ABSTRACT
Research on work–life balance or negotiations, even in the field of communication, typically centers on the experiences of middle-class, mid-career, married, cis, heterosexual couples with children. Balsam et al. (2008) affirms that there were multiple reasons work–life research started here, as heterosexual married couples face many issues not relevant to the lives of queer families, including increased conflict, increased inequity, and decreased shared labor. However, in taking a constitutive approach to communication (Manning, 2014), we appreciate that the expectations that guide our work–life experience and the norms that inform them (Drago, 2003) are reshaped through our mundane conversations. In this case, we continue the work of Knight (in press), illuminating how work–life concerns appear in emerging adults’ socialization to work and intimacy, especially in college, as well as how college conversations are a site of reproducing and reifying norms (Denker & Knight, 2020). In the conversations of Erin, Lupe, Max, and Isa, we think more about how college students struggle to balance communal and individual pursuits, how their micro-negotiations reify cultural norms, and how these interactions impact the ways in which they experience work–life dilemmas.
