1. Love and Choosing a Life Partner
Chapter 6
Love and Choosing a Life Partner

2. Chapter Outline Love and Commitment
Facts about Families: Six Love Styles
Mate Selection and Relationship Stability
The Marriage Market
My Family: An Asian Indian American Student’s Essay on Arranged Marriages
Homogamy: Narrowing the Pool of Eligibles
Developing the Relationship and Moving Toward Commitment
Issues for Thought: Date or Acquaintance Race
As We Make Choices: Harmonious Needs in Mate Selection
Cohabitation and Marital Quality and Stability

3. Love and Commitment
Love is viewed as the primary reason for getting and staying married.
Loving involves the acceptance of partners for themselves.
Loving requires empathy and commitment.
Commitment is characterized by a willingness to work through problems and conflicts as opposed to calling it quits when problems arise; it involves consciously investing in the relationship.

4. Love
Marriages between individuals with a relatively secure attachment style that take place about about age twenty-five and are between partners who grew up intact families are the most likely to be satisfying and stable.

5. Commitment
Committed lovers have fun together; they also share tedious times.
They express themselves freely.
They do not see problems as indications that their relationship is over.
They work to maintain their relationship.
Commitment is characterized by a willingness to work through problems and conflicts.

6. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Three components of love:
Intimacy – close, connected feelings.
Passion – drives that lead to romance, physical attraction and sexual consummation.
Commitment – the decision to love someone and maintain that love.

7. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Three components develop at different times:
Passion is quickest to develop and quickest to fade.
Intimacy develops more slowly.
Commitment develops gradually.

8. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love
Consummate Love
Composed of all three components, is “complete love, …a kind of love toward which many of us strive, especially in romantic relationships”

9. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love

10. Facts about Families: Six Love Styles
Eros
Characterized by intense emotional attachment and powerful sexual feelings or desires.
Storge
An affectionate, companionate style of loving focused on deepening mutual commitment, respect, friendship, and common goals.

11. Facts about Families: Six Love Styles
Pragma
Involves rational assessment of a potential partner’s assets and liabilities.
Agape
Emphasizes unselfish concern for the beloved’s needs even when that requires personal sacrifice.

12. Facts about Families: Six Love Styles
Ludus
Emphasizes enjoying many sexual partners rather than searching for a serious relationship.
Mania
Rests on strong sexual attraction and emotional intensity. It differs from eros in that manic partners are extremely jealous and moody, and their need for attention and affection is insatiable.

13. Attachment Theory and Loving Relationships
A secure attachment style is associated with better prospects for a committed relationship.
An insecure/anxious attachment style entails “fear of abandonment” with possible consequences such as jealousy or trying to control one’s partner.
An avoidant attachment style leads one to pass up or shun closeness or intimacy.

14. Three Things Love Isn’t
Martyring
Manipulating
Limerance

15. Love Isn’t Martyring Martyrs may:
Be reluctant to suggest what they want.
Allow others to be constantly late and never protest.
Help loved ones develop talents while neglecting their own.
Be sensitive to others’ feelings and hide their own.

16. Love Isn’t Manipulation
Manipulators may:
Ask others to do something that they could do.
Assume that others will happily do whatever they choose.
Be consistently late.
Want others to help them develop their talents but seldom think of reciprocating.

17. Love Isn’t Limerance
People in limerence fantasize about being with the limerent object in all kinds of situations.
Limerence is characterized by little, if any, concern for the well-being of the limerent object.
Limerence can turn into genuine love, but more often than not, it doesn’t.

18. Model of Relationship Outcomes

19. Mate Selection and Marital Stability
Positive attitudes about the relationship, coupled with realistically positive assessments of a spouse’s personality traits, are important to marital stability.
Supportive interaction results in greater marital satisfaction.
Greater marital satisfaction, in turn, results in the greater likelihood of marital stability (staying married).

20. Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce Risk
A divorced parental family transmits to its children a heightened risk of getting divorced.
However, not all children of divorced parents will themselves divorce.

21. Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce Risk
Children of divorce are themselves more likely to get divorced because they have:
More, and more serious, personality problems.
Neither been exposed to nor learned supportive communication or problem-solving skills.
More accepting attitudes towards divorce.

22. Minimizing Mate Selection Risk
Letting go of misconceptions we may have about love and choosing a partner
Selecting a partner wisely involves balancing any insistence on perfection against the need to be mindful of one’s real needs and desires.
Working things out requires both partners’ willingness and ability to do so.

