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Alvin Powell

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Sure, your heart thumps, but let’s look at what’s happening physically and psychologically

“They gave each other a smile with a future in it.” — Ring Lardner

Love’s warm squishiness seems a thing far removed from the cold, hard reality of science. Yet the two do meet, whether in lab tests for surging hormones or in austere chambers where MRI scanners noisily thunk and peer into brains that ignite at glimpses of their soulmates.

When it comes to thinking deeply about love, poets, philosophers, and even high school boys gazing dreamily at girls two rows over have a significant head start on science. But the field is gamely racing to catch up.

One database of scientific publications turns up more than 6,600 pages of results in a search for the word “love.” The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is conducting 18 clinical trials on it (though, like love itself, NIH’s “love” can have layered meanings, including as an acronym for a study of Crohn’s disease). Though not normally considered an intestinal ailment, love is often described as an illness, and the smitten as lovesick. Comedian George Burns once described love as something like a backache: “It doesn’t show up on X-rays, but you know it’s there.”

Richard Schwartz , associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a consultant to McLean and Massachusetts General (MGH) hospitals, says it’s never been proven that love makes you physically sick, though it does raise levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that has been shown to suppress immune function.

Love also turns on the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is known to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers. Couple that with a drop in levels of serotonin — which adds a dash of obsession — and you have the crazy, pleasing, stupefied, urgent love of infatuation.

It’s also true, Schwartz said, that like the moon — a trigger of its own legendary form of madness — love has its phases.

“It’s fairly complex, and we only know a little about it,” Schwartz said. “There are different phases and moods of love. The early phase of love is quite different” from later phases.

During the first love-year, serotonin levels gradually return to normal, and the “stupid” and “obsessive” aspects of the condition moderate. That period is followed by increases in the hormone oxytocin, a neurotransmitter associated with a calmer, more mature form of love. The oxytocin helps cement bonds, raise immune function, and begin to confer the health benefits found in married couples, who tend to live longer, have fewer strokes and heart attacks, be less depressed, and have higher survival rates from major surgery and cancer.

Schwartz has built a career around studying the love, hate, indifference, and other emotions that mark our complex relationships. And, though science is learning more in the lab than ever before, he said he still has learned far more counseling couples. His wife and sometime collaborator, Jacqueline Olds , also an associate professor of psychiatry at HMS and a consultant to McLean and MGH, agrees.

Spouses Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds, both associate professors of psychiatry, have collaborated on a book about marriage.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer

More knowledge, but struggling to understand

“I think we know a lot more scientifically about love and the brain than we did a couple of decades ago, but I don’t think it tells us very much that we didn’t already know about love,” Schwartz said. “It’s kind of interesting, it’s kind of fun [to study]. But do we think that makes us better at love, or helping people with love? Probably not much.”

Love and companionship have made indelible marks on Schwartz and Olds. Though they have separate careers, they’re separate together, working from discrete offices across the hall from each other in their stately Cambridge home. Each has a professional practice and independently trains psychiatry students, but they’ve also collaborated on two books about loneliness and one on marriage. Their own union has lasted 39 years, and they raised two children.

“I think we know a lot more scientifically about love and the brain than we did a couple of decades ago … But do we think that makes us better at love, or helping people with love? Probably not much.” Richard Schwartz, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

“I have learned much more from doing couples therapy, and being in a couple’s relationship” than from science, Olds said. “But every now and again, something like the fMRI or chemical studies can help you make the point better. If you say to somebody, ‘I think you’re doing this, and it’s terrible for a relationship,’ they may not pay attention. If you say, ‘It’s corrosive, and it’s causing your cortisol to go way up,’ then they really sit up and listen.”

A side benefit is that examining other couples’ trials and tribulations has helped their own relationship over the inevitable rocky bumps, Olds said.

“To some extent, being a psychiatrist allows you a privileged window into other people’s triumphs and mistakes,” Olds said. “And because you get to learn from them as they learn from you, when you work with somebody 10 years older than you, you learn what mistakes 10 years down the line might be.”

People have written for centuries about love shifting from passionate to companionate, something Schwartz called “both a good and a sad thing.” Different couples experience that shift differently. While the passion fades for some, others keep its flames burning, while still others are able to rekindle the fires.

“You have a tidal-like motion of closeness and drifting apart, closeness and drifting apart,” Olds said. “And you have to have one person have a ‘distance alarm’ to notice the drifting apart so there can be a reconnection … One could say that in the couples who are most successful at keeping their relationship alive over the years, there’s an element of companionate love and an element of passionate love. And those each get reawakened in that drifting back and forth, the ebb and flow of lasting relationships.”

Children as the biggest stressor

Children remain the biggest stressor on relationships, Olds said, adding that it seems a particular problem these days. Young parents feel pressure to raise kids perfectly, even at the risk of their own relationships. Kids are a constant presence for parents. The days when child care consisted of the instruction “Go play outside” while mom and dad reconnected over cocktails are largely gone.

When not hovering over children, America’s workaholic culture, coupled with technology’s 24/7 intrusiveness, can make it hard for partners to pay attention to each other in the evenings and even on weekends. It is a problem that Olds sees even in environments that ought to know better, such as psychiatry residency programs.

“There are all these sweet young doctors who are trying to have families while they’re in residency,” Olds said. “And the residencies work them so hard there’s barely time for their relationship or having children or taking care of children. So, we’re always trying to balance the fact that, in psychiatry, we stand for psychological good health, but [in] the residency we run, sometimes we don’t practice everything we preach.”

“There is too much pressure … on what a romantic partner should be. They should be your best friend, they should be your lover, they should be your closest relative, they should be your work partner, they should be the co-parent, your athletic partner. … Of course everybody isn’t able to quite live up to it.” Jacqueline Olds, associate professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

All this busy-ness has affected non-romantic relationships too, which has a ripple effect on the romantic ones, Olds said. A respected national social survey has shown that in recent years people have gone from having three close friends to two, with one of those their romantic partner.

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“Often when you scratch the surface … the second [friend] lives 3,000 miles away, and you can’t talk to them on the phone because they’re on a different time schedule,” Olds said. “There is too much pressure, from my point of view, on what a romantic partner should be. They should be your best friend, they should be your lover, they should be your closest relative, they should be your work partner, they should be the co-parent, your athletic partner. There’s just so much pressure on the role of spouse that of course everybody isn’t able to quite live up to it.”

Since the rising challenges of modern life aren’t going to change soon, Schwartz and Olds said couples should try to adopt ways to fortify their relationships for life’s long haul. For instance, couples benefit from shared goals and activities, which will help pull them along a shared life path, Schwartz said.

“You’re not going to get to 40 years by gazing into each other’s eyes,” Schwartz said. “I think the fact that we’ve worked on things together has woven us together more, in good ways.”

Maintain curiosity about your partner

Also important is retaining a genuine sense of curiosity about your partner, fostered both by time apart to have separate experiences, and by time together, just as a couple, to share those experiences. Schwartz cited a study by Robert Waldinger, clinical professor of psychiatry at MGH and HMS, in which couples watched videos of themselves arguing. Afterwards, each person was asked what the partner was thinking. The longer they had been together, the worse they actually were at guessing, in part because they thought they already knew.

“What keeps love alive is being able to recognize that you don’t really know your partner perfectly and still being curious and still be exploring,” Schwartz said. “Which means, in addition to being sure you have enough time and involvement with each other — that that time isn’t stolen — making sure you have enough separateness that you can be an object of curiosity for the other person.”

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The psychology of love: 10 groundbreaking insights into the science of relationships

(Photo credit: OpenAI's DALL·E)

In the quest to understand the complex dynamics of love and relationships, recent scientific inquiries have unveiled fascinating insights into how our connections with others shape our mental health, preferences, and overall happiness.

From the profound impact of romantic relationships on psychological well-being to the evolutionary roots of love, these studies offer a comprehensive look into the forces driving our closest bonds. This article delves into the latest research findings, shedding light on the science behind love, attraction, and the deep psychological interplay at the heart of human relationships.

The exploration into the psychology of love spans various disciplines, including social psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology, each contributing unique perspectives to our understanding of romantic connections.

These studies collectively reveal how aspects such as relationship quality, partner preferences, humor, and even our value systems play pivotal roles in the formation and maintenance of romantic relationships. Through a closer examination of these elements, we can begin to appreciate the intricate web of factors that not only draw us together but also sustain love over time.

1. The Link Between Romantic Relationships and Mental Health

In a study published in Current Opinion in Psychology , researchers Scott Braithwaite and Julianne Holt-Lunstad explored the intricate relationship between long-term romantic relationships and mental health. They delved into the question of causality—whether being in a marriage leads to better mental health or if individuals with better mental health are more likely to get married. Their review of both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies revealed that while married individuals generally exhibit better mental health than their non-married counterparts, the direction of causality leans more significantly from the quality and presence of romantic relationships towards improved mental health outcomes. This suggests that being in a committed relationship, such as marriage, tends to enhance one’s mental health more profoundly than less committed forms of cohabitation.

The study highlights the significance of relationship quality, noting that individuals in healthy and satisfying relationships experience better mental health. Moreover, improving the quality of a relationship was found to precede improvements in mental health, reinforcing the idea that positive relationship dynamics play a crucial role in fostering mental well-being. This insight underscores the greater impact that negative aspects of mental health, such as depression and depressive symptoms, have on romantic relationships compared to positive mental health constructs. The researchers emphasized the importance of focusing on preventing negative relationship patterns as a means of safeguarding mental health.

The implications of this research are profound, suggesting that interventions aimed at enhancing relationship quality could be as effective as those targeting individual mental health issues. The findings advocate for a shift in focus towards preventing dysfunctional relationships as a strategic approach to improving overall mental health. By establishing that healthy romantic relationships act as a protective factor against mental health problems, the study underscores the necessity of nurturing positive relationship dynamics. This reinforces the concept that investment in the health of personal relationships can lead to significant benefits for mental health, highlighting relationships as a cornerstone of human well-being.

2. Evolving Preferences in Partner Selection

In a fascinating study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , researchers led by Julie Driebe delved into how life events and personal growth influence people’s preferences in choosing a romantic partner over time. This research aimed to bridge gaps in understanding whether individuals’ ideal partner preferences evolve and if people are aware of these changes. Through a longitudinal approach, spanning 13 years from an initial speed dating experiment, the study revisited participants to reassess their partner preferences. The findings revealed a complex picture: while core preferences remained relatively stable, significant shifts did occur, notably with less emphasis on physical attractiveness and wealth and more on kindness, humor, and shared values as people aged. The influence of major life events, such as becoming a parent, was also highlighted as a factor contributing to these changes in preferences.

Driebe’s team’s methodology involved recontacting participants from the Berlin Speed Dating Study conducted in 2006, analyzing their responses to understand changes in eight key dimensions of partner preference. Despite the inherent stability in preferences over time, the study identified nuanced shifts, especially an increased value placed on status, resources, and family orientation as individuals aged. Interestingly, the study also discovered discrepancies between participants’ perceptions of their changing preferences and the actual changes observed, particularly regarding status, resources, and intelligence. This discrepancy points to the complexity of self-awareness in how personal growth and life experiences shape partner selection criteria.

The implications of these findings are profound, shedding light on the dynamic interplay between personal development, life experiences, and mate selection. The study underscores the importance of considering how individual experiences and the passage of time mold our desires in romantic partners, suggesting a fluidity in mate preferences that reflects broader personal evolution. Despite limitations, such as the reliance on a specific sample group and the unexplored influence of cultural factors, this research opens new avenues for understanding how and why our criteria for a romantic partner may change as we navigate through life’s milestones. It highlights the importance of acknowledging personal growth and life events in the study of mate selection, suggesting that as individuals evolve, so too do their preferences for a partner, with some changes more perceptible to the individual than others.

3. The Role of Humor in Romantic Attraction

A recent study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has illuminated the significant role humor plays in romantic attraction, suggesting that a good sense of humor is not just a desirable trait but is perceived as an indicator of a partner’s creative problem-solving abilities. This research, spearheaded by Erika Langley, a PhD candidate in social psychology at Arizona State University, and her colleague Michelle Shiota, an associate professor, aimed to dissect the underlying reasons why humor is so universally valued in romantic partners. Through a series of six comprehensive studies involving various scenarios—from first-date impressions to long-term relationship dynamics—the researchers discovered that individuals with a keen sense of humor are more appealing as potential partners due to the association of humor with creativity, intelligence, and social competence.

The initial studies focused on participants’ reactions to hypothetical first-date scenarios, revealing that humor significantly influenced the perception of a partner’s creative ingenuity, irrespective of the participant’s gender. This suggests that both men and women value humor for similar reasons, associating it with a partner’s ability to navigate complex situations with inventive solutions. Interestingly, the effect of humor on the perception of creative problem-solving skills was consistent across different relationship contexts, whether the participants were considering a potential partner for a short-term fling or a long-term commitment. Furthermore, humor was valued not only for the immediate joy it brings to interactions but also for the implied cognitive abilities it suggests in a partner, especially in the context of overcoming life’s challenges together.

The latter studies extended these findings, exploring how humor portrayed in online dating profiles and video dating scenarios influences perceptions of potential partners. Profiles and responses infused with humor were not only seen as more creative but also more socially competent, enhancing the individual’s attractiveness for initiating romantic relationships. This comprehensive investigation into the role of humor in romantic attraction underscores its significance beyond mere entertainment, highlighting humor as a key indicator of desirable traits such as creativity and social adeptness.

4. Understanding Love Through the Brain’s Reward System

A study published in Behavioral Sciences by Adam Bode and Phillip S. Kavanagh has unveiled a compelling link between the brain’s reward system and the intensity of romantic love. By crafting a new scale, the Behavioral Activation System Sensitivity to a Loved One (BAS-SLO) Scale, researchers have illuminated how the Behavioral Activation System (BAS)—a mechanism in our brain that drives us towards rewards and motivates our actions—is intricately tied to the depth of romantic feelings we experience. This finding enriches our biological understanding of love, suggesting that the strength of romantic emotions is partially influenced by the same internal system that propels us towards goals and rewards.

The first part of the study involved developing and validating the BAS-SLO Scale with over 1,500 young adults who identified as being in love. This new tool, adapted from the existing Behavioral Activation System Scale, aimed to measure the BAS’s response specifically in romantic contexts. Participants answered questions about their reactions and feelings towards their partners, alongside completing the Passionate Love Scale—30, a measure assessing the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of romantic love. The results indicated that the new scale was reliable and valid for measuring the role of BAS in romantic love, showing that the brain’s reward responsiveness, drive, and fun-seeking behaviors in relation to a partner were closely linked to romantic love intensity.

