Category Archives: modern love studies

modern studies of love, cultures across the world

Who Invented “Romantic Love”?

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A great variety of feelings, emotions, motivations, dispositions, traits, and values represent people’s experiences of love. Romantic love includes certain cultural ideas, beliefs, storylines, narrative schemes, and emotions. There are two realms in which romantic love exists: the realm of cultural ideas and the realm of individual realities.

Two Realms of Romantic Love

In the first case, the “ideas of love” are imaginary descriptions narrating “what love can be.” Writers, artists, and musicians use poetry, novels, and the fine arts to express creative narratives of stories, ideas, events, beliefs, and feelings of love.

In the second case, the “individual realities” are the experiences describing “what love is.” People describe love as their individual states, feelings, emotions, dispositions, traits, beliefs, and romantic behaviors.

The focus of this article is on the ideal models of love as they are presented in folk stories, novels, paintings, sculptures, and music portraying “what love can be.” They portrayed romantic love through cultural ideas, beliefs, stories, and depictions of the emotional lives of characters. For hundreds of years, oral folk stories and written novels have been the main ways that the educated elite in many cultures have come up with and spread these ideas about love (for a review, see Karandashev, 2017).

Did Europeans Invent “Romantic Love”?

Literary scholars, philosophers, and other thinkers previously believed that romantic love was a European invention with origins in “courtly love” in the 12th and 13th centuries. The presence and importance of love in European literature were enhanced during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. The ideas, stories, and descriptions of “romantic love” further developed in the following centuries.

Thus, it was once assumed that these European ideas of romantic love were disseminated in other cultures around the world. Recent studies, on the other hand, have shown that Arabic, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Persian societies all followed the same cultural patterns of literary evolution, mostly independently from each other.

Extensive research into the cultural histories of many different societies (Baumard, Huillery, Hyafil, et al., 2022; Jankowiak & Fischer, 1992; Karandashev, 2017) has shown that romantic love has existed in many different places and times.

Surprising Cross-Cultural Universality of Literary “Romantic Love”

A group of French and Spanish researchers recently completed a large-scale study that confirmed the cross-cultural universality of romantic love ideas. Nicolas Baumard, Elise Huillery, Alexandre Hyafil, and their colleagues did an amazing job of building an extensive database of ancient literary fiction from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. They put together the literary data for 77 periods covering 3,800 years of human history and 19 geographical areas of the world (Baumard et al., 2022).

Baumard and his colleagues showed that romantic elements in Eurasian literary fiction have substantially expanded over the last millennium. They also found similar literary boosts earlier, in Classical India, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome. The researchers were also interested in learning what kinds of ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural factors play a role in such literary proliferation.

Romantic Love Is Interesting, but Largely for Those Who Are Wealthy Enough to Afford this Leisure

The authors found that higher incidences and a larger prevalence of love themes in narrative fiction strongly correlate with regional variations in economic development. The higher levels of economic development in these societies are associated with the increased abundance of romantic love literature in their cultures. The researchers were able to reconstruct the latent evolution of love. They also evaluated the roles of other facets of economic development and cultural diffusion.

Who and Where Invented “Romantic Love”?

The findings appear to show that romantic love emerged and evolved in various world cultures concurrently. And it happened in their early histories of economic development. Only relatively affluent people could afford to entertain themselves with the idea of romantic love. It is a luxury to contemplate romantic love. So, only men and women who don’t have to struggle every day for food, shelter, and survival could take advantage of such an opportunity.

Modern and Traditional Models of Relationships in Spain

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Interest in love studies has been on the rise among Spanish researchers in recent decades. Scholars explored the general processes of love relationships and culturally specific aspects of Spanish cultural models of love (Karandashev, 2019, 2022). Let us look at the modern and traditional models of relationships in Spain, considering the examples of Spanish couples and Moroccan immigrants’ couples.

The recent article “Love, Relationships, and Couple Happiness: A Cross-Cultural Comparison Among Spanish Couples and Moroccan Couples in Southern Spain” by Encarnación Soriano-Ayala, Verónica C. Cala, Manuel Soriano Ferrer, and Herenia García-Serrán recently reported the study of multicultural models of love in Southern Spain (Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021).

