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Give the opportunity to ten people a pen and paper and ask them to define ‘love’; you will be presented with different answers and definition. Love is interesting sociologically for so many reasons. To start with, just the one word can stand for so many different meanings to different people: sexual love, intimate love, companionate love, romantic love, parental love, friendship love, love for places, belongings, views. It is a word that is used prolifically to mean so much, which means it is incredibly difficult to define and study. However, within all of these answers, similarities will be present. Factors such as social class, gender/sex, ethnicity, and age all affect how an individual sees love and acts in a relationship. Love is sociological. Although many of us like to believe in the popular idea that love is blind. most people do not find themselves deeply and madly in love with just anyone; instead, most of us end up in love with someone who looks, and acts like us. More specifically, we tend to end up in love with people who share our race, ethnicity even religion. we tend to gravitate towards those who are similar to us. Like people, love can be prejudiced; however, such prejudices are not natural and they can be overcome through our social interactions.
Gabb and Fink (2015) identify that “relationships comprise pragmatics and emotions, choices and lack of choice, and all the spectrum of feelings and experiences in-between”. In their opinion, everyday moments and ordinary gestures create the feel and determine the success of a long-term relationship. Fundamentally, relationships and love aren’t what people have created independently but a sociology which is perceived, and subsequently passed down from traditions and past generations. It seems hard to deny that the way we come to express love is a product of our socialization. Practically everything we know about how to love comes from a variety of agents of socialization such as family, friends, the media, and even religious doctrines.
And like all things that are social, the ways through which we demonstrate love is variable based on the social context in which we find ourselves Like all other institutions, sociology changes with time in accordance with the developing views of society. Sociologists’ understandings of love tend to reflect different understandings of it within society, simply because the way we can study love is through talking to people, investigating cultural representations and understanding the structuring and organizing principles of love. Though humans are world-building creatures, they are born into a world that precede them and as such, those who have lived in it before must teach the newcomers how to interact within it (Farganis, 2008). Numerous cultural and socio-economic factors influence long-term relationships and are underpinned by sociological perspectives. Structural functionalism heavily focuses on modern society being 4-fold: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational. While a woman sees herself as the home maker, the husband, he works to provide for the family. In the study of Gabb and Fink (2015), this gendered norm is portrayed through Sumaira’s diary extract. She sees herself as the homemaker; her partner works while she cooks the food and clean the home on his return from work. This can be a difficult view to hold for many since relationships are becoming more equal, and the sole provider of a house is no longer the male in a relationship. With the world becoming more industrialized, women are reaching higher level of work and no longer need to be married to have their basic survival needs. women in modern day are more prepared to end relationships and love connections if they are no longer working. The feminist approach, women don’t enter a relationship on the reliance upon men to procreate. Many people enter into relationships with the same sex where procreation occurs via artificial means or adoption. It is a mark of how society has change and these relationships can still grow and women no longer need to rely on men.
Relationships can be broken down when feelings change and Gabb and Fink (2015) identify a relationships success as being dependent on intimate couple knowledge, not materialistic symbols or external validation. The study also identifies that for women, a simple thank you or compliment from their significant other is what makes them feel appreciated.
The findings of the Enduring Love study can help to demonstrate how relationship ‘practices’ – for example, doing good things for one another—help to increase relationship quality. Good communication a crucial and essential in sustaining a long-term relationship. In-depth communication and casual chats also help in forgoing stress and when done regularly it can bring about a sense of closeness. When couples spend the time talking and listening to each other they tend to appreciate each other more, that can also be a means through which couples come to understand and comfort each other.
Good communication is often combined with a sense of ‘having a laugh’. In this context humor thus appears to serve as a pressure relief. Laughing together puts into perspective what we truly have. Long-term may no longer mean forever after due to different life circumstances, but there is no sense that couples should see their relationships as time-limited when they are together. Instead, there should be an acknowledgement and valuing of the everyday things that are required to make a relationship work.
Things are quite different for millennial’s today, and more so in western world, social media is used to portray how individual relationships should be. Social media allows the world to know the precious investments couples make with one another and what once was symbolic about love has become idealized as a fairy-tale, or dependent upon a social dominance. Gabb and Fink (2015) identify Sumaira’s diary extract as partially framed for the readers and the use of the word perfect is as much for our benefit, as it is hers. The tale recounted by Sumaira is said to be ‘a childlike quality that draws on the trope of fairy tales’. Hayley’s diary entry (Gabb and Fink, 2015) highlights how she feels selfish over wanting an extra hour to sleep rather than be intimate with her partner. Putting your partner’s needs before your own doesn’t have to happen constantly even though couples portray these through social media. The relationship is not proprietary, but partnership. This links to interpretative sociology and the social construction of reality. The norm perceived with respect to intimacy is that men are generally more sexually active than women. Without knowing intimate details about every relationship, it becomes hard to separate the stereotype associated with this. Hayley suffers a real internal struggle to please her partner but also be able to rest enough to manage her working life too.
Stress happens in every relationship at some point in time. Even though much may have been said about the stressors which destroys long-term relationships, but what the Enduring Love survey findings indicate is that ‘what doesn’t break you, will make you’. When external factors such as death, financial worries, birth of children, changes of work and residence put life pressure on the relationship and do not stretch the relationship to the breaking point, they strengthen the bonds of the relationship. Going through stress together and being there for each other through such difficulties and heartaches are identified by female and male participants alike as some of the things which made their relationship stronger.
Love remains a slippery concept. Love is readily invoked but its articulation and meanings remain hard to pin down. The act of saying “I love you” is identified as important by women and men alike, however a loving gesture appears to be far more highly valued. Thoughtful gifts and generous acts of kindness are framed as expressions of love by most; they are not dependent on money and appear independent of external significant dates (such as a birthday or Valentine’s Day). It is what the gift signifies which is important, that is to say, the selflessness of the gesture and/or the touching and intimate knowledge that it demonstrates. A rose picked from the garden is more treasured than the delivery of a grand bouquet from the most expensive flora shop. The smallest of acts, such as being brought daily ‘a cup of tea’, speak volumes.
If you are still unsure the social foundations of how we learn to love and behave in relationships, talk to your parents, your friends from other cultures, or read some early modern books, and you will quickly find out that there are many different norms, practices, and behaviors that people have developed to demonstrate love.
References
- Gabb, J. and Fink J (2015). Couple Relationship In the 21st Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
- Gabb, J. and Fink, J. (2015). Telling Moments and Everyday Experience: Multiple Methods Research on Couple Relationships and Personal Lives. Sociology, 49(5), pp.970-987.
- Farganis, J. (2008). Readings in Social Theory. McGraw Hill.
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