In the second phase, with a subset of participants, the study further explored how the BAS-SLO scores correlated with the intensity of romantic love, finding that higher sensitivity in the Behavioral Activation System towards a romantic partner was significantly associated with stronger feelings of love. This correlation accounted for almost 9% of the variance in the intensity of romantic feelings, underscoring the substantial role of the BAS in shaping romantic love. Despite some limitations, such as the need for replication in different samples and controlling for the normal functioning of BAS, this research marks a significant step forward in understanding the biological underpinnings of romantic love, opening new avenues for exploring the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral mechanisms that fuel our love lives.

5. Positive Communication’s Impact on Romantic Outcomes

A new study published in Sexual and Relationship Therapy offers insightful findings on the dynamics of positive communication within romantic relationships and its impact on sexual and relationship satisfaction. Conducted by Christine E. Leistner and her team from the Department of Public Health and Health Services Administration at California State University, Chico, the research utilized data from 246 couples to explore how expressions of affection, compliments, and fondness contribute to the satisfaction and desire among partners. Utilizing both traditional statistical analysis and advanced machine learning techniques, the study revealed that positive communication, encompassing acts like showing affection and giving compliments, consistently leads to higher levels of satisfaction and desire in relationships for both individuals and their partners. Interestingly, the study also found nuanced differences in how various forms of positive communication, such as fondness and compliments, uniquely influence sexual satisfaction and desire.

The research highlighted that the impact of positive communication on relationship and sexual satisfaction is complex, with certain combinations of communication types producing different effects based on factors like age and the balance of compliments and affection. For example, while fondness and compliments were identified as strong predictors of sexual satisfaction, the interaction between high levels of compliments and affection showed a surprising nonlinear relationship with sexual satisfaction. In some cases, an abundance of both compliments and affection predicted an increase in sexual satisfaction, whereas, for others, it led to a decrease. Furthermore, the study uncovered age-related differences in how perceived affection from a partner influenced sexual desire, indicating that younger individuals might experience higher sexual desire with less perceived affection, in contrast to older individuals who showed an increase in desire with more affection.

These findings underscore the importance of positive communication in enhancing the quality of romantic relationships, while also pointing to the intricate ways in which such communication interacts with individual and relationship factors. The study’s use of machine learning to reveal nonlinear interactions offers a nuanced understanding of the relationship between communication practices and satisfaction outcomes, suggesting that the effects of positive communication are not universally linear or positive for all couples.

6. Romantic Love’s Evolutionary Roots

In a thought-provoking article published in Frontiers in Psychology , researcher Adam Bode introduces a new theory suggesting that the phenomenon of romantic love may have evolved from the neurobiological and endocrinological mechanisms initially developed for mother-infant bonding. This theory challenges the traditional view, proposed by Helen Fisher, that categorizes sex drive, romantic attraction, and attachment as three distinct emotional systems evolved independently. Bode’s theory posits that romantic love and mother-infant bonding share significant psychological, neurological, and hormonal similarities, indicating that romantic love might be an adaptation of the bonding process between mothers and their infants.

The evidence supporting this theory includes observed behaviors and emotional patterns common to both mother-infant bonding and romantic love, such as intense emotional connections, a desire for physical closeness, and exclusive attention to the loved one. Brain imaging studies have also shown overlapping activity in regions associated with love and bonding, including areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, which are crucial for social and emotional behaviors. Furthermore, the presence of high levels of oxytocin in individuals in the early stages of romantic relationships mirrors the hormonal patterns observed in new mothers, reinforcing the idea that these types of love share common biological pathways.

Bode’s theory suggests a fundamental shift in how we understand romantic love, framing it as an evolutionarily repurposed mechanism that builds on the foundation of maternal-infant attachment. This perspective not only deepens our comprehension of human emotional and social bonds but also underscores the intricate ways in which evolutionary processes have shaped our experiences of love and attachment. As this theory continues to be explored and tested through future research, it holds the potential to offer new insights into the evolution of human relationships and the universal nature of love.

7. Goal Coordination and Life Satisfaction in Couples

A study published in the International Journal of Applied Positive Psychology explored the dynamics of how romantic couples in Hungary support each other in achieving personal goals and how this support influences their life satisfaction. The research, led by Orsolya Rosta-Filep and colleagues, focused on the concept of goal coordination, which involves partners aligning their efforts and resources to help each other reach their personal objectives. Through the analysis of 215 heterosexual couples, the study found that those who effectively coordinated on their personal goals not only made more progress in attaining these goals but also experienced higher levels of life satisfaction. This suggests that when couples work together towards their individual ambitions, they not only become better partners but also enjoy a more satisfying life together.

The methodology of the study involved participants evaluating their personal projects and the level of coordination with their partners at the beginning of the study and then assessing their progress and life satisfaction a year later. The findings indicated a clear link between successful goal attainment and increased life satisfaction, highlighting the importance of communication, cooperation, and emotional support in this process. However, the study also noted that goal coordination alone did not directly lead to life satisfaction; the key was the effectiveness of these coordinated efforts. If couples felt supported by their partners and saw tangible results from their joint efforts, this led to long-term life satisfaction, underscoring the value of not just supporting each other’s goals but doing so in a way that yields actual progress.

The research provides valuable evidence on the significance of couples supporting each other’s personal goals and the positive impact this can have on their relationship and overall happiness. The findings advocate for couples to not only coordinate their efforts around each other’s goals but also to ensure these efforts are effective, enhancing both individual and shared life satisfaction.

8. Sexual Activity, Health, and Longevity in Hypertensive Patients

A recent study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine has found that regular sexual activity may lead to improved health outcomes and longer life spans for middle-aged individuals diagnosed with hypertension (high blood pressure). This research, which analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) in the United States between 2005 and 2014, involved over 4,500 participants. It revealed that hypertensive patients engaging in more frequent sexual activities tend to have a significantly lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those with less sexual activity.

The significance of this study lies in its exploration of the link between sexual frequency and survival rates in people with hypertension, a condition known for its severe complications and absence of symptoms, making it a silent threat to public health. Researchers discovered that participants who reported having sexual intercourse 12-51 times a year, or more than 51 times a year, demonstrated a notably lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who had sexual activity less than 12 times a year. This association persisted even after adjusting for factors like age, gender, education level, body mass index, smoking status, and existing medical conditions, highlighting a potentially protective effect of sexual activity on overall health in hypertensive patients.

9. Humor’s Vital Role in Sustaining Romantic Connections

A study published in Psychological Science by Kenneth Tan and colleagues from Singapore Management University reveals the significant role of humor in strengthening and maintaining romantic relationships. This research, which involved 108 couples from a large university in Singapore, utilized a daily-diary method to collect 1,227 daily assessments over seven consecutive days. Participants reported their daily experiences of humor within their relationships, as well as their levels of relationship satisfaction, commitment, and perceived partner commitment. The findings suggest that humor acts as a powerful tool for signaling and maintaining interest in a romantic partner, with individuals reporting greater humor engagement on days when they felt more satisfied and committed to their relationships.

The study supports the “interest-indicator model” of humor, proposing that humor is not merely a trait that attracts individuals to each other during the early stages of a relationship but continues to play a crucial role in expressing and reinforcing commitment and satisfaction within established relationships. The researchers found that positive relationship quality was associated with increased humor production and perception, indicating that couples use humor to enhance their relationship quality and signal ongoing interest. Interestingly, the study did not find significant gender differences in the use of humor, challenging the stereotype that men use humor more frequently to attract mates.

These insights highlight the importance of humor in romantic relationships, suggesting that engaging in humorous interactions can contribute to a more satisfying and committed relationship. The research opens up new avenues for exploring the impact of humor in various relationship contexts, including work and parent-child relationships, and how humor might influence perceptions of a partner’s other positive traits, such as creativity, intelligence, and warmth.

10. The Influence of Self-Transcendence Values on Relationship Satisfaction

A study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Reine C. van der Wal and colleagues delves into how personal values, specifically self-transcendence values such as equality, kindness, and compassion, influence the quality of romantic relationships. Through four studies involving over a thousand participants, the researchers explored the connection between these values and relationship satisfaction. They discovered that individuals who prioritize self-transcendence values tend to report higher relationship satisfaction. Interestingly, the presence of these values in one partner did not significantly affect the other partner’s sense of relationship quality, suggesting that these values enhance satisfaction mainly for the individuals who hold them.

This research builds on Schwartz’s Value Theory, which categorizes human values into dimensions like self-enhancement versus self-transcendence and openness to change versus conservation. The study specifically found that self-transcendence values, which focus on caring for and accepting others, are positively associated with the quality of romantic relationships. In contrast, values related to self-enhancement, such as seeking power or personal success, were linked to lower relationship quality. The findings underscore the importance of altruistic values in fostering a healthy and satisfying romantic partnership, highlighting how personal values play a crucial role in relationship dynamics.

Overall, the study provides valuable evidence that prioritizing self-transcendence values within romantic relationships can contribute to greater satisfaction and underscores the potential impact of personal values on the health and longevity of these relationships.

These studies, each shining a light on different facets of romantic relationships, collectively contribute to a deeper understanding of the psychology of love. By exploring the myriad factors that influence our connections with romantic partners, science offers valuable insights into the art of maintaining healthy, fulfilling relationships.

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How Couple’s Relationship Lasts Over Time? A Model for Marital Satisfaction

José abreu-afonso.

William James Center for Research, ISPA -- Instituto Universitário, Lisbon, Portugal

High rates of divorce seem related to low marital satisfaction levels; however, there is still a lack of a model that can help understand the couple’s resilience and fragility throughout the life cycle. This research explores the role of communication patterns, their own and partner’s motivation for conjugality, cohesion and flexibility within a couple, and several sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., stage of the family life cycle) that can explain marital satisfaction. A sample of 331 Portuguese in a marital relationship completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and marital satisfaction measures, communication and conflict management competencies, cohesion and flexibility, and motivation. Adequate statistical analysis was performed using descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling. Both measurement and structural model performed in the study presented a good fit, with five significant predictors of marital satisfaction (that accounted for 85% of the variability): intrinsic motivation ( β  = .64), communication ( β  = .31), families with young children ( β  = −.08), families with teenagers ( β  = −.07) and professional/academic status ( β  = .06). By identifying a model for marital satisfaction, this research provides clues regarding which aspects might need to be considered in couples’ clinical work to promote healthier relationships.

Introduction

The empirical research of marital satisfaction has shown that in stable marriages, spouses are healthier, happier, and live longer ( Be et al., 2013 ; Robles et al., 2014 ; Vanassche et al., 2013 ; Whisman et al., 2018 ). Marital satisfaction refers to a global evaluation of one’s attitude towards his/her marriage, used to assess marital happiness and stability regarding all aspects of marriage ( Ahmadi et al., 2010 ; Li & Fung, 2011 ; Schoen et al., 2002 ; Tavakol et al., 2017 ). Married life circumstances influence marital (dis)satisfaction ( Rollins & Feldman, 1970 ).

The current practical advances support that marital satisfaction does not decline over time for most couples but remains relatively stable for extended periods ( Karney & Bradbury, 2020 ). Despite exhaustive research in this area, marital satisfaction that complies with several factors – e.g., duration of the marriage, communication, attachment, conflict, and children – remains uncertain ( King, 2016 ; Rebello et al., 2014 ).

During the last decade, empirical research seems to defy what most longitudinal studies of marriage consider valid. In several studies, marital satisfaction is mentioned to decrease over time ( Bradbury & Karney, 2004 ; Pérez & Estrada, 2006 ), being higher in the first years of the relationship; yet, others mention that it increases again during the last stages of the life cycle ( Narciso, 1994/1995 , 2001 ; Stephen & John Michael Raj, 2014 ). Some couples mention decreased marital satisfaction based on a retrospective evaluation, although acknowledging recent improvements counterbalance that decrease ( Karney & Frye, 2002 ). Also, older couples might present higher marital satisfaction levels since unsatisfactory unions end in divorce ( Henry et al., 2007 ).

Studies show that most marriages end in divorce ( Schoen & Canudas-Romo, 2006 ), mainly due to low levels of satisfaction—with Portugal presenting a divorce rate of 58,7%, the second-highest in Europe ( Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos, 2020 ). Researchers remain lean towards a better understanding of which factors contribute to higher satisfaction, which will allow marital counselling and couples to employ strategies that may contribute to a more satisfying marriage.

Marital satisfaction over the family life cycle

The family life cycle shows different stages of family members' developmental processes and related risks ( Duvall, 1967 ; Neighbour, 1985 ; Relvas, 2004 ). They are considered a framework for analyzing marital success (including variables as satisfaction, happiness, or social expectations; Burgess & Locke, 1945 ).

The significant changes in family undergo over time as an important factor that affects and impacts marital satisfaction. Family therapists realized that it is essential to contextualize couples' crisis in the family life cycle, claiming that transition phases might reflect higher vulnerability than others ( Haley, 1984 ). Waldemar (2008) approaches these with newly formed couples and highlights the need to deal with a series of questions, as the bonding process with the family of origin or the partner's idealization. If the couple succeeds in managing these, then the birth of a first child leads to another complex transition. This transition can be seen both ways: negative – the couple experience exhaustion, lack of time for themselves, and more disagreement – and in a positive one – a sense of gratification and joy (e.g., Belsky & Pensky, 1988 ; Cowan & Cowan, 1993 ; Twenge et al., 2003 ). This period needs special attention since it introduces additional stress to the couple relationship, accelerating the decline in marital satisfaction (e.g., Belsky & Pensky, 1988 ). In this stage, the romantic relationship is usually relegated to second place, conflicts concerning children’s education might occur, paradoxical social pressures are felt, and the first sexual difficulties might emerge. If disputes between partners remain unresolved, they may increase when children reach adolescence. This new stage is considered one of the critical periods for the marital relationship at midlife (e.g., Steinberg & Silverberg, 1987 ). This period will coexist with the couple’s existential crisis, with each partner probably 40–50 years old, reassessing their lives and redefining its meaning while also dealing with their parents’ aging. Another essential stage concerns children’s departure and the re-adaptation of living together as a couple; this stage can concurrently occur with the couple trying to manage their parents’ death and retirement ( Waldemar, 2008 ). When couples experience an improvement in their relationship as they age and children leave home, the decline in satisfaction with their relationship eventually reverses ( Gorchoff et al., 2008 ). Couples with children remain at home after reaching adulthood ( Umberson et al., 2005 ), which might become a problematical paradoxical situation. Finally, another nodal point of the couple’s life is the aging of the dyad and the closeness to death ( Waldemar, 2008 ).

