An unmarried partner trails all these. They re not related. It creates a real problem. Whatever their relationship status, young adults typically think that they don t have to worry about living wills and designated decision-makers, since their own death appears to be somewhere in the murky future. But sometimes it s not their own mortality they have to cope with suddenly.
People don t want to deal with it until they have to.
In some trying situations, young adults wish they had thought about advance directives. She was an adult, but her partner, to whom she wasn t married, was badly hurt in the fire and could not talk to doctors about her wishes. The couple did not have any advance directives. Nagler said she had never talked with her parents about such predicaments. But she said she happened to have parallel views with them on many issues, so they made decisions that she agreed with in retrospect.