What Are Personal Identity and Social Identity?

Personal, social, and cultural identities, along with more specific kinds like sexual or gender identity, are essential constituencies of an individual’s identity. All these are about how people are aware of themselves, but they differ in the attributes that represent each … Continue reading

Proxemics and Immediacy in Interpersonal Communication

In this article, I define what proxemics and immediacy in interpersonal communication are. I also explain what the proxemic zones and immediacy of communication tell us about relationships. Cultural variations in the use of proxemics and immediacy still exist. What … Continue reading

Three Other Things That Make Mangaian Love “Romantic”

As noted elsewhere, Polynesian sex and love are more complex emotional phenomena than people in Western culture previously thought. Mangaian love presents an example of this. Early anthropological research distorted the nature of Polynesian heterosexual relationships. They portrayed men and … Continue reading

Polynesian Love in Mangaian Culture

Is Polynesian love the same as that in Western European and North American cultures? For a long time, love was considered an exclusively Western concept. According to Western European and North American scholars, ethnographic studies of love add little value … Continue reading

What Is Polynesian Love?

Many western scholars have traditionally believed that love is a uniquely western concept. Some researchers attempted to demonstrate that love was absent or had a low value in other cultures, especially in the cultural groups in Polynesia. Later ethnographic studies, … Continue reading

The Sexual Revolution in Sexual Equality

The liberalization of sexual morals due to the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s was a key process that altered the idea of romantic love in the second part of the 20th century in North America and Europe (Karandashev, … Continue reading

What Is the Sexual Revolution?

The word “sexual revolution” is commonly associated with rapid and substantial changes in cultural attitudes toward sex in the United States of America and many West- and North-European countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, … Continue reading

Romantic Love Can Be Good for Relationships

Romantic love elevates our relationship and makes it romantically beautiful. Nevertheless, romantic love can hide some perils of disenchantment and disappointment. This is why cultural attitudes toward romantic love differ over time and across cultures (Karandashev, 2017). What are the … Continue reading

The Pitfalls for Romantic Lovers

Romantic lovers have several main features that distinguish them from other types of lovers. As I noted in another place, romantic idealization is a core feature that makes love “romantic”, as opposed to “rational”, “practical”, and pragmatic.” Such idealization can … Continue reading

What Is Imprinting?

Generally, imprinting (linguistically, it is a derivative of “printing”) means marking or impressing a sign or mark on the surface of anything. Imprinting in Ethology In ethology, the science of animal behavior, imprinting stands for a sensitive period, usually very … Continue reading