Modernized Spanish Culture and Relationships in Spain

The authors show that love relationships are sociocultural constructions, and the differences in cultural models of relationships in Western and Arab countries play their roles. Moroccan immigration comes from Arab society. It is Spain’s largest foreign cultural group that brings with it the Arab culture of relationships. Due to this large immigration, people in Spanish society observe the coexistence of two models of relationships: modernized Spanish and traditional Moroccan cultures.

Modernized Spanish culture has changed along with the country’s social and economic changes. There is less religious influence and more open public discussion to support freedom of choice in relationships. Attitudes towards relationships and love have become more liberal, flexible, and open to diversity. Spanish men and women tend to have a greater number of partners, with a shorter relationship duration and less predisposition to marriage. The more fluid forms of love govern these patterns of relationships. Despite such modernization of relationships in Spain, “familism” is quite distinctive to Spanish culture. Some estimates indicate that Spain is the most family-centered country in the European Union. Nevertheless, only one-third of the Spanish stated that their family had a strong influence on them. This fact can reflect the loss of the importance of the family as an institution among the Spanish.

Traditional Arab Islamic Culture and Relationships in Spain

Traditional Islamic societies have remained largely conservative in these regards. In their cultures, religion defines many of the normative prescriptions for love relationships. Although Arab Islamic societies have traditionally valued eroticism, pleasurable sexuality, and love, they considered them separate from marital relationships. In the matter of marriage, their views were opposite, with the restriction on freedom of choice and sex being focused on its reproductive function and the maintenance of social roles and status. Moroccan immigrants tend to have more stable and lasting relationships in which marriage plays an important role. Moroccan couples residing in Spain have the highest marriage rates. Marriages continue to serve a social status that immigrant Islamic communities highly value. According to some estimates, more than 90% of the Moroccans stated that their family had had a strong influence on them.

How Happy Are Spanish Couples and Moroccan Immigrant Couples in a Relationship?

Based on their analysis of earlier research, the authors identified some sociocultural differences in how happy couples feel in their relationships. They claimed that:

“The enormous changes in affective-emotional relationships in Europe and the United States have been accompanied by decreased marital happiness and satisfaction within the couple, particularly among groups with low socio-educational levels and minority ethnic groups. These groups experienced the lowest satisfaction.” “Conversely, family, sexual and matrimonial forms in Arab countries have experienced transformations in affective relationships that are tempered by the role of religion, thus maintaining greater stability in family, marital and gender structures, although younger generations are beginning to demonstrate changes in that stability.”

Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021

So, from these two excerpts, we see two main tendencies, which are difficult to judge in terms of good or bad. In the first case, it is about relationship satisfaction, while in the second case, it is about marital stability—two incomparable parameters of relationships.

Acculturation in Relationships

A main question for this study is, “What happens to couples from non-western countries, such as Morocco, when they migrate to Western countries, such as Spain?”

The authors reviewed a few studies that examined post-migratory changes in couple relationships when they migrated from traditional to modernized cultures. Those studies showed that couples continue to maintain their own cultural norms while adopting the new cultural norms of the society from which they migrated. They gradually develop a hybrid cultural model of relationships. Some immigrants acculturate to a new cultural model of love sooner than others.

The change in the affective and relational models of couples shifts the immigrants’ attitudes in favor of the romantic model of love, towards more freedom of choice and less dependency on family ties.

Couple Relationships in Morocco

In Morocco, such basic cultural values as honor, religion, traditional gender roles, and family stability significantly influence couple relationships. However, the gradual transformations in Moroccan society, such as the modernization of interpersonal relationships, continue.

Among those are legislative measures such as the “Moudawana” family code, which allowed divorce, set a minimum legal age for marriage, and started to punish sexual harassment.

A liberal romantic understanding emerged that recognizes marriage as a choice and the fruit of love. This new cultural value admits new forms of intimacy.

All these mixtures of modern norms and practices with traditional ones evolve into ambivalent and contradictory modern models of relationships. Some people experience a liberalization of their lifestyles linked to modernized sexual and social patterns. The other people tend to preserve their traditional Arab Islamic norms and practices, which are linked with puritanism and conservatism in gender and sexual relationships. Scholars also consider controversial interpretations of these changes (see for review, Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021).