Predictors for marital satisfaction

According to Narciso and Costa (1996) , the relationship’s quality and marital satisfaction in different areas of the couple’s life are concerned throughout two crucial dimensions: love and conjugal functioning. Conjugal functioning refers to how a couple organizes and manages relationships within their conjugal/family holon, covering aspects such as roles and functions, free time, autonomy/privacy, communication and conflicts, and extra-family relationships. Love is related to feelings that each member of the couple has for each other or their relationship. Love would then cover aspects such as feelings and emotional expression, sexuality, emotional intimacy, the sense of continuity of the relationship, and the opinion on the partner’s physical and psychological characteristics ( Narciso & Costa, 1996 ). How couples manage their differences and problems during their life cycle might be a relevant factor to distinguish between satisfied and unsatisfied couples ( Hall, 2006 ; Markman, 1992 ), which leads us to consider the impact of significant components on relationships’ success (i.e., communication, marital beliefs, the family of origin, idealization of the partner).

Several authors acknowledge communication as strongly associated with marital satisfaction and stability ( Alayi et al., 2011 ; Haris & Kumar, 2018 ; Lavner et al., 2016 ; Rehman & Holtzworth-Munroe, 2007 ; Shafer et al., 2014 ). Positive and negative communication competencies are good predictors of marital satisfaction ( Johnson et al., 2005 ). Generally, satisfied couples reveal more constructive communication patterns—showing positive communication behaviors and seeking to avoid negative ones—while more problematic couples predominantly adopt destructive styles of communication—frequently calling upon negative styles of problem’s resolution strategies, mostly related to high levels of offense and unresolved issues ( Bertoni & Bodenmann, 2010 ; Birchler & Webb, 1977 ; Bradbury & Fincham, 1992 ; Houts et al., 2008 ). Consequently, couples with unsolved problems that may be under distress may be at risk of increased harmful and destructive communication patterns challenging to resolve, resulting in decreased couple’s intimacy ( Eldridge et al., 2007 ; Pearce & Halford, 2008 ). Contrary to couples that can engage in joint and shared effort solving, leading to higher levels of the couple’s satisfaction ( South et al., 2010 ).

The quality of marital relationships is not static, with communication facilitating marital dynamics modifications ( Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). Couples’ cohesion and flexibility throughout life also seem essential to couples’ satisfaction and significant meaning during family transitions ( Olson, 2000 ). Cohesion, varying between separateness and togetherness, can be defined by the emotional bonding that family members and couples have towards two crucial dimensions. Flexibility, ranging between stability and change, can be characterized by the number of leadership changes, roles, and rules within the relationship ( Olson, 2000 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). Moderate levels of cohesion and flexibility allow couples and families to balance between separateness and togetherness and between stability and change according to the situation lived, resulting in more functional systems ( Olson, 2000 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). However, this does not mean that couples and families will never adopt behaviors that are characteristic of extreme levels to deal with certain situations ( Barnes & Olson, 1985 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). Excessive levels of cohesion and flexibility can be useful in some cases but generally be pejorative if the marital and family functioning remains in those ( Olson, 2000 ). Poor communication within a couple does not lead to changes in the marriage functioning, which results in families maintaining themselves in extreme levels of cohesion and flexibility ( Olson, 2000 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ).

Another factor that seems vital to predict marital satisfaction in the relationship is both partners and their motivational styles ( Blais et al., 1990 ). Motivation influences the establishment and maintenance of relationships, the choice of the partner, the quality of everyday relational behaviors, and the development and breakdown of relationships ( Aimé et al., 2000 ; Blais et al., 1990 ; Deci & Ryan, 2000 , 2008 ; Knee et al., 2002 ; Patrick et al., 2007 ; Rempel et al., 1985 ). Notably, it seems more likely that a relationship will last and be more satisfactory if the motivation is more intrinsic than extrinsic ( Rempel et al., 1985 ), with several authors claiming that more adaptive behaviors (e.g., when dealing with conflicts) emerge if the motivation for being in a relationship is intrinsic and autonomous ( Blais et al., 1990 ; Knee et al., 2002 ; Patrick et al., 2007 ). Extrinsic motivation might weaken intrinsic motives and reduce the feeling of love for the partner ( Rempel et al., 1985 ; Seligman et al., 1980 ). Additionally, faith in a relationship also seems to be associated with the perception that the partner is intrinsically motivated ( Rempel et al., 1985 ). Likewise, couples who present congruent and self-determined motivational styles appear to have high marital satisfaction levels ( Aimé et al., 2000 ).

Dyadic coping also seems a crucial element to predict marital satisfaction. Current empirical studies have stated that dyadic coping can help stress communication and manage individual strategies to cope with stressful situations ( Falconier et al., 2015 ). Research inclines to more prevention and intervention for all couples, implementing dyadic coping as a behavioral skill to help couples in unsatisfied relationships ( Falconier et al., 2016 ).

Research on marital satisfaction has also suggested that differences between sexes might be essential in explaining a couple’s satisfaction and adjustment. For example, differences between men and women in expressing and dealing with emotions ( Cordova et al., 2005 ; Mirgain & Cordova, 2007 ; Rauer & Volling, 2005 ), managing conflicts and problems ( Miller et al., 2003 ) can influence how partners communicate with each other, thus helping to understand couples’ dynamics. Nonetheless, some authors, such as Dandurand and Lafontaine (2013) , state no significant differences between men and women regarding intimacy and marital satisfaction. Findings reinforce more future interpolations acknowledging sociodemographic predictors for marital satisfaction. Significant correlations were found within sex, communication skills, duration of the marriage, conflict resolution styles, attachment styles, and educational level ( Kardan-Souraki et al., 2018 ; Zainah et al., 2012 ; Zhang et al., 2016 ).

The present study

More evidence of what maintains a healthy marriage and higher marital satisfaction is needed to help couples in crisis. This is crucial for maintaining long-term relationships since the family goes through several life moments that require adaptation and changes. Although changes are a way of dealing with a crisis, couples can encounter an unstable moment, increasing dissatisfaction and stress ( Olson, 2000 ). Few studies explore the stability and growth in the family life cycle, especially at intermediate stages. Most of them give little information about what problems couples face at different stages ( Miller et al., 2003 ).

Our primary interest came from understanding significant marital satisfaction predictors that have important implications in a clinical context. First, we wanted to understand what happens along the life cycle of satisfied couples and what makes them stay together most of their lifetime. Second, helping couples in crisis requires knowledge of what keeps a marriage healthy so that clinicians may be better able to predict which couples are at higher risk of divorce. In the absence of explanatory models of the dynamics of the family life cycle, our study aims to understand the factors that work as promoters of the couple’s resilience, allowing them to maintain the relational quality and the fragility factors of considerable risk. To our understanding, there is the lack of a model based on a set of concepts and psychological variables that, by influencing marital quality and stability, may be crucial to the success of relationships, and that according to literature and following our clinical experience are essential to assess satisfaction within a couple. Most early studies focused on cross-sectional designs, limiting information about how marriage unfolds over time ( Hirschberger et al., 2009 ). Spite the growing longitudinal studies of marriage, many suffer from methodological problems (e.g., such as not covering part of the duration of a marriage or not measuring marital satisfaction throughout the study).

To develop the model, it was considered how marital satisfaction might be explained by communication, motivation, cohesion, flexibility, stages of the family life cycle, and sex, alongside with other sociodemographic variables (e.g., age, professional/academic status, educational level, union type, union duration, and current union being the first person’s marriage/cohabitation or not).

Participants

The present study is part of a larger project examining different aspects of the couple’s dynamics during life, for which 596 valid research protocols were collected. However, considering the study’s aim, the final sample was formed by 331 heterosexual participants, 72.8% married, and 27.2% living in cohabitation. The ages’ oscillated from 19 to 80 years old; more than 50% of the sample had higher education and was professionally active. Two hundred twenty-nine married participants have children (95%), and 49 participants living in cohabitation also have children (54,4%). Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of the sample.

Characterization of participants (N = 331) in relation to sociodemographic variables.

Note. M  = mean; SD  = standard deviation.

ªCurrent and/or previous relationships.

Inclusion criteria were: (a) individuals who were married to or cohabiting with the partner and (b) according to the literature, participants could be integrated as part of only one of the family life cycle stages ( Neighbour, 1985 ; Relvas, 2004 ; Umberson et al., 2005 ; Waldemar, 2008 ). However, a new group was considered. We came across several couples that still had their adult children living with them. This raised a question about the couple’s effect, which is expected to be in a different stage and a common situation in our culture today. Umberson et al. (2005) study acknowledged that adult children’s presence causes tensions between the couple, instigating low levels of positive marital experiences. As such, it was considered the following criteria regarding the distribution of the sample across groups:

• Beginning families , participants that were married or living together up to four years (inclusive) without children from current and/or previous relationships residing with them. All participants with more than five years of marriage/cohabitation and less than four years of marriage/cohabitation with children were excluded.
• Families with young children , participants with children from the current relationship with age up to five years old, regardless of the number of years of marriage/cohabitation. Given the importance of assessing the impact of the child’s birth, participants who had children from previous relationships were excluded.
• Families with school-age children , participants with children aged between six and 12 years old (inclusive), regardless of years of marriage/cohabitation. Participants with children at these ages who also had older children (from current and/or previous relationships living with them) were excluded.
• Families with teenagers , participants with children aged between 13 and 19 years old. Participants with children at these ages but that also had older children (from current and/or previous relationships) living with them were excluded.
• Families whose children have already left home , participants whose children left home for at least four years (inclusive). Although have some children have left home, it was excluded participants still have others living with them.
• Families with adult children staying at home , participants with adult children (aged over 23 years) still live at home. Participants whose children were aged between 20 and 23 (at university attendance cannot be considered adults or teenagers) were excluded.
• Families in the middle years , participants without children at home and with at least one member of the couple aged 60 years old. All participants were included regardless of the number of marriages/cohabitations and children from current and/or previous relationships.

A sociodemographic questionnaire was prepared by the authors of this research for the sample’s characterization and to define the groups of this study. All participants were asked to provide their sex, age, professional/academic status, educational level, couple’s information (e.g., type [marriage or cohabitation] and duration [in years] of the marital union), and the number of children (current and/or previous relationships), their ages and situation (still living at home or already left home). Participants also completed marital satisfaction measures, communication and conflict management competencies, cohesion and flexibility, and motivation.

Marital satisfaction

A self-report questionnaire that assesses satisfaction within a couple’s relationship using the Scale of Evaluation of the Satisfaction on the Marital Areas of Life (EASAVIC; Narciso & Costa, 1996 ), through a total of 44 items, in a 6-point Likert scale from not satisfied at all to completely satisfied . These items represent different areas of the couple’s life that could be considered in two dimensions: (1) Functioning that comprise areas such as familiar functioning (roles and functions, autonomy/privacy), free time, communication and conflicts, and relationships outside of the family; (2) and Love, with areas such as feelings and emotional expression, sexuality, emotional intimacy, continuity of the relationship, and physical and psychological traits. A global average score includes the two dimensions. The EASAVIC presents good reliability values, revealing Cronbach’s alphas higher than .90 ( Narciso & Costa, 1996 ).

Styles and patterns of communication

Specific competencies of communication and conflict management were evaluated through the Managing Affect and Differences Scale (MADS; Arellano & Markman, 1995 ; Portuguese version by Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2016a ). The self-report measure comprises 109 items, and a 5-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to agree strongly . The Portuguese version of the MADS is organized in dimensions that reflect either constructive or destructive communication patterns: (1) Emotional Expressiveness and Positive Communication, which relates to love, affection and the degree of comfort with emotional expression; (2) Negativity/Negative Escalation, which regards the expression of negative attitudes and feelings; (3) Clarification, which relates to asking the partner how he/she is feeling and talking about his feelings; (4) Availability and Affective Expression, which involves love and affection for the partner, the availability to listen to him/her and to share own emotions; (5) Focusing/Stop Actions, which reflects behaviors as talking about an issue at a time or stop an escalating conflict agreeing to postpone the discussion for a more adequate moment; (6) Editing/Validation, which represents controlling one’s reactions to a partner’s message and to expressing value in partner’s perspective or point of view; (7) Withdrawal, which involves physically or emotionally withdrawing from discussions; (8) Feedback, which consists in paraphrasing or asking clarifications of partner’s message; and (9) Communication Over Time, which involves improvements in communication over time within a couple. In the Portuguese version ( Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2016a ), good reliability levels were found for all the nine dimensions, with Cronbach’s alphas varying between .60 and .93.

Cohesion and flexibility

Couples’ dynamics were measured through the couple’s version of the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scale III (FACES III; Olson et al., 1985 ; Portuguese version by Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2016b ) in a 5-point Likert scale from almost never to almost always . This scale is composed of 20 items and divided into two dimensions: (1) Cohesion (10 items), which assesses emotional bond, support, family limits, free time and friends, recreative interests and activities; and (2) Flexibility (10 items), which assesses leadership and control, negotiation, roles, and rules. The Portuguese version of the FACES III revealed good reliability levels, with Cronbach’s alphas varying between .70 to .89 ( Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2016b ).

The motivation assessment was made using the Motivation Scale (MS; Rempel et al., 1985 ; Portuguese version by Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2009 ). This scale has 24 items answered on a 9-point Likert scale from nothing to completely assess both Intrinsic Motivation and Extrinsic Motivation. Participants should answer the MS twice, considering two different perspectives: firstly, they should answer regarding their viewpoint, which therefore allows assessing their motivation to conjugality; secondly, they should answer regarding their view of the spouse/partner’s reasons to be in the relationship, which therefore allows assessing perceived motivation. MS, thus, allows setting four dimensions for each participant: (1) Intrinsic Personal Motivation, (2) Extrinsic Personal Motivation, (3) Intrinsic Perceived Motivation, and (4) Extrinsic Perceived Motivation. In the Portuguese version ( Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2009 ), good reliability levels were found, with Cronbach’s alphas varying between .87 and .96.

The Ethics Committee approved the study of ISPA – Instituto Universitário and the institutions where the sample was recruited before data collection. Also, the study was under the ethical Declaration of Helsinki and later amendments. Written informed consent was presented to the participants clarifying the study’s purpose, the research’ collaboration procedure, the confidentiality, and anonymity of the information collected. All potential participants were informed that it was voluntary participation, that they could skip any question that they did not answer, and that they could withdrawal at any moment without consequences. The research protocol was distributed and delivered to easy access points as several private and public services in the Lisbon metropolitan area (e.g., schools, businesses, health centers, community centers). Individuals were recruited through a “snowball” sampling system for a total of 18 months and received no financial incentives.

Data analysis

All analyses were done with the IBM SPSS Statistics and AMOS statistical software, both version 25. Regarding preliminary analysis, the data normality was assessed, and missing values were imputed for variables through the mean interpolation method, where its frequency was lower than 5% of the sample. Descriptive statistics for marital satisfaction, communication, motivation, cohesion and flexibility, and sociodemographic variables were performed.