23. The Marriage Market
Individuals enter the market armed with resources—personal and social characteristics—and then bargain for the best “buy” that they can get.

24. Arranged Marriages
Not uncommon in the less Westernized parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Couples in arranged marriages are expected to develop a loving relationship after the marriage.
A study that compared marital satisfaction among arranged marriages in India to those more freely chosen in the United States found no differences in marital satisfaction between the two groups.

25. My Family: An Asian Indian American Student’s Essay on Arranged Marriages
What are some advantages of arranged marriage?
Some disadvantages?
In what ways might personal choice be involved in arranged marriages today?

26. Free-choice Culture
The United States is an example of a free-choice culture:
People choose their own mates, although typically they seek parents’ and other family members’ support for their decision.

27. Arranged Marriage
In arranged marriages, families and community do the bargaining, based on assets such as status, possessions, and dowry.

28. Free-Choice Marriage
In freely chosen marriages, the individuals perform a more subtle form of bargaining, weighing the costs and benefits of personal characteristics, economic status, and education.

29. Social Exchange
Individuals pick the relationship that is most rewarding or least costly.
In romantic relationships individuals have resources: beauty, personality, status, skills, maturity, intellect, originality, etc.
Individuals also have costly attributes: being demanding, low status, geographic inaccessibility, etc.

30. The Traditional Exchange
Women trade their ability to bear children and perform domestic duties, along with sexual accessibility and attractiveness, for a man’s protection, status, and support.
Both women and men can experience gender related disadvantages in the traditional exchange.

31. Bargaining in a Changing Society
Research that looked at mate preferences in the United States over the past sixty years showed that men and women have increased the importance that they put on potential financial success in a mate, while domestic skills in a future wife have declined in importance.
One study indicates that, for today’s young man, a woman’s high socioeconomic status increases her sexiness.
Today both men and women are likely to want a spouse with more education or who earns more than they do

32. Assortative Mating—A Filtering Process
Individuals gradually filter those whom they think would not make the best spouse.
Research has shown that people are willing to date a wider range of individuals than they would live with or become engaged to, and they are willing to live with a wider range of people than they would marry.

33. Homogamy: Narrowing the Pool of Eligibles
People tend to marry people of similar race, age, education, religious background, and social class.
Endogamy: marrying within one’s social group.
Exogamy: marrying outside one’s group.
Heterogamy, marrying someone dissimilar in race, age, education, religion, or social class.

34. Pool of Eligibles
A group of individuals who, by background or birth, are considered most likely to make compatible marriage partners.

35. Homogamy
These Hmong immigrants in St. Paul, Minnesota, are celebrating the Hmong New Year, which also serves as a courting ritual.
Because virtually all participants are Hmong, the ritual helps to ensure racial/ethnic homogamy.

36. Reasons for Homogamy
Geographic availability: (propinquity or proximity) geographic segregation, which can result from either discrimination or strong community ties, contributes to homogamous marriages
Social pressure: cultural values encourage marrying someone who is socially similar to ourselves

37. Heterogamy: Interfaith Marriages in the U.S.
Between 30-40% of Jewish, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, and a higher percentage of Protestant adults and children live in interfaith or interdenominational households
One study found strong religious beliefs are associated with less couple conflict.
Shared religiosity gave them a commitment to permanence, coupled with a willingness to forgive the spouse when conflicts emerged.

38. Heterogamy: Interracial/Interethnic Marriages in the U.S.
Interracial marriages include unions between partners of the white, black, Asian, or Native American races with a spouse outside their own race.
Unions between Hispanics and others, as well as between Asian/Pacific Islander or Hispanic ethnic groups are interethnic marriages.
In June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that interracial marriages are legally valid in all states.

39. Interracial and Hispanic/non-Hispanic Married Couples, 2008

40. Interracial/Interethnic Heterogamy and Marital Stability
Two factors to measure marital success:
Stability — whether or how long the union lasts
The happiness of the partners
Some unhappy spouses remain married and some separate.
Social scientists find that marriages that are homogamous in age, education, religion, and race are the most stable.

41. Interracial/Interethnic Heterogamy and Human Values
One study found higher relationship satisfaction compared to same-race couples.
Regardless of differences in race or ethnicity, common values and lifestyles contribute to relationship stability.
Polls show Americans becoming less disapproving of interracial dating and marriage.

42. Developing the Relationship and Moving Toward Commitment
What first brings people together?
What keeps them together?

43. Meandering Toward Marriage and First Meetings
Young people today “meander toward marriage,” feeling that they’ll be ready to marry when they reach their late twenties or so.
Young adults express need to explore as many options as possible before settling down.

