anxiety about parental disapproval, or guilt over perceived betrayals of family expectations. The study’s findings suggest that clinicians should not frame these conflicts simply as individual pathology or as family dysfunction. Instead, they can be understood as culturally significant developmental work—clients’ attempts to reconcile closeness and autonomy using the interpretive resources their culture provides. Recognizing graduated disclosure as a legitimate and adaptive strategy, rather than as avoidance, may help clinicians support clients in ways that respect both family bonds and personal growth.

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Springfield College and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with informed consent obtained from all participants and data anonymized to protect privacy. The authors acknowledge the study’s limits: with two participants, the findings are not statistically generalizable, and the accounts reflect the perspectives of college-educated women at a particular developmental moment. Yet this is precisely the kind of depth-oriented, theory-generating work that qualitative narrative research is designed to deliver. By following two young women as they narrated the passage from an independent “I” to a relational “we”—through the shared space of “us”—the study offers a vivid, technically grounded account of how culture is not a background variable in romantic development but an active, intimate participant in it. For the millions of young adults straddling two cultural worlds, the message is both simple and profound: falling in love is also an act of translation, performed in dialogue with the people who raised you.

Subject of Research: Romantic identity development among Vietnamese-American emerging adults navigating parental influence and cultural expectations

Article Title: From I to we Through us: Romantic Identity Development in Vietnamese-American Emerging Adults

Article References: From I to we Through us: Romantic Identity Development in Vietnamese-American Emerging Adults. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00541-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00541-8

Keywords: romantic identity, emerging adulthood, Vietnamese American, narrative analysis, positioning analysis, parental influence, cultural expectations, bicultural identity, qualitative research, second-generation immigrants, graduated disclosure, cultural psychology