The quantification of love and functioning, styles, and patterns of communication, own’s and partner’s type of motivation, cohesion, and flexibility within the couple’s dynamics and sociodemographic variables were integrated into a structural equation model to assess marital satisfaction. Only total scores of each construct (i.e., subscales) of the instruments used were considered as observed variables for this analysis. Additionally, to integrate stages of the family life cycle in this model, each stage was transformed into a dichotomous variable (“yes/no”). Also, the sociodemographic variables were transformed into a dichotomous variable (sex: male/female; professional/academic status: inactive/active; educational level: without education/with education; union type: marriage/cohabitation; first marriage/cohabitation: yes/no).

Multicollinearity between independent variables was explored with the variance inflation factor (VIF); almost all variables presented VIF values below 5, revealing the absence of collinearity ( Hair et al., 2014 ). The only two exceptions were for: (1) age, new couples, couples with young children, and union duration, which led us to remove age and union duration from the analyses since they presented higher VIF values and regarding our interest in studying the impact of stages of the family life cycle on marital satisfaction; (2) Intrinsic Personal Motivation and Intrinsic Perceived Motivation; however, since they are part of the same construct (i.e., intrinsic motivation) and are assessed with the same set of items—yet asking participants to take their perspective (for Intrinsic Personal Motivation) firstly and then to take their partner’s perspective (for Intrinsic Perceived Motivation)—we did not consider unreasonable to take both into account to perform our analyses.

Therefore, the structural equation model for marital satisfaction was built relating it with 13 independent variables: sex; professional/academic status; educational level; union type; first marriage/cohabitation; beginning families; families with young children; families with school-age children; families with teenagers; communication; intrinsic motivation; extrinsic motivation; cohesion and flexibility. Two stages of the family life cycle—families whose children have left home ( n  = 15) and families in the middle years ( n  = 27)—were not included in the model due to fewer participants. The family life cycle stage with adult children staying at home was also not included in the model due to not revealing a normal distribution according to skewness values (Sk > 3; Kline, 2015 ). The goodness of fit of the model was given by chi-squared statistics (χ 2 /df), comparative fit index (CFI), goodness of fit index (GFI), and root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA). Reference values used to evaluate the goodness of fit were practiced in structural equation modeling ( Byrne, 2016 ).

A two-step approach was used to evaluate the structural model. Firstly, the factor’s measurement model was assessed to demonstrate an acceptable fit. Observed variables with standardized regression weights inferior to .40 were removed if their removal did not compromise the theoretical meaning of the model and correlations between variables that were not significant; errors of measurement were also progressively correlated based on modification indices. Secondly, the structural model encompassing the dependent and the 13 independent variables was built, and the significances of the structural trajectories were assessed.

Descriptive statistics regarding both mean and standard deviation values for marital satisfaction, communication, cohesion and flexibility, and motivation are presented in Table 2 .

Mean and standard-deviation of marital satisfaction, communication, cohesion and flexibility, and motivation variables.

Alongside with high satisfaction levels among participants—both considering Marital Satisfaction and its dimensions, Love and Functioning— dimensions reflecting constructive communication patterns presented higher mean values than dimensions reflecting destructive communication patterns. Additionally, according to cut-off values previously established by Abreu-Afonso and Leal (2016b) , mean values for both Cohesion and Flexibility reflected moderate levels. Regarding motivation, this sample showed higher mean values for Intrinsic Motivation dimensions than for Extrinsic Motivation ones.

The fit of both the measurement and structural models ( Table 3 ) was good, and some correlations between measurement errors were performed. It should be noted that the observed variables Focusing/Stop Actions and Communication Over Time were removed due to their standardized regression weights on Communication being lower than .40, and since we did not consider that those removals would compromise the theoretical meaning of the model.

Model goodness fit indexes for factor anal ysis.

Bivariate associations between independent and dependent variables are presented in Table 4 , and standardized structural weights of the independent variables regarding marital satisfaction are shown in Table 5 .

Bivariate associations for the independent and dependent variables.

Note. S = Sex; PAS = Professional/Academic Status; EL = Educational Level; UT = Union Type; FMC = First Marriage/Cohabitation; BF = Beginning Families; YC = Families with Young Children; SAC = Families with School Age Children; T = Families with Teenagers; C = Communication; IM = Intrinsic Motivation; EM = Extrinsic Motivation; CF = Cohesion and Flexibility; MS = Marital Satisfaction.

* p ≤ .05; ** p ≤ .01; *** p ≤ .001.

Standardized structural weights of the independent variables (sociodemographic, motivation, cohesion and flexibility and communication variables) regarding the dependent variable (marital satisfaction).

Note. β  = standardized estimates; SE  = standard error; p  = significance level.

** p ≤ .01; *** p ≤ .001.

Five variables in a total of 13 are significant predictors of Marital Satisfaction, accounting for 85% of Marital Satisfaction variability. Intrinsic Motivation reveals the highest standardized structural weight in explaining Marital Satisfaction, followed by Communication. In contrast, Intrinsic Motivation is positively explained by personal Intrinsic Motivation and by perceived Intrinsic Motivation, and Communication is positively explained by constructive communication patterns and negatively explained by destructive communication patterns. Additionally, it is suggested that Marital Satisfaction is better explained as participants do not have young children, do not have teenagers, and are professionally and/or academically active. The structural model, with only its significant trajectories and correlations, is shown in Figure 1 .

Structural model for marital satisfaction: Its relation with communication, intrinsic motivation and significant sociodemographic variables. One direction arrows represent significant trajectories and two direction arrows represent significant correlations, p ≤ .05.

This study’s central aim was to explain marital satisfaction by integrating and analyzing in a structural model several variables that have long been suggested as important to marital quality and stability and, consequently, for relationships’ success. Given the high divorce rates, it seems imperative that we understand the critical risks to marital quality and stability.

Our results showed that the structural model obtained presented a good fit and explained most of the variance of marital satisfaction—thus contributing both to literature growth given the lack of a model that embraces the variables studied, and to family and couple therapists’ knowledge on which features might be necessary for maintaining couples together and in promoting healthier relationships.

Regarding motivation, while Extrinsic Motivation did not significantly explain marital satisfaction, Intrinsic Motivation was revealed to be the strongest predictor in the structural model. This result is in line with the literature, stating that intrinsic motives better account for a relationship’s satisfaction and success ( Rempel et al., 1985 ; Seligman et al., 1980 ) and people’s happiness ( Sheldon et al., 2004 ) compared to extrinsic motives. Interestingly, this study revealed Intrinsic Motivation and Communication to be strongly associated in explaining marital satisfaction, which again supports existing literature stating that self-determined motivation styles seem to reflect more adaptive behaviors, inclusively in conflict resolution ( Blais et al., 1990 ; Knee et al., 2002 ; Patrick et al., 2007 ), which recalls for constructive communication patterns. In general, communication was also pointed as a strong predictor of marital satisfaction, and its relation with satisfaction within a couple was positively explained by emotional expressiveness and positive communication, clarification, availability and affective expression, and editing/validation. On the other hand, it was negatively explained by negativity/negative escalation and withdrawal. This had also been acknowledged by other authors, stating that both positive and negative communication behaviors predict marital satisfaction ( Johnson et al., 2005 ) and that constructive communication patterns are more characteristic of satisfied couples ( Bertoni & Bodenmann, 2010 ; Birchler & Webb, 1977 ; Bradbury & Fincham, 1992 ; Houts et al., 2008 ), whereas negative interactions seem positively correlated with thinking about divorce ( Stanley et al., 2002 ). Observational studies of couple interaction refer that improved communication, once achieved, will enhance the quality and stability of the relationship ( Karney & Bradbury, 2020 ).

Generally, moderate levels of Cohesion and Flexibility are associated with more functional family and couple’s systems ( Olson, 2000 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). Nevertheless, despite moderate mean values found among our sample, Cohesion and Flexibility were not significant in explaining marital satisfaction in the structural model. This outcome might be because functional families and couples, notwithstanding usually organizing themselves within moderate levels of Cohesion and Flexibility, may engage in behaviors characteristic of extreme levels in the face of particular situations ( Barnes & Olson, 1985 ; Olson & Gorall, 2003 ). This subjectivity was not assessed in this study, and we suggest that cohesion and flexibility might be more informative regarding marital satisfaction if assessed in a clinical context, asking couples to answer twice to FACES III—first concerning how they perceive their marital relationship (perceived couple) and then how they would desire their marital relationship to be (idealized couple; Abreu-Afonso & Leal, 2016b ; Olson et al., 1985 ). Answers regarding the idealized couple would suggest each subject’s preferences and guide clinical work towards eventual changes to pursue in the marital relationship ( Maynard & Olson, 1987 ).

Concerning the structural model found, there also seems to be a tendency for less satisfaction when couples have young children, and when they have teenagers instead of being in other stages of the family life cycle. Indeed, the transition to parenthood is stated as bringing several changes to the couple’s dynamics, consequently resulting in increased stress and decreased positive aspects of the relationship (e.g., sex, affection; Lavner et al., 2014 ; Waldemar, 2008 ). Additionally, during children’s adolescence, there is a change in parental roles to allow teenagers to move in and out of the family system, which might happen along with conflicts within the couple regarding the end of the reproductive life, career issues, and their higher parents’ dependence derived from the aging process. Despite a few studies on marital satisfaction when parenting teenagers, Pérez and Estrada (2006) stated higher couple’s intimacy until children reach adolescence, and Cui and Donnellan (2009) suggested that conflict between a parent and a child in this stage may also result in disputes between spouses, having an impact on couple’s relationship. These authors found a decline in marital satisfaction during children’s adolescence ( Cui & Donnellan, 2009 ).

According to our findings, marital satisfaction also seems to be better explained by being professionally and/or academically active than being unemployed or retired. For example, Howe et al. (2004) had studied job loss in couples. These authors had achieved an integrated view on the issue, stating that both the unemployed subject and his/her partner might feel distressed after a job loss, mutually reinforcing the distress felt by the other member of the couple and, consequently, relationships’ quality can become compromised—which is in line with our results. It is also noteworthy that marital satisfaction seems higher within couples with congruent attitudes concerning their providers’ roles and fairer and more equal division of the housework ( Helms et al., 2010 ). While men and women traditionally had different but complementary roles, nowadays, society brings new challenges to the couple due to higher gender equality, more valued individuality ( Aboim, 2006 ), and family structure changes. According to our structural model, this fact may also explain the non-significance of the subject’s sex on marital satisfaction. There is a lack of consensus in the literature on differences between sexes and how this might impact the couple’s relationship. Our results support Dandurand and Lafontaine (2013) conclusions stating no differences in marital satisfaction between men and women. Nonetheless, future research should also address this issue to clarify incongruent findings across existing studies.

Finally, marital satisfaction did not reveal to be explained by subjects’ educational level, union type, and current union being the first person’s marriage/cohabitation. According to the literature, cohabitation is usually associated with reduced levels of satisfaction and happiness compared to marriage ( Vanassche et al., 2013 ), and there seem to be contradictory findings regarding marital satisfaction differences between marriages and re-marriages ( Mirecki et al., 2013 ). To our knowledge, not much literature exists on the eventual influence of education on marital satisfaction. Future studies are then needed regarding these variables and results.

Some limitations of this research must, although, be considered. For clinical reasons, we aimed to understand what made satisfied couples work. However, this decision may have limited a global understanding of marital realities, namely on potential other features of unsatisfied couples’ relationships, not directly addressed in this study. Thus, it would be pertinent to reproduce this research with couples with low satisfaction levels and in therapy, eventually also accounting for potential changes in the variables considered in this study throughout the therapeutic process. Since we only considered Portuguese and heterosexual subjects, it can also be relevant to include samples from other nationalities and sexual orientations in future studies to assess the current results’ generalization.

More research is also needed concerning marital satisfaction and stages of the family life cycle. Indeed, couples whose children have left home, in old age, and with adult children staying at home were not directly accounted for in the present study on their potential role in explaining marital satisfaction. This limitation was due to either a reduced number of subjects or a skewed data distribution, which calls for more representative samples regarding each stage of the family life cycle in further research. Moreover, couples with adult children staying at home represent an emergent stage of the family life cycle, and its impact on marital relationships is not yet known, which must be clarified. It should also be noted that this research was cross-sectional; other studies should adopt a longitudinal design to assess the generalization and stability of the predictors of marital satisfaction found.

Finally, the use of self-report measures entails difficulties in ensuring both subjects’ full understating and sincerity when answering the instruments’ items, making it difficult to control answers’ reliability. Therefore, the present results would benefit from being interpreted with complementary information obtained with other methodologies—for example, qualitative methods. Our structural model’s variables explained 85% of marital satisfaction variability, although other unexplored variables in this study should be analyzed further. For instance, neither age nor union duration was explored as predictors of marital satisfaction since multicollinearity was found between these two variables and two stages of the family life cycle. We hypothesize, though, that multicollinearity was revealed because as people age and spend more years together, it can also be expected that they will experience new stages of the family life cycle.

Couples experience challenges and difficulties inherent to events of the life cycle, whether they are satisfied with their marital relationship or not. Therefore, investment in both basic and applied research seems essential, resulting in an increased understanding of how relationships work and how they will develop and maximize clinicians’ and therapists’ therapeutic efficiency approaches to couples. Accordingly, and despite the limitations discussed, we believe that the present research provides important clues regarding what might need to be endorsed in therapy to avoid the relationship’s dissolution when facing a crisis. Specifically, by acknowledging which features seem to increase marital satisfaction, we believe that a path is revealed not merely to increase marital bond and commitment, but more importantly, couples’ and families’ quality of life.

Author Biographies: José Abreu-Afonso,  PhD, is a psychoanalyst of Sociedade Portuguesa de Psicanálise (S.P.P.) and International Psychoanalytic Association (I.P.A.). He is also the vice-president of S.P.P. Professor and researcher at ISPA – Instituto Universitário, in Lisbon. He is the pedagogical coordinator of the internships in Clinical and Health Psychology Master degree. His clinical experience included institutional work, and he is currently developing in private practice with adults, adolescents and families. In addition, he is a supervisor of psychotherapists in independent and institutional practices. Author of several works published in scientific journals, books and abstracts of national and international events.

Maria Meireles Ramos,  MSc in Clinical and Health Psychology, was a research assistant in William James Center for Research, ISPA – Instituto Universitário at the time of this study. As research assistant, she collaborated in diverse research projects on the translational line and has co-authored several publications. Since 2019, she has been working as a Psychologist in schools, intervening essentially with children, adolescents, families and teachers.

Inês Queiroz-Garcia, MSc in Clinical Psychology, since 2018, has collaborated on several (inter)national projects in a research assistant position at the William James Center for Research (R&D), ISPA – Instituto Universitário. The latest collaboration was as a research assistant of an R&D project funded by a BIAL Foundation Grant (ref. 188/18) – “COping with PAin through Hypnosis, mindfulness and Spirituality”, focusing on the effects of three psychosocial interventions experimentally induced pain. Inês is a PhD Fellow in Health Psychology, developing research in the field of obesity in couples and health behavior change with the project “COuples’ OBesity (COOB): Conceptualization, measurement, development, and efficacy testing of an online-based couples’ intervention” (FCT Grant 2020.05357.BD). Her research interests include behavior change strategies, eHealth application for obesity interventions, mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative methods), and psychometric validation of instruments.

