The word love can mean various things so that it is often unclear what a speaker is talking
about while using it. Therefore, we need to pay attention to the context of communication to�…

Westerners generally understand romantic love as a compelling emotional attraction to an
idealized other. The Western notion of romantic love is spreading worldwide, while�…

Romantic love appears to be a nearly universal phenomenon, appearing in every culture for
which data are available (Janowiak & Fischer, 1992) and in every historical era (Hatfield &�…

The article presents a conceptual, historical, anthropological, psychological, and
sociological review of cultural perspectives on love: how culture affects our experience and�…

The scientific efforts to understand love and sex stem from the late nineteenth century and
continued in twentieth century. Despite those early attempts, scholars often resisted�…

This chapter discusses the fact that passionate love and sexual desire are universal desires.
Passionate love is a universal emotion. Yet despite its universality, culture has a profound�…

Narratives of romantic love pervade Western culture. However, the complexity of the lived
experience of romantic love is not reflected in many of these. Qualitative research that�…

We yearn to experience the idealized love depicted in so many novels, movies, poems, and
popular songs. Ironically, it is the idealization of love that arms it with its destructive power�…

To love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much
received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a�…

What is Romanticism? In this Very Short Introduction Michael Ferber answers this by
considering who the romantics were and looks at what they had in common—their ideas�…