Some speak of a Moroccan sexual and democratic revolution due to Western ethnocentrism. They explain the changes that occur as the result of progressive steps forward for the family, romanticism, and intimacy. Many scholars, however, focus on more traditional and folk ways of life, which give rise to rigid stereotypes about sentimental relationships in Arab and Muslim couples.

How Are the Relationships in the Couples of Spaniards and Moroccan Immigrants in Spain?

A recent survey study showed that Spaniards perceive their relationships as less stable. The relationships are influenced by a variety of factors. However, they reported spending a greater amount of time with their partners than Moroccan couples. The relational patterns of Spaniards reinforce the new, discontinuous forms of couple relationships. Those patterns are consistent with a weakening of interpersonal connections in Western societies (Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021).

Spanish women tend to highly value love in their lives. They consider intimacy especially important and rate their happiness in couple relationships highly. The Spanish women felt happier and more satisfied. However, the Moroccan women did not feel this way. Moroccan women tend to be in favor of romantic love. They give high priority to commitment, intimacy, and passion. However, someone may doubt the validity of such self-reports from Spanish and Moroccan women considering the other findings described above.

The results of a recent survey study found that the Moroccans in Spain are more influenced by religion and family. Despite the migration to different societies, they consider religion a very important factor of socialization for the Moroccan communities. They tend to maintain more stability in relationships (Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021).

For Moroccan men and women, the maintenance of social relations and communities, such as family or religious practice, is of high importance. These social values displace the importance they place on couple relationships. Couple relationships for Muslim women are based more on socio-economic materiality than on intangible sentimentality, such as love and couple relationships. Even among immigrants, love does not occupy the vital role in their lives that is culturally attributed to it. They would rather establish strong emotional bonds with other women. The stereotype of the submissive woman may not be quite adequate.

Gender-unequal stereotypical roles are considered

the “feminine mystique” and represent women as “emotional beings who are responsible for giving and expressing love to men”

(Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021, p.82)

In summary,

“The Spanish love style appears as a transitional style between the romantic model of the twentieth century and new neo-liberal forms linked to love, sexual poly-consumption and female empowerment.” “The love model presented by the Moroccan people corresponds to the traditional forms of love. In immigrant couples, the liberalisation of love that is taking place in large Moroccan cities is not observed to any significant extent”

(Soriano-Ayala et al., 2021, p. 84).

The Italian Romantic Hero as an Ideal Latin Lover

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This article on the website presents the recent study of Francesca Pierini, a lecturer from the University of Basel, Switzerland, as well as many other scholarly and literary examples of romantic ideals of male heroes. The author’s literary exploration described the narrative patterns of the Italian romantic hero. Her excellent review paper beautifully described the ideals of the Italian romantic lover.

The Literary and Cultural Stereotypes of Southern European Romantic Heroes

In contemporary Anglophone fiction, prominent descriptive patterns of the Latin, Spanish, and Italian people have shown these cultures as distinct constellations of counter-values to Anglo-American cultures and ethos. Literature and public discourse have depicted a particularly complex and multi-layered concept of culturally appealing “primitivism.” This viewpoint has found its way into a variety of cultural/artistic contexts, including Anglophone contemporary romantic novels, movies, and public discourse. For example, the Italian masculine hero, in both positive and negative aspects, is the recognized signifier of attractive otherness (Pierini, 2020).

Romantic novels describe the physical characteristics of Italian heroes as sensuous and alluringly dark men, implying an untrustworthy character and a hot and short temper. In these descriptions, mainstream beliefs about southern European machismo conflate with popular literary conventions about Middle Eastern cultures based on their apparent discontinuity with the modern world. The novels present Arab and southern European men as attractive because of their unusual and even exotic images.

Latin Lover

Italian and Spanish romantic heroes are often presented as Latin lovers. These romantic heroes resemble alpha males. These men are strong, hard, confident, dominant, and can be aggressive, yet they have a tender spot that the heroine uncovers. Writers frequently elicit mainstream assumptions about machismo as alpha maleness when creating the character of a Latin lover (Jarmakani, 2011).