Isabel Leal, is a clinical and health psychologist and psychotherapist. PhD in Psychology from the Catholic University of Louvain, she has been a professor at ISPA – Instituto Universitário since 1983, where she is a full professor, researcher at the William James Center for Research (R&D) and currently dean. She developed professional activity within the Ministry of Health in the Civil Hospitals of Lisbon and in the Maternity Dr. Alfredo da Costa, where he founded and coordinated the Department of Clinical Psychology. She was Advisor to the National Commission to Fight AIDS, Consultant to the “Project to promote Mental Health in Pregnancy and early childhood” of the General Directorate of Health, President of the Portuguese Society of Health Psychology and President of the Jury of the Award Madalena Barbosa of the City Council of Lisbon, which promotes gender equality. Her research interests are currently focused on Health and Psychology’s interface in, particularly on sexual and reproductive health and gender issues and on the adjustment processes at transitions in the life cycle (adolescence, menopause, aging, disease, etc.). She has published more than 250 articles in specialized journals, 58 book chapters, 40 published books, and interacted with 218 collaborators in co-authorships of scientific papers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: William James Center for Research is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia – FCT (grant UID/PSI/04810/2019).

ORCID iD: Inês Queiroz-Garcia https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7842-5285

What’s Love Got to Do With a Lasting Marriage?

Not everything, but close to it..

Posted November 10, 2020 | Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

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What is love in a marriage ? How does it develop, change, and impact the relationship? It comes as no surprise that love is a key factor in people getting married and in contributing to the marriage’s longevity. Researchers discuss how love is one of the variables that plays a strong role in stable and lasting marriages (Sternberg, 1986; Roizblatt, et al., 1999; Weigel, 1999; Bachand and Caron, 2001).

A marriage does not always survive on love alone. Friendship , trust, loyalty, togetherness, willingness to compromise, and respect for each other are also important. There are some marriages where love may not be necessary for initiating or supporting the marriage, such as arranged marriages or marriages of convenience. In addition, marriages when love was present earlier in the relationship but is no longer there may continue because of other reasons, including a sense of duty, religious or cultural factors, and family and financial concerns.

Nevertheless, most people rank love as their most important priority for marital satisfaction (Kaslow & Robison, 1996; Roizblatt et al.,1999). Wallerstein and Blakeslee (1995) found that in some marriages the bond sustaining the couple was so strong that the partners were always in love and could not envision being without the other to the extent that they viewed their partner as their “other half.” These unions were described as “romantic marriages” and fueled by mutual love, passion, and excitement. This not to say that for love to continue and grow in a marriage, the couple must remain oblivious to each other’s faults, limitations, or disturbing idiosyncrasies, but love can help diminish their impact.

Love and a marriage’s duration often go hand-in-hand. Sternberg (1986) conceptualized love in a marriage as including intimacy , passion, and commitment. Intimacy is reflected by feeling close and bonded to one’s spouse. Passion develops from physical and sexual attraction . Commitment is expressed by making the decision that one loves one’s spouse and wants to maintain that by perpetuating the relationship.

Love in a marriage evolves. It may start out as infatuation or even passion, but as time passes something deeper develops. As a couple’s relationship continues over time the infatuation may diminish. Feelings of love can intensify by the couple’s commitment to one another and the satisfaction they experience in their union (Sprecher, 1999). These positive feelings not only contribute to the couple’s intimacy and connectedness but also strengthens their marriage.

When spouses have love in a marriage it enhances their physical and mental health. It gives the partners a sense of vibrancy and purpose. It can help them overcome barriers and depression . Having an invested spouse and not being alone instills a sense of courage and the ability to face the challenges of life. Thus, rather than succumb to obstacles, illness, and despair, there is a sense of hope where the individuals can thrive. It also contributes to each spouse's confidence resulting in higher life satisfaction and longevity.

What are some ways couples demonstrate their love? For some, the actual statement, “I love you,” is not necessary. Instead, deeds are more revealing about how much one cares for the other. Behavioral indications of love include:

• Demonstrating respect
• Showing concern
• Being in the company of each other
• Fulfilling a spouse’s needs
• Being committed to the marriage
• Wanting what is best for one’s spouse even at one’s own expense

Clearly, marriages do not survive on love alone. There are other features that perpetuate and strengthen them. However, it may be said that by performing some of the following maintenance behaviors, one is doing so out of love.

• Having similar values and beliefs, and if not, being able to understand and accept those that are different.
• Feeling comfortable in talking and listening to each other (no matter the topic) with the knowledge that each one will feel safe and respected.
• Accepting a spouse’s strengths and flaws.
• Being committed to each other and encouraging each other’s growth, sometimes over one’s own.
• Spending time together.
• Engaging in physical contact with each other.
• Tolerating a spouse’s small annoyances and reinforcing those qualities that are endearing.
• Striving to not go to sleep at night when angry with one's spouse.
• Understanding that the love you have for your spouse is different from that for your children.
• Listening to one another with an open mind.
• Not laughing at but with one’s spouse.
• Adding spice to the relationship, such as exploring new and challenging activities together as opposed to living a predictable and mundane life.
• Performing acts that help each other, especially when you do not want to or are not expected to do so.
• Making sacrifices without being a martyr or feeling regret.
• Being each other’s cheerleader.
• Helping each other cope with or solve problematic issues, both within and outside the marriage.
• Surprising one another with random acts of kindness.
• Not taking for granted the positive aspects of one’s marriage (e.g., happiness , fun, excitement, companionship, security).

We live in a tumultuous time. Like all living organisms, love in a marriage needs to be nourished to thrive. What works for one may not work for another, and what worked once may not work now. Therefore, we frequently need to focus on and tend to the health of one’s marriage and not take its existence or our spouse for granted.

Bachand, L. & Caron, S. (2001). Ties that bind: A qualitative study of happy long-term marriages. Contemporary Family Therapy, 23 (1), 105-121. DOI:10.1023/A:1007828317271

Kaslow, F., & Robison, J. (1996). Long-term satisfying marriages: Perceptions of contributing factors. The American Journal of Family Therapy, 24 (2), 153-168. doi.org/10.1080/01926189608251028

Roizblatt, A., Kaslow, F., Rivera, S., Fuchs, T., Conejero, C., & Zacharias, A. (1999). Long lasting marriages in Chile. Contemporary Family Therapy, 21 (1), 113-129. doi.org/10.1023/A:1021918822405

Sprecher, S. (1999). "I love you more today than yesterday": Romantic partners' perceptions of changes in love and related affect over time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76 (1), 46-53. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.1.46

Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93 (2), 119-135). doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.93.2.119

Wallerstein, J., & Blakeslee, S. (1995). The good marriage: How and why love lasts. Houghton Mifflin.

Weigel, D. J., & Ballard-Reisch, D. S. (1999). How couples maintain marriages: A closer look at self and spouse influences upon the use of maintenance behaviors in marriages. Family Relations, 48 (3), 263-269. doi.org/10.2307/585635

Shoba Sreenivasan, Ph.D., and Linda E. Weinberger, Ph.D. , are psychology professors at the Keck School of Medicine at USC.

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• Open access
• Published: 18 January 2024

Meanings and implications of love: review of the scholarship of love with a sub-Saharan focus

• Karin Steen   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4176-4296 1 ,
• Alice Antoniou 2 ,
• Lehnke Lindemann 2 &
• Anne Jerneck 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  129 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Development studies

Love, as an emotion, binds people together in social practices that are contingent on culture, historical processes, and social trends. As such, love is a perfect site to study how people interact and to understand how power, equality, and sustainability play out in human relations. Despite its importance and much attention, love as a concept and form of interaction is not fully understood, especially not across cultures. In our research, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, we show that alongside other emotions, love matters not only for passion in life or for wellbeing but also for improved resource use, increased gender equality, and, subsequently, higher food security and sovereignty – all signs of sustainability. While love is understood as a universal human phenomenon, definitions and expressions of love vary across time and cultures. Since love drives human interaction in many intertwined ways there is no single best way to define it. Yet, scholars have advanced the theory of love by identifying at least 40 major distinct but interdependent ‘love constructs’ fitting into the four main dimensions of affection, closeness, compassion, and commitment (Karandashev et al. 2022 ). In parallel to this and based on our review of the scholarship of love in a subset of 45 relevant academic articles from an 80-article systematic literature search of ‘love’ we find four core (and partly overlapping) types of how to speak about love as an expression and experience. These include: 1/ contextual love influenced by culture, space, and time; 2/ romantic and compassionate love; 3/ transactional love; 4/ post-humanist perspectives and ‘harmony love’. Finally, we examine love in relation to power; love-related emotions; and how understandings of love and culture impact gender relations.

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Introduction.

Love is universal but contextual. Everyone who has been ‘in love’ knows that it matters (Sayer, 2011 ) and how it feels, often a fluttering, engaging feeling. Although the literature is brimming with illustrations (Sayer, 2011 ) and conceptual attempts to capture the essence of love, it often escapes clear scholarly definitions. It may be discarded as laughable, embarrassingly personal, or unimportant to study (Cole and Thomas, 2009 ; Sayer, 2011 ; Swidler, 2001 ), but love, passion, fear, and other affective dimensions of being with one another are increasingly recognised as fundamental in understanding development, social vulnerability, and thereby also sustainability (Clouser, 2016 ; Sayer, 2011 ; Wright, 2012 ).

Although culture is constitutive, it still allows multiple options and repertoires to be mobilised for various aims and purposes including social change (Swidler, 2001 ). In intimate contracts, spouses relate to each other in various forms of love and power (and other emotions). By unravelling how they think, speak and act (Schmidt, 2008 ) on love, one can get closer in identifying and explaining aspects of material and immaterial power. For that, as described below, we need to conceptualise love in ways that allow a fertile and multifaceted analysis.

Love and other emotions

Although emotional energy, such as love, drives much of human interaction (Collins, 2005 ) it is a non-obvious subject under scrutiny (Collins, 1992 ) in disciplines ranging from biology to anthropology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. Emotions and emotional energy including affection, desire, fear, hope, and love are expressed through social and cultural practices (Collins, 2005 ; Wright, 2012 ) ‘that bind people to another’ (Cole and Thomas, 2009 , 2) and that are contingent on context, culture, historical processes, social trends, and the exercise of power (Bauman, 2003 ).

Relevant research in feminist geography emphasises that love and affection in ‘relationships of intimacy’ (Morrison et al. 2012 ) must be held up to scrutiny to unpack power in sexual and love relationships. To exemplify, love is manifested as a dynamic power relation in intimate contracts with wider social implications (Collins, 2005 ) and is an effective entry point to capture issues of power, gender and identity including the negotiations of those. The study of love as an arena for power could thus show how emotions, such as love in intimate contracts, influence gendered resource management. For that setting, marriage, as an intimate relation, is best seen as a social institution that both reproduces gender inequality and mediates social change (Jackson, 2012 ).

On an individual scale, the emotional energy in love drives our motivation, intention, and action. The effects of love on a person can be defined in writer Jeanette Winterson’s ( 2007 , 122) words: ‘I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean? It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling’. This echoes our understanding of what the power in love may imply in terms of imagination as well as in negotiation and compromises of relations in everyday practices and strategies; thereby referring to both expressions and experiences of love in relationships. But while personal aspects are central, it is necessary to keep social aspects in mind. To clarify this, we draw parallels to other feminist debates. For long, feminist thinkers have argued that work and labour in both the private and the public sphere should be identified, valued, and analysed as interdependent. Similarly, black feminist scholars of love-politics seek to interpret ‘love’ not only (or mainly) as an individual and personal experience but also as a social and collective concern and a subject for justice theory (see Nash, 2020 ). Such views allow us to challenge the focus on the private self and sphere and reorient it towards the public social world beyond self-hood (Nash, 2020 ). In line with that, life choices (including love) could, in the famous words of Audre Lorde, be illuminated by the idea that the personal is political ( 1984 , 113).

Focusing on the interaction between individual and collective scales, our mapping here reveals understandings of how love, affection, and similar emotions can influence human interactions in varied forms of relationships, and in extension, how that may impact sustainable development in sub-Saharan African agricultural settings.

Love, gender, and sustainability

Gendered access to land and power in sub-Saharan farming societies is widely studied, whereas the division, provision, or outcome of labour in this context is not. Even less is known about embodied and affective dimensions of food production, reproductive work, and household food security (Steen, 2011 ). This means that gender-sensitive sustainability studies must address material, immaterial and emotional challenges, here with a focus on emotions in nature-society relations and on feelings of affection such as love between spouses in intimate relations. Sustainability is here defined broadly in terms of its three main types of dynamics – human-environmental, intergenerational, and intersectional interaction and outcome.

Research on gender in societies where women depend on men for productive resources focuses more on gendered control of land and other productive resources than on immaterial resources such as labour, intra marriage dynamics, or emotions. Empirical and theoretical research and representations of love in sub-Saharan Africa are still scant, especially outside African scholarship (Cole and Thomas, 2009 ; Thomas and Cole, 2009 ) and the failure to engage in research on love in sub-Saharan Africa is partly a product of colonial history. Europeans justified their domination in various ways such as by depicting African people as hypersexual or lacking the emotional or intellectual depth required for nobler sentiments like love (Thomas and Cole, 2009 ; Tocco, 2010 ). To avoid falling into the trap of reiterating still-pervasive depictions of African intimacy as reducible to sexual urge, biological reproduction, or economic survival, we must engage more profoundly in research on love in this context (Tocco, 2010 ) and do so to highlight how it is expressed and experienced (see Steen and Jerneck, forthcoming). While doing so, we also acknowledge that romantic love is not necessarily a Western construct, but a universal emotion that is historically and contextually contingent (see Karandashev, 2015 and Karandashev et al. 2022 for further discussion).

In this article, we map out how love is understood (in different contexts) and how it influences human, and gendered, interaction. While our main focus is intimate contracts, we will address other sites of love occasionally. Below, we describe our search methods for the literature review and the material that we generated. After that we present, discuss, and compare findings. Finally, we sum up and seek to draw some conclusions.

Methods and material

The starting point refers to our interest in how love, and similar emotions, may influence sustainability in sub-Saharan Africa, here understood more specifically as increased food security and food sovereignty with due attention to socio-environmental conditions and concerns. While the first question guided our literature review – How is love defined and studied in the scholarship of love research? – it was mainly aimed at shedding light on the second and main question ‘What does love mean across sub-Saharan African cultures? The ambition was to bring sub-Saharan scholarship on love in conversation with the broader field of research. For the literature review we developed a list of key terms to be checked in titles, keywords, and abstracts (Table 1 ) and limited the search to English language texts including book chapters, conference proceedings, peer-reviewed journal articles and review articles published until July 2021. Primarily we relied upon the search engine Web of Science later cross-checked with Google Scholar to ensure relevant coverage and resulting in a catalogue of 80 texts.

