Love and Marriage in Eleven Cultures

Abstract

College students from secondary population centers in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, England, and the United States were asked to rate the importance of love for both the establishment and the maintenance of a marriage. Love tended to receive greatest importance in the Western and Westernized nations and least importance in the underdeveloped Eastern nations. These differences were stronger and clearer for decisions regarding the establishment of a marriage than for the maintenance and dissolution of a marriage. There were few significant sex differences, either across or within countries. Individualistic cultures, as opposed to collective cultures, assigned much greater importance to love in marriage decisions. Respondents assigning greater importance to love also tended to come from nations with higher economic standards of living, higher marriage rates and divorce rates, and lower fertility rates.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Beach, S. , & Tesser, A. (1988). Love and marriage: A cognitive account. In R. S. Sternberg & M. L. Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love. (pp. 330-355). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bond, M. H. (1988). Finding universal dimensions of individual variation in multicultural studies of values: The Rokeach and Chinese value surveys. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, 1009-1015.

Branden, N. (1980). The psychology of romantic love. New York:Bantam.

Burgess, E. W. , & Wallin, P. (1953). Engagement and marriage. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 1-49.

Dion, K. L. , & Dion, K. K. (1988). Romantic love: Individual and cultural perspectives. In R. S. Sternberg & M. L. Barnes (Eds.), The psychology of love. (pp. 264-289). New Haven: Yale University Press.

Goode, W. J. (1959). The theoretical importance of love. American Sociological Review, 24, 38-47.

Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture's consequences: International differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Iwao, S. (1989). Changing lives and social consciousness. In Nippon Steel Corporation, Contemporary Japan: Self-portrait. (pp. 51-62). Tokyo: Gakuseisha.

10.

Kephart, W. M. (1967). Some correlates of romantic love. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 29,470-474.

11.

Leslie, G. R. , & Korman, S. K. (1989). The family in social context. New York: Oxford University Press.

12.

Martin, T. , & Bumpass, L. (1989). Recent trends in marital disruption. Demography, 26, 37-51.

13.

Nyrop, R. E. (1985). India: A country study. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

14.

Rosenblatt, P. C. (1967). Marital residence and the functions of romantic love. Ethnology, 6, 471-480.

15.

Samuelson, R. J. (1990). The economist book of vital world statistics. New York: Times Books.

16.

Skolnick, A. S. (1987). The intimate environment: Exploring marriage and the family. Boston: Little, Brown.

17.

Simmons, C. H. , vom Kolke, A. , & Shimizu, H. (1986). Attitudes toward romantic love among Amenrican, German, and Japanese students. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 327-336.

18.

Simpson, J. , Campbell, B. , & Berscheid, E. (1986). The association between romantic love and marriage: Kephart (1967) twice revisited. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12, 363-372.

19.

Triandis, H. C. (1988). Collectivism vs. individualism: A reconceptualization of a basic concept in cross-cultural social psychology. In G. K. Verma & C. Bagley (Eds.), Personality, cognition and values: Cross-cultural perspectives of childhood and adolescenc. (pp. 60-96). London: Macmillan.

20.

Triandis, H. C. , Bontempo, R. , Villareal, M. J. , Asai, M. , & Lucca, N. (1988). Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 323-338.