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Anticipation of Old Age by Outstanding Women as a Motive for Fulfilling the Need for Closeness in Middle Adulthood

Summary/Abstract: Personality theories treat anticipation as a mechanism that enables individuals to plan for the future. At the beginning of the text, various perspectives on this mechanism from different personality theorists are presented. The need for closeness is then defined as an important human motive in search for a life partner, which supports the fulfilment of this key developmental task in the early adulthood.The research questions were aimed at uncovering the reason why creative, independent women – who are capable of supporting themselves without a man’s help and who experienced failure in their first marriage during the early adulthood – choose to enter into a second marriage during middle adulthood. The hypothesis stipulates that this decision stemmed from the anticipation of ensuring closeness in later life.An analysis of the biographies of five creative and highly esteemed women (Agatha Christie, Isadora Duncan, Tamara de Lempicka, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Gabriela Zapolska) revealed that only two of them (Agatha Christie and Tamara de Lempicka) found closeness in their subsequent relationships. The remaining women, despite their efforts, did not succeed in maintaining a partner into old age.

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