A Latin lover is commonly known as a Latin man who is known for his romantic disposition, passionate temperament, and sexual aptitude. For the figure of the “Latin lover,” Pierini (2020) proposed the term “Mediterranean Man.” It implies a merger of the southern European and the Arab man.

What Does a Latin Lover Look Like?

The physical appearance of these men’s heroes is important. A couple of decades ago, the physical traits of the romantic hero were depicted in fascinating remarks on the dark color of their skin. Currently, such references look more like the remarks

on the “rich caramel coloring of his [the sheik’s] skin, giving true meaning to the description of tall, dark, and handsome.”

(Jackson, 2002/2017).

The Exotic and Erotic Latin Lover

British romantic novels often depict Spain as the land of a blazing sun, the flamenco, the castanets, the fiesta, the siesta, and bullfighting.

European romantic novels describe Italy quite similarly—in some regards—as a timeless land of a blazing sun, winemaking, and continuous traditions, as well as the people with long and unbroken family histories, the aperitivo, the pasta, and the siesta. The Italian romantic hero is frequently portrayed as an elegant Italian winemaker who is very attached to his family and parents. He is a successful, imposing, but compassionate man (George, 2014).

Darkness marks the Latin lover out as being exotic, erotic, and different. His dark hair, black eyes, and olive skin accentuate the cultural and ethnic differences. The heroine, with her English rose complexion and clear eyes, commonly signifies another cultural marker or metonymy (Pérez-Gil, 2019).

Romance stories depicts such exotic features as natural and inborn in . They appear as the outcome of genetic features—a “Mediterranean” DNA—rather than a social and cultural environment. Italian and Spanish men seem to have a sort of “Mediterranean DNA” that accounts for their physical traits (Pierini, 2020).

Masculinity of an Italian Romantic Hero

The typical image of an Italian romantic hero resembles, in a broad sense, a Mediterranean man. His blackness of the skin, eyes, and hair is a recurring theme. Authors frequently use the terms “dark eyes,” “dark stare,” “dark golden eyes and gaze,” “olive-toned complexion,” and “bronzed skin” in various combinations (see for review, Pierini, 2020).

Many romantic novels have repeatedly portrayed the stereotypical description of the Italian hero’s dark eyes and complexion. Writers often use the analogy of darker skin with chocolate, which is inviting, tempting, and essentially resembles a hedonistic food.

The idea of the domineering and primitive masculinity of a Latin lover, in contrast to English cold-bloodedness and sexual restraint, resembled “oriental men,” splendid, healthy, and predatory animals.

In the romantic depictions of Italian heroes, the recurring expressions frequently present

“olive-toned skin,” “chocolate eyes,” and “eyelashes, long and lustrous, fringed eyes the color of rich, melted chocolate, warm and tempting”

(see for review, Pierini, 2020, p. 6).

They have

“dark eyes,” “smouldering dark eyes,” “molten eyes,” or “dark, sultry eyes.”

(see for review, Pierini, 2020, p. 6).

They also have

“dark gaze” or “dark and compelling gaze,” “olive-toned flesh,” and “olive-toned hands.”

(see for review, Pierini, 2020, p. 6).

The Latin Lover as an Italian Playboy

For instance, in Anderson’s Between the Italian’s Sheets (2009), we read,

“Dazed, she studied the difference in their colouring.  She had come from a cold winter, so her skin was pale, whereas his olive complexion had been enhanced in the heat of the European summer”.

Or, another similar writing says:

“she stared hard into the darkness of his eyes, let hers roam over his features, his olive skin, the angled jaw that right now was shadowed with stubble, the full mouth”.

In The Playboy of Rome (2015) by J. Faye, author describes the Italian hero as “dark and undeniably handsome,”  with “tanned skin around his dark eyes.” The eyes are “dark and mysterious,” with a “dark gaze.”

In The Italian’s Christmas Child (2016) by L. Graham, author persistently repeats the expression “dark golden eyes.” And Vito, the male protagonist, is a “glorious display of bronzed perfection.”

Pierini (2020) presents many other examples of such romantic cultural descriptors. They allow us to compile an attractive ideal image of the romantic Italian lover.

What is a prototypical Italian man? How romantic is a Latin lover?

  • Does the real Italian man look like a prototypical Latin lover in love?
  • What is a prototypical Italian woman?