In the second round we coded the introduction and conclusion in the 80 texts to determine their relevance – high, medium, or low – according to six emerging clusters, which resulted in 45 highly relevant texts. The twelve categories represented six clusters, with various sub-themes (Table 2 ), each treated as a column in the literature tracking table. We extracted relevant information from each article and entered as text in Excel, which yielded data in 1360 cells, including some labelled ‘n/a’ or ‘not specified.’

Finally, we systematically analysed the completed literature tracking table by adding a synopsis of each article and column. The column content was then systematically colour-coded across the data set. Ultimately, information for each thematic category was arranged horizontally in Excel and details for the 45 selected texts arranged side by side for ease of viewing and preliminary visualisations.

Results and discussion

Overarching insights.

Love is researched in many disciplines. In Web of Science, we found most categories in the humanities, such as art and literature, and in behavioural sciences, such as psychology, but fewer hits in family studies, healthcare science services, history, religion, sociology, or ‘social science other topics.’ The overarching insight from the survey is that love is best understood, not as a single, universal concept, but as a vastly diverse and contextually specific social phenomenon. This finding echoes other studies in the field of love research since the 1960s (e.g. Karandashev, 2015 ; Karandashev et al. 2022 ).

To reflect diversity in the literature on love, we identified four core (and partly overlapping) types of speaking about love as an expression and experience: 1/ contextual love influenced by culture, space, and time; 2/ romantic and compassionate love; 3/ transactional love; 4/ post-humanist perspectives and ‘harmony love’. While the intention was to make distinct themes there is obviously certain overlap. Finally, we examine love in relation to power; love-related emotions; and how understandings of love and culture impact gender relations.

Contextual love: influenced by culture, space, and time

Love is often spoken of as a universal feeling. However, in the literature, love is widely agreed upon to be contextually specific – thus, a complex, multi-dimensional and far from universal feeling (Bhana, 2013a ). Beall and Sternberg ( 1995 , 433) state that ‘Love is a social construction that reflects its time period because it serves an important function in a culture’.

During the Enlightenment, love was understood as a rational experience only to become an uncontrollable passion during 18 th and 19 th century Romanticism. Later on, love is said to be defined and experienced according to the context. Here culture defines what is considered moral or immoral in relation to love and how thoughts, feelings, and actions are associated with and follow from that (Beall and Sternberg, 1995 ). Culture also influences what is considered desirable and attractive. For example, in the 1990s Beall and Sternberg described how the individualistic culture associated with the US and the West often values the explicit expression of emotions, including love, and that of ‘finding oneself’. In contrast, Chinese culture was described as valuing relationships, meaning that people were more likely to define themselves by a relational role such as father, sister, or spouse (ibid) rather than only in individual terms (Karandashev, 2015 ). Even when love is similarly defined across settings, its manifestation will depend on culture (Eugénie, 2016 ). Bhana ( 2013b ) further concludes that since love is socially and culturally bound it will be experienced, felt, and enacted depending on gender and how gender is perceived and expressed in a particular context.

Romantic, compassionate, and confluent love – how to reach emotional fulfilment?

In the reviewed literature, we identified a variety of types of love expressions. Again, this illustrates the complexity of love, as an emotion and a relational experience varying across cultures, space, and time. Broadly speaking, loving is commonly accompanied by a sense of ‘closeness, belonging, and an attachment to a significant other’ (Osei-Tutu et al. 2018 , 83). Depending on the nature of this significant other , love expressions may be distinguished into romantic, parental, compassionate, or altruistic love, while levels of intimacy, passion and commitment diverge (ibid.).

In the surveyed literature, the idea of romantic love is construed as predominately ‘heterosexual, monogamous and permanent’, as suggested by the familiar ‘living happily ever after’ or ‘one true love’ narratives (Vincent and McEwen, 2006 , 39). Central to this is a fixed male-female binary, which serves the purpose of each partner ‘completing the other as a result of the inherent separation between them’ (Vincent and McEwen, 2006 ). In other words, the ‘flawed individual’ is made whole (Giddens, 1992 , 45 in ibid). Importantly, romantic love perpetuates stereotypical versions of femininity and masculinity. Supported by Simone de Beauvoir, love holds a different meaning to men and women ( 1953 , 642). Accordingly, men are portrayed by de Beauvoir as remaining ‘sovereign subjects’ within love relationships and are less likely to place their love affairs in the context of long-term visions of perfect harmony (ibid.). Contrastingly, women are represented to be consumed by love and the idea of finding their significant other or soulmate. Vincent and McEwen stress that romantic love has at its heart a highly ‘restricted mode of femininity’, which entails that women suffer and endure pain in the name of love ( 2006 , 41). The embodiment of this type of romantic feminised love refers to jealousy, breaking up, followed by a passionate reconciliation (ibid). Vu ( 2020 ) and Baum ( 1971 ) stress that a worldwide rise in individualism in times of neoliberalism compels young people to increasingly choose marriages based on this ideal of love and romance.

This understanding of romantic love is becoming increasingly challenged by a vast emergent body of queer literature. Doan et al. ( 2015 ) explore to what extent the expression of emotions of love differs across social groups. Specifically, the authors investigate whether American heterosexuals differentially attribute love to lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples (Doan et al. 2015 , 401). Underlying their investigation, is the assumption that social norms and cultural standards play a role in the expression and experience of emotions. They find that stigma and societal prejudice may lead to a lower level of granted legitimacy and recognition of a loving homosexual relationship, which in turn affects the couple’s level of public expression of their emotions (ibid. 406). In fact, ‘nowhere could the queer reader find a romance that depicted a queer couple with any hope for future fulfilment’ (Barot, 2016 ). While queer theory has had something to say about sex, its perspectives on love were entirely omitted until recently, according to Halperin ( 2019 , 396). Love was seemingly ‘too intimately bound up with institutions and discourses of the “normal”, too deeply embedded in the standard narratives of romance, to be available for “queering”’ (ibid). As a consequence, the LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, 2-spirit queer questioning, and intersex) community has been denied access to love, both as a representation and a form of life (ibid, 397). This adds another dimension to the struggles related to the political recognition and oppression of LGBTQI+ subjectivities.

Exploring the history of romantic love in sub-Saharan Africa, Megan Vaughan ( 2009 ) illustrates that the nature of romantic love is subject to much contemporary debate across the African continent. Romantic love is often construed as a Western, ‘alien import’ at odds with African tradition. While Vaughan demonstrates that contemporary African discourses often make the association between romantic love and modernity, her findings also reveal that some pre-colonial or ‘traditional’ African societies and cultures have a rich vocabulary for feelings and emotions, typically ascribed to ‘Western’ perceptions of passionate desire and romantic love. For instance, the Taita of Kenya used words for lust and infatuation , in relation to irresponsible feelings felt by the young for each other, while romantic love is used when passion is combined with enduring affection (Vaughan, 2009 , 11). A focus group study with young South African males yielded similar results (Manyaapelo et al. 2019 ). The participants stressed that the isiZulu expression for ‘I love you’, as opposed to ‘I like you’, is only used by men when they want to propose a romantic relationship to a woman (ibid, 5). Similarly, traditional Swahili songs revolved around passionate love poetry, full of loss and longing, and of unrequited love. Importantly, Vaughan stresses that love, across African societies, takes forms that are far richer and more diverse than can be allowed for by the restrictive ideals of romantic love (Vaughan, 2009 , 23). Karandashev and others (Karandashev, 2015 ; Karandashev et al. 2022 ) confirm that romantic love is not solely a Western construct.

Osei-Tutu et al. ( 2018 ) investigated love expressions among Ghanaian Christians. In collectivist communities of sub-Saharan Africa, love is typically associated with expressions of affect towards others including social relationships and material provisioning. In addition, it involves a deep commitment to sharing, reciprocity, fidelity, and exclusivity in social relationships. Conducting interviews with over 60 participants, Osei-Tutu et al. found that communal and maintenance-oriented love appears to be the dominant love expression among Ghanaian Christians. A distinction between agape and eros love was identified, the former being a ‘universal type defined as a concern or regard for people of all sorts’, and the latter being defined as a ‘desire for something or someone’. While agape is centred on the benefits of the other person (including children), eros is self-oriented and is directed towards benefits to the self. Agape love was the dominant type of love expressed by the Ghanaian Christian participants, while they often quoted biblical perspectives or the words of God. Additionally, Vaughan identified three major understandings of love in her interviews: to meet someone’s needs, to help people in need, and to care for someone. Thus, the overall expressions of love among the respondents were communally oriented, which is expressed primarily through the distribution of basic material resources, taking care of family obligations and the needs of neighbours. In short, in collectivist cultures, love arguably captures feelings of responsibility for and care of others. This type of love is mentioned in the literature as companionate, or altruistic love. It is juxtaposed to the notion of romantic love explored above, which centres around the individual’s experience of how love (and infatuation) makes one feel.

In line with this, it can be useful to refer to how sociologist Anthony Giddens ( 1992 , 117) proposes the idea of confluent love as the alternative to romantic love. This understanding of love is rooted in equality and the necessity of emotional involvement and commitment between partners. Importantly, this type of love is not oriented towards permanence, but rather towards the emotional fulfilment of each during the time of engagements.

Transactional love – is it love?

Transactional love examines the interconnectedness of love and financial support to explore whether – and if so, also explain how – emotions are associated with economic benefits. While the West generally rejects the interconnectedness of love and provision due to the Western conception of love as a spontaneous and private emotion, Cole argues that material support is involved in Western romantic relationships (Bhana, 2013a ). However, she states that the connection between love and provision is often more explicit in African romantic relationships where poverty is more prevalent. Similarly, Bhana addresses the connection between love and provision, stating that ‘money and love are not separate issues but rather entangled in feelings, desires and ideals of love’ (Bhana, 2013b , 6).

To take some examples from sub-Saharan Africa, Jackson ( 2012 ) traces the characteristics of Shona marriages in Zimbabwe from the colonial period to the 1980s and demonstrates how changes in culture and marriage customs influenced the connection between love and provision. She found that with the weakening of kin relations, the bride price increasingly became a man’s responsibility rather than his family’s. In response, women sought men in financially secure positions as they knew they could not depend on his family for support. The weakening of kin relationships also increased women’s autonomy. In households that were separate from their in-laws, women had more power over their husband’s finances. Additionally, the decreasing frequency and importance of paying a bride price provided women greater ability to leave the marriage with less financial repercussions and greater rights over their children (ibid.).

In her study on love and provision among financially disadvantaged youth in Tanzania, Stark ( 2017 ) found that men who are poor felt disempowered compared to wealthier men, while women felt exploited by men that could not satisfactorily provide financially. Stark defines transactional intimacy as ‘a continuum of relationships with sex work at one extreme, and provision of needs by a primary male partner (permanent boyfriend or husband) at the other’ (Stark, 2017 , 571). Stark chooses to use the term ‘transactional intimacy’ over ‘transactional sex’ to emphasise the emotions involved in the long-term relationships she studied. Due to conceptions of love that include the male as a provider, men who are poor described feeling they could not get married if they did not have enough resources to support themselves and their spouse. A few men allowed their girlfriends to have intimate relations with other men as a means of earning money. Men also described having multiple girlfriends for fear that one of their girlfriends would leave them for a wealthier man. Many women in the study expressed conflicting views on transactional love. Women described understanding gifts as an expression of love; yet they also spoke of ‘clean love’, a love that is free from material relations.

In a similar qualitative study among sex workers in rural Ghana, Onyango et al. ( 2019 ) explored the relationship dynamics between sex workers and their intimate partners. The authors found that most relationships between sex workers and their intimate partners were mutual, reciprocal, and transactional, while many of the participants (both male and female) described their relationships in terms of friendship, love, and a hopeful future (ibid, 31). Both men and women expressed that they support each other financially, share resources and support one another emotionally (ibid, 38).

These studies demonstrate the complex connectedness between love and provision. While the connection may be more apparent in sub-Saharan African relationships, this should not be viewed as inherently negative (Thomas and Cole, 2009 ). Love and affection can coexist within transactional relationships as demonstrated by Cole’s finding showing that bride-wealth may include an affective dimension demonstrating a man’s love for his fiancé and her value (ibid.).

Post-humanist perspective and ‘harmony love’

The capacity to love and to form an emotional attachment is a fundamental human condition, according to González Morales ( 2019 ). He stresses that ‘the human condition refers insurmountably to love, which because of it and in it, is what makes humans what we are’ (ibid, 6). Similarly, love is presented as the ‘essence of our lives’ and as the enabling factor for achieving spiritual growth and happiness. The primary objective of spiritual growth is to improve ourselves and to achieve love: Love for yourself (self-love), love for others, and love for other living beings (non-humans) (Pličanič, 2020 , 407). An emergent body of literature explores love and emotional attachment that goes beyond human-to-human interaction, and instead extends to other non-human beings.

Drawing from Donna Haraway, Engelmann ( 2019 ) defines a post-humanist love as a love that is not limited to human entities. Instead, love is the foundational principle of awareness, interconnectedness and situatedness shared by all beings. (Affectionate) love, then acts as an affirmative action towards all living entities and is the integrating factor between all species. Similarly, Blom et al. ( 2020 ) stress that love is the most powerful of emotions, which has the capacity to heal, as it is the innate ability to feel with one’s heart. The authors propose a post-humanist perspective of love as an outward emotion, towards nature, which provides a way of ‘knowing nature’. It is about complementing nature to become one, through our senses and inner-knowing. This kind of post-humanist love, then, channels our connection and appreciation for the natural world and as such can be considered one of the drivers for the restoration and sustainability of Earth’s natural health and beauty.

The concept of ‘harmony love’ is introduced by Suvorov and Suvorova ( 2016 , 2015 ) as the supreme moral law, grounded in ethics and peace. Love is understood as the capability to understand the problems of another person and to go against one’s interests for the sake of others, and to make the joy of others their own. Love is a creative force which is the foundation for the ethical and moral perfection of human potential. The authors argue that this principle of harmony love may be a driver for holistic sustainable development, taking both society and nature into consideration.

Both the post-humanist perspectives on love for nature and the concept of harmony love argue that love holds a transformative potential to drive sustainable development (Engelmann, 2019 ; González Morales, 2019 ; Pličanič, 2020 ; Suvorov and Suvorova, 2015 , 2016 ). Underlying this, is the requirement that humanity’s love for the natural world be rekindled. Humans across all cultures must once again learn to connect with and love nature in order to protect and nurture the natural environment.

