Throughout the last couple of centuries, traditional ideals of romantic love have suggested people find their soul mate, marry the loved one, have children, and live happily ever after. The cultural beliefs in love marriages have long shaped people’s dreams … Continue reading
Category Archives: close relationship
Happy People, Happy Relationships
Long-standing cultural ideologies of love have encouraged men and women to fall in love, get married, and spend their lives happily with their spouses. In recent decades, the modern culture of relationships has evolved and transformed into new forms. Traditional … Continue reading
The Need to Belong: Individual and Cultural Perspectives
The “need to belong” is, at its core, a desire to feel loved and accepted. And all men and women have such needs and strive to fulfill them in their relationships with caregivers. Infants, from the early days of their … Continue reading
The Cultural Evolution of Human Bonding
Animal species’ need for positive social connections and bonding has deep evolutionary roots. According to scientific evidence, many animals, including birds, dogs, cats, and primates, exhibit social emotions, behaviors, and a need for bonding and love. They are capable of … Continue reading
Can Sharing Bad News Improve Close Relationships?
Men and women in close relationships hope to experience joyful and optimistic times together. They are happy to share everything good that happens in their lives. The people close to them are happy to hear the good news. It is … Continue reading
How Expressive Is the Culture of Intimacy in a Relationship
The feeling of intimate belonging fulfills people’s needs for intimacy. However, people can satisfy their need to belong in various ways in different cultures, depending on their norms. A distinction between collectivistic (interdependent) and individualistic (independent) values is especially important … Continue reading
Interpersonal Self-Disclosure Differs in Different Cultures
Self-disclosure is the way an individual communicates and shares personal information with another. Values and opinions, goals and aspirations, plans and thoughts, feelings and preferences, achievements and failures, fears and hopes, dreams and disappointments—all these internal personal things can be … Continue reading
What Is Closeness in a Relationship? It Is Culturally Diverse.
Scholars and laypeople frequently refer to psychological closeness in interpersonal relationships as “intimacy.” It might be either physical or emotional proximity, or their combination. It can be bodily, sexual, physical, emotional, or intellectual. The understanding of intimacy is also culturally … Continue reading
How Social Propinquity Leads to Love
The article explains how social propinquity and residential proximity affect our interpersonal relationships, love, and marriage. Men and women tend to like those with whom they get together frequently. In social science, this is called the “propinquity effect.” They have … Continue reading