Abstract
This theoretical article presents the review of modern cross-cultural research on love. Despite the cross-cultural universality of love, its specific interpretation differs from culture to culture. This review of cross-cultural findings depicts the diversity of romantic love experience across cultures.
Love is the variety of emotions. Therefore, the cultural context of their emotional life has an impact on how people experience love. The diversity of emotional experience reflects on love beliefs, attitudes, and feelings. As for the specific experiences of love, the article presents the examples and discusses
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1.
Experience of passion in love, along with reviewing its cross-cultural similarities and differences;
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Romantic experience in love, in the frame of romantic beliefs, attitudes, and idealization, romantic ideas of union, exclusivity, and jealousy;
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3.
Erotic and sexual experience of love, as well as their relations from different cultural views;
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4.
Joyful and powerful experience of love, along with describing the joy, satisfaction, and happiness that love brings;
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5.
Maladaptive experience of love, along with emotional instability, suffering, obsessive, and possessive feelings.
All these experiences of love have culturally specific accents in the minds of people from different cultures. The chapter summarizes the variety of theoretical and empirical findings from various disciplines, such as anthropology, psychology, sociology, and communication science.
The research findings on how people with different cultural background experience love should be valuable for multicultural couples, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and other practitioners working with multicultural population.
Keywords
- Love
- Passion
- Romantic beliefs
- Idealization
- Jealousy
- Erotic love
- Sexual love
- Joy and happiness of love
- Obsessional love
- Suffering from love
- Lovesickness
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Karandashev, V. (2021). Cultural Diversity of Romantic Love Experience. In: Mayer, CH., Vanderheiden, E. (eds) International Handbook of Love. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45996-3_4
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