Love, power, and inequality

At the household level, love is often analysed in terms of division of labour, resource management, and power. For instance, Lambrecht ( 2016 ) explores the process of negotiating access to land and resources among marital partners in Ghana. Her findings reveal that community leadership and land ownership, as well as resource access are highly gendered and largely male-dominated, with merely 10 percent of agricultural parcels being owned by individual female farmers (ibid, 2016, 188). Importantly, access to land and land ownership are not in fact negotiated at the individual or household level, but are instead deeply embedded in social norms, rules and perceptions about men’s and women’s roles, responsibility and capabilities in their households, families, and communities. According to Lambrecht, these societal expectations rest on the assumption that husbands ‘love, lead and provide’, thus revealing an explicit imbalance in power relations (ibid, 2016, 192).

As love is culturally bound, it is greatly impacted by societal gender relations. Gregoratto ( 2017 ) states exploitation can occur within a romantic relationship and is often rooted in social factors such as race, gender, and cultural definitions of love. For example, when love is defined as unconditional and selfless, and women are expected to be caring and sensitive, relations can end with the labour exploitation of women in unpaid domestic work. A study on sex and love within marriage in Zimbabwe explored how power is displayed (Mugweni et al. 2012 ). In the study, some of the men interviewed declared sex with their spouse as their right because they had paid a bride price. Some men also described forcing their partners to have sex when they did not want it, as a way to teach their wives to be obedient and submissive. Many of the women who experienced intimate partner violence within marriage did not report it due to a taboo surrounding sex and marriage, as well as fear of losing their husband’s financial support if they reported it. However, other women in the study reported withholding sex until they received what they desired from their spouse, for example a material item, thus an example of transactional love (ibid). In conclusion, sex was used in different ways by both genders to assert power.

Jackson asserts ‘conjugality is a social relationship which may either deepen, or diminish, the effects of wider patriarchal environments’ (Jackson, 2012 , 43). This is an acknowledgement that relationships do not exist in a vacuum and are influenced by their context. However, relationships are not bound to replicating cultural norms. Spouses have agency within a relationship to negotiate relations and power. Similarly, Bhana states ‘To claim that love is a bond of inequality simplifies relations of intimacy and ignores the possibilities of tenderness and agency despite the widespread forms of inequalities’ (Bhana, 2013b , 6).

Love-related emotions

As definitions of love differ across cultures and contexts, so do the emotions expressed and associated with it. Rostami et al. ( 2014 , 697) stress that the ability to distinguish and express emotions, increases the intimacy and sense of security, heightens the ambiguity tolerance in individuals and is essential for the continuation and preservation of a successful marriage. In short, the expression and interpretation of emotions is central to love and social relationships. Vincent and McEwen ( 2006 ) distinguish between the set of emotions associated with romantic love, as opposed to confluent or companionate love. Romantic love is heavily dominated by feelings of heartache and pain, since it is ‘natural for heroines to suffer, to endure pain, in the name of love’. The lived demonstration of this kind of love is through high levels of jealousy, breaking up, and passionate reconciliation. Romantic love, according to the authors, is necessarily irrational, meaning that lovers are often unable to comprehend their own feelings and emotions. Juxtaposed against this, the set of emotions associated with confluent love involves equality, commitment, and mutuality between the partners, which grants the emotional fulfilment of the couple.

Vaughan ( 2009 ) asserts that emotions are socially and symbolically produced. They can be both feelings and meanings and are both individual and social in nature. Importantly, emotions are influenced by culture, meaning that the salience of expressions of love by individuals and among communities differs cross-culturally. In his investigation, Vaughan contrasts the sets of emotions associated with romantic love within societies in sub-Saharan Africa with Western ideas of love. She found that in Sub-Saharan African societies, passion, lust, and infatuation are expressed and interpreted as emotions equated with youth and irresponsibility. ‘True’ love or companionate marriages, on the other hand, are understood to be guided by mutual feelings of trust, respect, and moral responsibility. This stands in stark contrast with Western emotional expressions of romantic love which often include passion, desire, and pain. Osei-Tutu et al.’s ( 2018 ) investigation of the expression and meaning of love in Ghana yields similar results. They contend that individualistic societies tend to value passionate love more, while collective cultures tend to value companionate love more. Passionate love centres around the experience of how love makes one feel, while companionate love captures feelings for and care for others. There may of course be exceptions to these rather generalised views.

Ruark et al. ( 2014 ) stress that there is a gendered difference within the emotional experience of love. Conducting in-depth interviews with 28 Swasi men and women, the authors found that women are typically motivated by love, emotional attachment, and loneliness, while men are motivated to enter a relationship by lust, sexual desire, love and attachment or alcohol use. Men did recognise a distinction between sexual relationships and real (more encompassing) relationships, the latter of which involved love and emotional attachment, while the former is mostly driven by lust and alcohol use. While emotions of love, such as affection and tenderness are typically attributed to ‘femininity’, women also expressed strong emotions when discussing their partners’ infidelity. This alludes to the assumption that social and gender norms, as well as cultural standards play a role in the expression and experience of emotions. Doan et al. ( 2015 ) explore to what extent the expression of emotions of love differs across social groups, in this case homosexual and heterosexual couples. They find that stigma and societal prejudice leads to a lower level of granted legitimacy and recognition of a loving homosexual relationship, which in turn affects the couple’s level of public expression of their emotions.

To conclude, emotions are at the core of romantic or social relationships and are inextricably bound to expressions of love. Emotions associated with love differ historically and cross-culturally, are gender-specific and shaped by societal norms and range from positive feelings such as affection, care, tenderness, or commitment to negative feelings of pain, jealousy, or irrationality. Yet, findings may have to be further investigated – and new insights generated.

Gendered love and labour

As stated above, Ruark et al. ( 2014 ) argue that there is a gendered difference within the emotional experience of love. Men did recognise a distinction between sexual relationships and real relationships, the latter of which involved love and emotional attachment, while the former is mostly driven by lust and alcohol use. Women expressed strong emotions when discussing their partners’ infidelity, which often materialised in sadness or anger (ibid, 136).

Gender norms can influence how a heterosexual couple divides their unpaid domestic labour and income generating labour. A study in Tanzania and Zimbabwe found that men who wanted to provide practical support to their wives by assisting with domestic work were heavily stigmatised by other community members who would say that these men are completing a woman’s work or have been given a love potion by their wife (Comrie-Thomson et al. 2020 ). It was more acceptable for men to provide assistance when their spouse was ill, or to phrase it as a favour to their spouse, rather than that of a regular duty. Nonetheless, both men and women reported their marriages were ‘happier, more loving, more peaceful and more mutually supportive following increased male partner practical support’ (Comrie-Thomson et al. 2020 , 731).

While a number of studies demonstrate that a household spends more on items such as food and child education when women control a larger proportion of household assets (Fafchamps et al. 2009 ; Lachaud, 1998 ; Quisumbing and Maluccio, 2003 ), Kevane ( 2012 ) is critical of this assumption and shows how factors beyond gender could be contributing to the observed outcome. For example, this may be impacted by decisions of who to marry, especially in situations where men and women with similar views on spending and consumption choose to marry each other. Similarly, farming practices that appear to be determined by gender within a household may be more influenced by external factors. A study on farming practices in Southern Ghana showed women’s plots of land were less invested in than their spouses because their claim to the land was more insecure due to patriarchal allocation of land practices by village elders. In areas where women only have secondary rights to the land through a male relative, it can be more sensible to invest more resources and time in their spouse’s land which is securely held (ibid) (Steen, 2011 shows similar examples from a Zimbabwean context). These studies demonstrate how context and culture influence gender relations and the division of labour within a household.

Conclusions

The article brings a comprehensive and applied perspective on love, as a construction of society based on intra and interpersonal relationships. In this systematic review, we set out to examine how love, as a study site of social interaction, may be adequately understood and how it influences power, sustainability, and gender relations. After reviewing the literature, we may now conclude that despite its universal importance, love as a concept and a form of human interaction is still under-examined, not yet fully understood and thus deserving more attention in both in-depth studies and more comparative cross-cultural research.

In the reviewed literature, which comprises a catalogue of 80 selected texts with a focus on a subset of 45 articles, we identified four core types of love. First, love is conceptually specific as it is influenced by culture, space, and time. Second, the genres of romantic, compassionate, and confluent love, which are commonly construed as Western ideals, could also be identified across sub-Saharan African cultures. Third, transactional love describes the interconnection of love and material provision or financial support and was the most visible type of love in sub-Saharan African relationships. Finally, post-humanist perspectives of love are not limited to human entities, but instead constitutes an affirmative action towards all living entities as the primary integrating factor. Such love may be further explored in relation to themes such as ‘love of the environment and nature’ – also in the context of agricultural settings in sub-Saharan Africa.

Based on this systematic categorisation of how love is best understood, we also examined love in relation to power and a range of diverse emotions and gender relations with a specific focus on labour seen as a resource next to land in many sub-Saharan settings. Especially at the household level, exploitation can occur within a spousal relationship. Because of this, studying love in relation to the division of labour, resource management and power, reveals how spouses actively negotiate their power relationship. Furthermore, we clearly noticed that the expression and interpretation of emotions is central to social relations and love. The array of emotions associated with love, which we identified in the literature, largely corresponds with the distinct love genres presented above, and are influenced by culture. Similarly, understanding how love and culture impact gender relations may help reveal the division of a couple’s unpaid domestic labour and income generating labour.

To conclude here, we made the case that love not only matters for emotional wellbeing and interpersonal relations, but also influences resource use and division, gender equality, power and sustainability understood in human-environmental, intersectional, and intergenerational terms which we have also explored in further studies (Steen and Jerneck, forthcoming). The findings from the literature review have revealed that by examining love, our understanding of power relations, as well as negotiations in spousal relationships may be enhanced, as love directly relates to the division and use of labour (in farming households and mainly with a focus on women’s labour) and other resources. The scholarship of love, then, delivers novel perspectives and insights into gender inequalities, and in turn, contributes – or may contribute – to women empowerment.

Beyond the household level, we reviewed a broad body of literature of diverse, cross-cultural representations of love. On this basis, we found that love is best understood as a universal phenomenon, which is also culturally and socially-bound, as well as contextually specific. Importantly, the preconceived idea that ‘romantic love’ originated in Western or modern societies and can be reduced to a mere ‘imported good’ across non-Western cultures and societies, has been disproved, thus also echoing findings in other reviews (Karandashev, 2015 ). Simultaneously, we demonstrated that the complex connectedness between love and provision, introduced as ‘transactional love’, which was found to be more prominently discussed in the context of sub-Saharan African relationships, can coexist with emotions of love, passion, and affection. The diversity of conceptions of love, both in its expression and experience, was further exemplified by the post-humanist perspectives, or ‘harmony love’. Resting on the assumption that love is not limited to human entities, but instead extends far beyond it, love may be construed as the foundational principle of awareness, interconnectedness and situatedness shared by all beings. This ultimately channels humanity’s connectivity with nature and the world and may therefore drive the restoration and protection of Earth’s biodiversity. Provided that humanity’s love for the natural world is rekindled, love holds a vast transformative potential to promote sustainability in terms of protecting and conserving the natural environment and driving climate change action.

In addition to providing a systematic overview of the scholarship of love, we set out specifically in this article to examine what love means across sub-Saharan African cultures and societies as exemplified by the cases and examples we found. Out of the 80 reviewed articles, only 20 articles explicitly investigated love in an African setting. This indicates that African conceptualisations and experiences of love remain underrepresented in the debate on the theory of love. The article is an attempt to challenge this as we not only presented the richness of love (and its interpretations and expressions) in sub-Sahara Africa, but also illuminated the implications and contributions that the scholarship of love can make to improved gender equality as one aspect of sustainability. Finally, the overwhelming majority of the articles and texts that we reviewed either completely omitted or barely discussed queer perspectives on love. While there is a growing, emergent body of queer literature, we noticed the gap in the scholarship of love to fully encompass queer experiences.

As regards calls for further research, first we suggest combining literature and research on polygany and polyamorous love in order to enrich the understanding of the relationships between love, sex, power and gender. Second, we would encourage scholars to enrich the theory of love through cross-cultural investigations, profound ethnographies, in-depth cases, and wider discursive studies from where to draw further insights that may illuminate and advance the theory of love and the contribute to empower sub-Saharan smallscale farmers.

Data availability

As this is a literature review, no original data were generated or analysed.

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KS conceived the idea, designed the review, structured the article, and contributed to analysis and writing. AA and LL carried out the review searches, drafted the article, and contributed to analysis and writing. AJ contributed to analysis and writing. The information and views set out in this publication are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the employer.

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Steen, K., Antoniou, A., Lindemann, L. et al. Meanings and implications of love: review of the scholarship of love with a sub-Saharan focus. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 129 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02504-1

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Phase 1: The Discovery of Reliable Patterns of Interaction Discriminating the “Masters” From the “Disasters” of Relationships

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They were also amazed that in their first study with 30 couples they were able to “predict” the change in marital satisfaction almost perfectly with their physiological measures. The results revealed that the more physiologically aroused couples were (in all channels, including heart rate, skin conductance, gross motor activity, and blood velocity), the more their marriages deteriorated in happiness over a three-year period, even controlling the initial level of marital satisfaction.

The rating dial and their observational coding of the interaction also “predicted” changes in relationship satisfaction. Such large correlations in the data were unprecedented. Furthermore, Gottman and Levenson had preceded the conflict conversation with a reunion conversation (in which couples talked about the events of their day before the conflict discussion), and they had followed the conflict discussion with a positive topic. Gottman and Levenson were amazed to discover that  harsh startup  by women in the conflict discussion was predictable by the male partner’s disinterest or irritability in the events of the day discussion. They found that the quality of the couple’s friendship, especially as maintained by men, was critical in understanding conflict. Furthermore, the ability to rebound from, or  “repair” , conflict to the positive conversation became a marker of emotion regulation ability of couples.

Both Levenson and Gottman had discovered Dr. Paul Ekman and Dr. Wallace Friesen’s Facial Affect Coding System (FACS), and Gottman subsequently developed the  Specific Affect Coding System (SPAFF) , which was an integration of FACS and earlier systems in the Gottman lab.

The SPAFF became the main system that Gottman used to code couples’ interaction. At first, it took 25 hours to code 15 minutes of interaction, but later Gottman was able to get the same coding done in just 45 minutes, with no loss of reliability. Gottman also began applying time-series analysis to the analysis of interaction data. He wrote,  Time-Series Analysis: A Comprehensive Introduction for Social Scientists , a book on time-series analysis to explain these methods to psychologists, and developed some new methods for analyzing dominance and bi-directionality with James Ringland.

