LOVE TYPES AND SUBJECTIVE WELL-BEING: A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY

Social Behavior and Personality, 2004 by Kim, Jungsik, Hatfield, Elaine

CULTURE

Culture affects how people define love, how susceptible they are to love, with whom they tend to fall in love, and how their love relationships proceed (Braudel, 1984; Fehr, 1993; Hatfield & Rapson, 1996; Hong, 1986). Especially, individualistic and collectivistic cultures are contrasting in the importance people in each culture place on love. Whereas passionate love is highly emphasized in individualistic cultures, in the collectivist cultures, where strong kinship networks and extended-family ties exist, passionate relationships are often viewed as negative because they may disrupt the tradition of family-approved and arranged marriage choices (Goode, 1959; Nyrop, 1985; Skolnick, 1996). Shaver, Wu, and Schwartz (1992) found that the Chinese equated love with sadness, jealousy, and other dark views, whereas Americans equated love with happiness. This different view is also reflected in marriage practice. The majority of people in individualist cultures marry for love and tend to believe that love is the most important factor for marriage. In comparison, it is not unusual that people in collectivist cultures marry through arrangement by family, relatives, or friends based on similar socioeconomic background, which does not necessarily involve love. Where this tradition is found, it is believed that couples develop companionate love for one another although they do not marry for love (Levine, Sato, Hashimoto, & Verma, 1995). Behind the wide practice of marriage arrangement, there appears to be a belief that passionate love may decline faster but companionate love may endure and last longer and benefit couples in the long run. Therefore, it was predicted that the correlations between companionate love and life satisfaction would be stronger in a "collectivistic" Korean sample than in an "individualistic" U.S. sample. In contrast, it was predicted that the association between passionate love and positive and negative affects would be stronger in the U.S. sample than in the Korean sample.

GENDER

Males love more passionately than do women, whereas females love more companionately than do males (Dion & Dion, 1993; Traupmann & Hatfield, 1981). One possible reason for this comes from evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory theorizes that love is just one of the emotional experiences which have been selected during the evolution process since it has helped humans find mates for reproduction and that through this evolutionary process men and women have developed different perspectives in love (Buss, 1994; Buss & Barne, 1986). In mate selection males, who are most interested in distributing as many genes as possible, constantly look for different sex partners and tend to seek females who demonstrate characteristics suitable for that purpose: health and beauty. In comparison, females are more interested in keeping genes by rearing healthy children in a safe environment rather than distributing genes by having as many children as they can. In relationships, this tendency is presented in the way that females seek a safe and secure relationship in which they can expect stable resources to help them rear children. Thus, the reult of this tendency is that females are less romantic and more realistic in finding males who will be resource providers.