44. First Meetings
Physical attractiveness increased as a value over the past century and is especially important upon first meeting and in the early stages of a relationship.
Majority of couples meet for the first time in face-to-face encounters.
Internet relationships progress through “an inverted developmental sequence.”

45. Issues for Thought: Date or Acquaintance Rape
What can you do to help prevent date rape?
What should you do if you or a friend is raped by an acquaintance?
What would or should you do if a friend or acquaintance of yours was known to be the perpetrator of a date or acquaintance rape?

46. The Wheel of Love Four stages of love
Rapport – rests on mutual trust and respect
Self-revelation – sharing intimate information
Mutual dependency – developing interdependence
Needs fulfillment – developing emotional exchange and support

47. Reiss’s Wheel Theory of the Development of Love

48. Harmonious Needs in Mate Selection
Prominent sociologist Pepper Schwartz suggests the following three areas in which couples’ needs should be similar for a happy, long-term match:
Personal Energy
Outlook
Predictability

49. Dating Violence — A Serious Sign of Trouble
Dating violence typically begins with verbal or psychological abuse and tends to occur over jealousy, with a refusal of sex, after illegal drug use or excessive drinking, or upon disagreement about drinking behavior.
A recent study of 28 female undergraduates in abusive dating relationships found that some of these women felt “stuck” with their partner.
A majority had assumed a “caretaker identity,” similar to martyring.

50. Indicators of Dating Violence
Handles ordinary disagreements with inappropriate anger or rage
Struggles to regain self-control when a minor issue triggers anger
Goes into tirades

51. Indicators of Dating Violence
Quick to criticize or verbally mean
Unduly jealous, restricting and controlling
History of violence in previous relationships

52. Breaking Up
According to the exchange perspective, couples choose to stay committed or to break up by weighing the rewards of their relationship against its costs.
When costs outweigh rewards, when there are desirable alternatives, when one’s relationship does not match one’s ideal, when little has been invested and when there are fewer barriers to breaking up, couples are more likely to do so.

53. Cohabitation and Marital Quality and Stability
At least half of today’s married couples ages lived together before their wedding.
Research shows that marriages preceded by more than one instance of cohabitation are more likely to end in separation or divorce.
One study shows that these findings apply to non-Hispanic whites but not to African Americans or Mexican Americans, for whom cohabiting may be a more normative life-course event.

54. Experience Hypothesis
Posits that cohabiting experiences themselves affect individuals so that, once married, they are more likely to divorce.
Serial cohabitation may adversely affect subsequent marital quality and stability because “‘successful’ cohabitation demonstrates that reasonable alternatives to marriage exist.”

55. Selection Hypothesis
Assumes that individuals who choose serial cohabitation are different from those who do not; these differences translate into higher divorce rates.
One study found that people who cohabit have less-effective problem solving and communication skills.
Those who choose serial cohabitation may have negative attitudes about marriage and accepting attitudes toward divorce.

56. Quick Quiz
Quick Quiz can be used with JoinIn clicker software

57. 1. The text characterizes commitment by
a willingness to work through problems and conflicts.
feeling as though one cannot live without another.
putting other ahead of oneself.
all of the above.

58. Answer: a
The text characterizes commitment by a willingness to work through problems and conflicts.

59. 2. __________ may ask others to do things for them that they could do for themselves, and generally expect to be waited on.
Martyrs
Narcissists
Manipulators
Ludic lovers

60. Answer: c
Manipulators may ask others to do things for them that they could do for themselves, and generally expect to be waited on.

61. 3. A(n) __________ attachment style would likely be evidenced in partners engaged in an A-frame or dependent relationship.
secure
insecure/anxious
avoidant
intimate

62. Answer: b
An insecure/anxious attachment style would likely be evidenced in partners engaged in an A-frame or dependent relationship.

63. 4. “Rapport,” “self-revelation,” “mutual dependency,” and “personality need fulfillment” are the four stages in Ira Reiss’s __________ theory of love.
triangular
love-style
framework
wheel

64. Answer: d
Rapport,” “self-revelation,” “mutual dependency,” and “personality need fulfillment” are the four stages in Ira Reiss’s wheel theory of love.

65. 5. The wheel theory of love suggests that once people fall in love, they
will stay in love.
may not necessarily stay in love.
will inevitably “fall out of love.”
will eventually experience a reduction in love.

66. Answer: b
The wheel theory of love suggests that once people fall in love, they may not necessarily stay in love.