Session 8: Life Cycles, Love and Intimate Relationships
Chair: Kassia Wosick-Correa

Intimacy at the End of Life
Wayne Leaver
Walden University, USA

While physical intimacy is often greatly limited at the end of life due to the disease process, emotional and spiritual intimacy are often desired by patient and family members. There are blocks to intimacy ranging  from a desire to protect the loved one from greater emotional distress to the attempts to be strong and stoic in the face of death. This presentation shares ways that these blocks to intimacy at the end of life have been overcome by people in a hospice setting.
The nature of emotional and spiritual intimacy  and sharing at the end of life is part of this presentation. Spiritual intimacy is approached from the viewpoint of faith as trust and confidence in a spiritual power rather than from the viewpoint of faith as belief or doctrine. Emotional intimacy is seen from the viewpoint of self revealing of hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, wishes and desires rather than from the viewpoint of communication or behavioral theory.
The presentation is based on observations and notes of a licensed mental health counselor who has worked for fourteen years in hospice bereavement full time. The presentation identifies techniques that have helped allow intimacy at the end of life

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Attachment, Transition and Work: The Case of the Young Adults
Ana Martins
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal

No abstract is presently available

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An Ethnographic Deconstruction of Sex and Relationships Education
Paul Gilfillan
Faculty of Education, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK

This paper addresses the issue of sexual or romantic relationships among adolescents and their meaning in the educational context.
As learners move through the education system, a change occurs in their relationships with others as they begin to form romantic and/or sexual relationships.  These relationships require a new level of investment and reflexivity in terms of time and effort, as well as new learning that must take place in order to understand how to initiate, negotiate, reproduce and maintain these new interpersonal relationships. While such 'relationship work' may impact negatively on educational outcomes if considered a distraction from scholastic work, there is evidence that by late adolescence young people consider ‘romantic partners’ as a significant source of support and care-giving (Furman, 2002) who may therefore serve to positively impact their scholastic performance in times of stress.
The relatively recent introduction of Sex Education to schools has centred on a desire to minimise 'risk behaviour', the biological aspects of sexual relationships and the issues of reproduction and contraception.  In the UK, this aspect of the school curriculum has recently been changed to Sex and Relationships Education, reflecting a growing interest and recognition of the emotional nature of relationships and their importance in the developing maturity of young people. Nonetheless, this new insight faces challenges from wider social and cultural developments outwith the school environment such as the widespread re-structuring of the family as well as an ever-growing sexualisation and commercialisation of youth culture. A concern therefore is that the content and guidance for teachers is often guilty of vagueness or of covertly promoting specific normative agendas that are unrealistic for many.