Drawing on interviews with a diverse group of sixty young adults, this dissertation investigates how young adults navigate and make sense of the transition to adult life and their attempts to assume adult identity locations in a Western cultural context that currently privileges emotional, therapeutic approaches to making sense of the self. I focus primarily on young adults' own accounts and stories of their experiences in intimate (romantic and sexual) relationships to make connections between young adults' constructions of the meanings they give to their experiences, their constructions of identity via how they situate themselves within those experiences, and the broader implications that young adults' constructions may have for perpetuating different kinds of social inequalities. I take an intersectional, constructionist approach in my analysis and also find that young adults' identity aspirations, in addition to their identity origins, matter in young adults' sense-making processes more than most have previously acknowledged. Generally, I find most young adults' intimacy stories take an individualized approach to transitioning to adulthood through intimacy-young adults understand their stories as unique journeys. Despite this, young adults' stories are patterned based on both their intersecting identity locations and the intersecting identities they plan to assume as full adults. Though some identities-and identity intersections-show promise in the form of challenging structural, deep-seated inequalities (and the cultural beliefs that structure those inequalities), in most cases, young adults' stories help uphold and solidify social inequalities and potentially harmful ideas about difference based on factors such as social class, race, gender, sexual identity, and even age. In addition, the personal nature of intimacy stories and experiences helps obscure the extent to which individuals' stories are patterned. In the final data chapter, I explore how this process impacts generalized ideas about transitioning to adulthood and what it means to be a "successful" adult in a Western context as well. This work contributes to the scholarship on emotions, identities, youth, and inequalities.