12.3.1: Love and Courtship in Global Perspective

 12.3.1: Love and Courtship in Global Perspective Have you ever been “love sick”? Some people can’t eat, and they are obsessed with thoughts of the one they love. Some neuroscientists decided to study “love sickness,” and they found that it is both real and extreme: Love feelings release dopamine and light up the same area of the brain that lights up when heroin addicts are craving heroin (Bernstein 2015). Evidently, then, love can be an addiction. 

From your own experience, you probably know the power of romantic love—mutual sexual attraction and idealized feelings about one another. 

Although people in most cultures talk about similar experiences, ideas of love can differ dramatically from one society to another (de Munck et al. 2011; Baykose et al. 2019). 

In the following Cultural Diversity around the World, we look at a society where people don’t expect love to occur until after marriage. 390 Cultural Diversity around the World 

Arranged Marriage in India: Probing Beneath the Surface 

The idea that parents should choose their child’s husband or wife shocks Western sensibilities. 

Arranged marriage seems to violate our basic ideas of the rights of individuals to forge their own path in life. 

And it does just that. In fact, this is what is wrong with the Western system, say the Indians. 

Young people don’t have the experience to make such life-significant decisions. 

They need to depend on their elders, who have more experience.

 Their parents know them well, have their best interests at heart, and can make a much better choice of mate than they can.

 This billboard in India caught my attention. As the text indicates, even though India is industrializing, most of its people continue to follow traditional customs. This billboard is a sign of changing times. Credit: James M. Henslin Such thinking is foreign to us, of course. 

It is almost the polar opposite of what we expect and see as the right way to do things. The distinction gets even more complicated when we learn that Indians’ ideas of love also differ from ours. 

We expect love to occur before marriage, and to base marriage on love. Indians expect to base marriage on wise parental decisions, and then love will develop after marriage. 

We each—the Westerner and the Indian—shake our heads in wonderment at the strange customs of the other. 

Each wonders how life could possibly work out the way the other does things. But each system works.

 So perhaps we can learn from one another. 

I have done work in several states of India, so let me share with you what I learned from the experience of an Indian friend.

 As I saw an arranged marriage unfold, I realized that there is much more to this process than met my Western eye. 

My friend, Atal, began to look for a husband for his daughter, Bhanumati. From my Western perspective, this was a strange approach to marriage, but as I observed the process, my perspective changed. I saw that this was a burden for Atal. It was a part of his father role, and everyone—his wife, daughter, and son—was looking to him expectantly. They had full confidence that he would do right, a confidence that placed a heavy burden on his shoulders. Bhanumati is a pretty young woman, age 23, intelligent, with an engaging personality. 

She is also educated, with a master’s degree in English. 

Despite her education, Bhanumati would never question her father choosing her spouse.

 Nor did her brother when it came time for his marriage. 

This traditional way of mate selection in India makes sense to the people who live there.

 I saw Atal’s disappointment as he tried to fulfill his duty of arranging a good marriage for his daughter. 

He made several overtures to families of eligible sons, only to be rejected. 

My friend is a poor man, and he was unable to afford the dowry that these parents demanded. Atal’s problem was unexpectedly solved when a young American visitor “fell in love” with Bhanumati. This man, an engineer with a good job, would make a good husband. Everyone—Atal, his wife, his son, and his daughter—approved of the match. The man, of course, had to follow the Indian custom of seeing his future bride only in the presence of her parents or brother. Behind the scenes of arranged marriages, as you can sense, there is much more than the father’s decision. The responsibility is laid on him, but to fulfill it and keep a good family life, the father must have his family’s agreement. Without it, the system fails. 

My friend is a good man, a gentle and considerate husband and father. Tradition laid this responsibility on his shoulders, and he fulfilled it well. 

You can see that other men might have used this power to benefit themselves and not their child. 

You can also see how this duty is an example of the patriarchy we reviewed in Chapter 7, of how power is vested in men.

 As strange as it seems to us, the Indian view of love works. 

With the marriage arranged, Bhanumati is freed to develop feelings of love for her husband-to-be. 

From marriage, the Indians say, comes love. We, of course, say that marriage comes from love. 

Americans and Indians confuse one another, but perhaps sharing this experience will help you to understand a different way of life.

 For Your Consideration → What do you think love is, anyway? Watch Arranged Marriages and Online Dating Play WatchArranged Marriages and Online Dating 391 Because romantic love plays such a significant role in Western life—and often is regarded as the only proper basis for marriage—social scientists have probed this concept with the tools of the trade: experiments, questionnaires, interviews, observations, and completing online forms (Bolmont et al. 2014; Surti and Langeslag 2019). In a fascinating experiment, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron discovered that fear can produce romantic love (Rubin 1985). Here’s what they did. A rickety footbridge sways in the wind about 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Walking on it makes you feel like you might fall into the rocky gorge below. A more solid footbridge crosses only 10 feet above the shallow stream. The researchers had an attractive woman approach men who were crossing these bridges. She told them she was studying “the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression.” She showed them a picture, and they wrote down their associations. The sexual imagery in their stories showed that the men on the unsteady, frightening bridge were more sexually aroused than were the men on the solid bridge. More of these men also called the young woman afterward—supposedly to get information about the study. You may have noticed that this research was really about sexual attraction, not love. The point, however, is that romantic love usually begins with sexual attraction. Finding ourselves sexually attracted to someone, we spend time with that person. If we discover mutual interests, we may label our feelings “love.” Apparently, then, romantic love has two components. The first is emotional, a feeling of sexual attraction. The second is cognitive, a label that we attach to our feelings. If we attach this label, we describe ourselves as being “in love.”