Phase 2: Prediction and the Replication of the Prediction

Soon after, Gottman and Levenson received their first grant together and began attempting to replicate their observations from the first study. The subsequent studies they conducted in their labs with colleagues eventually spanned the entire life course — with the longest of the studies following couples for 20 years, in Levenson’s Berkeley lab.

The Gottman lab at the University of Illinois also studied the linkages between marital interaction, parenting, and children’s social development with Dr. Lynn Katz, and later at the University of Washington involved studying these linkages with infants with Dr. Alyson Shapiro. Gottman developed the concept of  “meta-emotion” , which is how people feel about emotion (such as specific emotions like anger), emotional expression, and emotional understanding in general. Meta-emotion mismatches between parents in that study predicted divorce with 80% accuracy.

Gottman and Levenson discovered that couples interaction had enormous stability over time (about 80% stability in conflict discussions separated by 3 years). They also discovered that most relationship problems (69%) never get resolved but are  “perpetual problems”  based on personality differences between partners.

In seven longitudinal studies, one with violent couples (with Neil Jacobson), the predictions replicated. Gottman could predict whether a couple would divorce with an average of over 90% accuracy, across studies using the ratio of positive to negative SPAFF codes, the  Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (Criticism, Defensiveness, Contempt, and Stonewalling), physiology, the rating dial, and an interview they devised,  the Oral History Interview , as coded by Kim Buehlman’s coding system.

Gottman could predict whether or not their stable couples would be happy or unhappy using measures of positive affect during conflict. With Dr. Jim Coan, he discovered that positive affect was used not randomly, but to  physiologically soothe  the partner. Gottman also discovered that in heterosexual relationships,  men accepting influence from their wives  was predictive of happy and stable marriages. Bob Levenson also discovered that humor was physiologically soothing and that empathy had a physiological substrate (in research with Dr. Anna Ruef), using the rating dial.

Phase 3: Theory Building, Understanding, and Prevention & Intervention

The third phase of Gottman’s research program was devoted to trying to understand the empirical predictions, and thus building and then testing theory. Ultimately, Gottman aimed to build a theory that was testable or disconfirmable.

Testing theory in the psychological field requires clinical interventions. In 1996, the Gottman lab returned to intervention research with Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman. John and Julie Gottman designed both proximal and distal change studies. In a proximal change study, one intervenes briefly with interventions designed only to make the second of two conflict discussions less divorce-prone. In one of these studies, they discovered that a 20-minute break, in which couples stopped talking and just read magazines (as their heart rates returned to baseline), dramatically changed the discussion, so that people had access to their sense of humor and affection.

Together with Julie, John Gottman started building the  Sound Relationship House Theory . That theory became the basis of the design of clinical interventions for couples in John Gottman’s book,  The Marriage Clinic , and Julie Gottman’s book,  The Marriage Clinic Casebook . In August of 1996, they founded The Gottman Institute to continue to develop evidence-based approaches to improving couples therapy outcomes.

Read more about The Gottman Institute’s mission  here .

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How to Make a Relationship Last: 5 Secrets Backed by Research

L ove is wonderful, love is joy, love is the greatest thing in the world… Love is also an enormous pain in the ass. Marriage is hard work.

(Older people are nodding right now while young people are probably sticking their fingers in their ears and reciting their favorite lines from “The Notebook.”)

So how do you make love last? What myths about love are leading us astray and what do you have to do to have a loving relationship that stands the test of time?

I called somebody who looked at the research and has some answers…

Jonah Lehrer is the author of Imagine and How We Decide . His newest work is A Book About Love .

A lot of what you’re about to read is very unsexy and very unromantic. Sorry about that. But this isn’t fairy tale time. We’re going to see what the research says makes real relationships last so you can get as close to the fairy tale as possible.

Everyone asks how you got married. Nobody asks how you stayed married. Time to find out the answer to that often-ignored second question…

Why Online Dating Doesn’t Work

You want to find the perfect person. You ask, “Do they like the music I like? Do they enjoy the same movies I do?” Um, let’s stop right there…

Because the research shows similarity doesn’t matter .

From A Book About Love :

Another recent paper summarized the results of 313 separate studies, concluding that the similarity of personality and preferences—such as, the scientists say, “matching people who prefer Judd Apatow’s movies to Woody Allen’s with people who feel the same way”— had no effect on relationship well-being. Meanwhile, a 2010 study of twenty-three thousand married couples found that the similarity of spouses accounted for less than 0.5 percent of spousal satisfaction. In short, what we think we want in a spouse—someone who is just like us and likes all the same things—and what we want in real life are fundamentally mismatched.

Ruling someone out because they love Coldplay and don’t appreciate the subtle genius of Radiohead is a bad idea.

And all the online dating websites with their fancy algorithms fail because they’re based on the idea that similarity rules. Here’s Jonah:

Most online dating websites are focused on finding you a similar partner. But when you look at meta-analyses of thousands and thousands of couples you find that similarity is insignificant. It’s less than 1% of the variation in overall marital satisfaction. Researcher Eli Finkel argues that the algorithms they use are really no better than random chance because the idea that the person we should be seeking out is our doppelganger ends up leading us astray.

Looking for similarity is founded on the belief that if you share things in common, you won’t have problems. But over the course of a lifetime, every couple has problems.

So the only type of similarity that matters for relationships that last is in an area that researchers call “meta-emotions.”

What’s that mean? Thank you for asking. It means how you feel about feelings . You want someone who handles emotions the same way you do. Here’s Jonah:

John Gottman at the University of Washington has amassed a persuasive body of evidence that meta-emotions are the real signal variable in terms of predicting whether or not a marriage will last. Do you believe you should express anger? Or do you believe in holding it in and waiting for it to fizzle out? Do you think happiness should be shared but anger should be suppressed? Sharing your meta-emotional style gives you a common emotional template, a common language.

With long-term relationships you should be less concerned with characteristics that reduce the likelihood of conflict and pay more attention to finding someone who has a similar style of dealing with conflict. Because there is always going to be some.

It’s like aging. You can’t avoid it. So smart people don’t ask, “How can I live forever?” They ask, “What’s the best way to handle it?” Here’s Jonah:

Daniel Wilde said, “Choosing a partner is choosing a set of problems.” There is no partner with whom we’re not going to fight and get annoyed and complain about. The question is how you deal with those problems. What Gottman has found is that people who have clashing meta-emotional styles, they have a really tough time dealing with conflict. Even minor annoyances tend to become huge fights, because one partner wants to express and the other partner thinks you should hold it in and then all of a sudden it explodes. In contrast, when you have compatible meta-emotional styles — when people agree on how feelings should be expressed — they’re able to diffuse these tensions before they get too big and dangerous.

(To learn the 4 most common relationship problems — and how to fix them — click here .)

So there’s going to be conflict but you want to find someone that you can communicate with using a common emotional language. So communication is good. Which leads us to another counterintuitive finding…

Read more: How To Get People To Like You: 7 Ways From An FBI Behavior Expert

Arguing Is Good, Too

Yup, fighting is okay. Even about little things. Yes, really.

According to the scientists, spouses who complain to each other the most, and complain about the least important things, end up having more lasting relationships. In contrast, couples with high negativity thresholds—they only complain about serious problems—are much more likely to get divorced.

Arguing on the first date? Okay, probably not a good idea.

But Gottman’s research shows that 3 years into a relationship, if you’re not arguing at all, you’re much more likely to find yourself arguing in divorce court. Here’s Jonah:

Gottman’s research shows that 3 years into the relationship, if you’re not fighting, that’s the indicator of an unhealthy relationship. At that point, you’re not holding in your farts anymore. You’re fully intimate. You’ve seen where they’ve got hair, you’ve smelled their morning breath. You’re not holding anything back. So if you’re not fighting, it’s often a sign of withdrawal. In a sense, you can look at complaining and fighting in an intimate relationship as just ways of showing you care.

Arguing is not a sign of impending doom, it’s normal and natural. No relationship is trouble-free. So, after years together, not fighting means you’re not communicating.

(To learn how to win every argument, click here .)

Some might be thinking, “Romeo and Juliet didn’t argue.” And my response would be…

Forget Romeo And Juliet. Think Arranged Marriage.

Yes, I know, that’s terribly unromantic.

But Shakespeare killed off Romeo and Juliet at the end of the play so he wouldn’t have to write about the contentious divorce settlement or mention the People Magazine cover describing the vicious custody battle over Romeo, Jr.

There’s infatuation and then there’s love. Infatuation is quick, romantic and easy. Researchers call it “limerence.” Here’s Jonah:

If you want the purest example of limerence, it’s Romeo and Juliet. He falls in love with her in seconds. He sees her and he just knows. He walks over and starts talking in iambic pentameter. It’s when you meet someone and your heart starts racing and your palms gets sweaty and your mid-brain is just bursting with dopamine. You just get that high and you’re convinced: they’re your soulmate. It’s a very, very romantic feeling. It’s love at first sight. It’s what the movies are always going on and on about.

Thinking about soulmates and being obsessed with limerence is very romantic. It’s also lazy. It’s the idea that “If I find the perfect person I won’t have to fight, change or do any work.” And that leads to the problem with limerence…

It just doesn’t last. Here’s Jonah:

Dorothy Tennov, who’s done most of the research on limerence, found again and again and again that limerence doesn’t pan out. Her work is filled with all sorts of sad case studies of people who talk about the high and how at a certain point, they realized it was leading them astray. It was a pure fantasy but it was hard to shake it off. Limerence is chemical fiction. Because it’s cinematic, we’ve often confused it for real love. Love is something that can be measured over time and limerence doesn’t pass that test. The purest way to distinguish between limerence and love is: love lasts and limerence doesn’t.

Okay, opposite extreme: what does the research on arranged marriages show? They’re harder in the beginning. But after a few years they’re as successful (and often more successful) than “love” marriages.

Am I saying you should have an arranged marriage? No. Chill out. It’s the underlying lesson here that’s important.

Going into a long-term relationship focused on limerence leads to disappointment. But people in arranged marriages have no such illusions.

They don’t even know the other person. So they’re well-aware it’s going to take effort to make it work . And so they work. And so it works. Here’s Jonah:

Arranged marriages go in with this expectation that love is hard work, that love isn’t going to take care of itself. Because they barely know this person, there is no illusion that they don’t have to put in the work. Instead, they know by necessity that it’s going to require an investment of effort. Not that I want my kids to have arranged marriages, but the attitude that they’re premised on, the idea that love is work, that is the right attitude.

Romeo-and-Juliet-style limerence feels great and easy but doesn’t last. Arranged marriages sound weird but they have the right attitude: it’s gonna take some work. But if you do the work, it pays off over the long haul.

(To learn the science behind how to be a good kisser, click here .)

Okay, lots of talk so far about hard work. Let’s make this simpler. Is there a way to be more successful in your career and more successful in your relationship? Yeah. There’s one quality that leads to good things in both…

Read more: New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals That Will Make You Happy

What Produces Success In Life Also Produces Success In Love

What does a lot of research say produces success in school and career? Grit . Guess what? It works in relationships, too.

Now “grit” may not sound like something you’d praise on Valentine’s Day but that’s just an issue of wording.

Do you want devotion? Loyalty? Someone who won’t give up on you or the relationship? Exactly. (To learn more about grit from leading expert Angela Duckworth, click here .)

Ladies, look for guys with grit. They’re far less likely to get divorced.

Duckworth demonstrated the importance of grit in loving relationships by collecting grit scores from 6,362 middle-aged adults. After analyzing the data, and controlling for the influence of other personality traits and demographic factors, she found that gritty men were 17 percent more likely to stay married.

Relationships are challenging over the long term. So you want someone who has stick-to-itiveness. Here’s Jonah:

When I talked to Duckworth about it, her answer was very straightforward. It’s because grit determines how we persist in trying situations. Marriage has plenty of trying situations. People who are particularly low in grit, when love feels like work, they’re more likely to drop out the same way soldiers do at West Point. Love lasts but it doesn’t last by itself. It’s not magic. It lasts because we can make it last, because we keep putting in the work.

(To learn a Navy SEAL’s secrets to grit, click here .)

Alright, so all these fancy studies have a lot to say. But can they predict who will split up? Yes. And the formula is quite simple…

What Really Predicts If A Relationship Will Last

Just ask a couple about their relationship. Yup, that simple. The story they tell predicts with 94% accuracy whether they will divorce in 3 years.

After assessing fifty-two couples based on their oral history interviews, the psychologists Kim Buehlman, John Gottman, and Lynn Katz at the University of Washington found that the way spouses described their history predicted whether they would get divorced within the next three years with 94 percent accuracy. It’s an astonishing statistic: by simply looking at how couples speak about their past, the scientists could foresee their future.

So what differs between the stories told by the happy couples and the not-so-happy couples? It’s not the content. Again, everyone experiences conflict. But couples with a future “glorify the struggle.” To simplify:

BAD : “We fought. It was awful. In fact, my partner is awful.”

GOOD : “We fought. It was awful but we worked it out and now we’re better than ever.”

Here’s Jonah:

Every couple is going to go through hard times and go through points where they wonder if they should still be together. That’s just part of being in a long-term relationship. Then, the question becomes: how do they talk about it? Some couples talk about it almost like a sign from the gods that they shouldn’t be together. Some couples find a way to glorify it. To talk about how it brought them together. How they made it through and how they’re stronger because of what happened.

It’s how you interpret what happened. Nobody is happy on mile 20 of the marathon. And if the story stops there, it’s not a good one.

But if you pass the finish line, the struggle makes the victory that much sweeter. And those are the stories that happy couples tell.

(To learn the recipe for a happy marriage, click here .)

Alright, we’ve learned a lot from Jonah. Let’s round it up and learn why a relationship that lasts is the key to a happy life…

Read more: New Harvard Research Reveals A Fun Way To Be More Successful

Here’s what Jonah had to say about how to make a relationship last:

• Similarity doesn’t matter : Matching music playlists don’t predict happy marriages. Sorry. Focus on emotions.
• Arguing is good : Negative communication beats no communication every time.
• Know it’s going to take work : The healthy way to get to “Romeo and Juliet” is to think “arranged marriage.”
• Have grit : Devotion. Loyalty. That’s grit. And it predicts success at the office and at home.
• “Glorify the struggle” : It’s all about the story you tell. Did the conflict lead to a happy ending? Hint: it better.

Love is a challenge. But life is a greater challenge. We’d like a sure-thing that guarantees happiness and takes away all the pain. But that’s fiction.

If you’ll excuse a superhero analogy, you need to stop trying to be Superman . He’s invulnerable. But nobody is invulnerable. Bad things happen to all of us. We cannot avoid pain.

You’d be better off trying to be Wolverine . He isn’t invulnerable. But he can recover from almost any injury. You can’t live a life free from conflict but you can learn to cope with the hard times until the good times return.

And what helps you cope with the problems of life better than anything? And makes you successful and happy? “Our closest relationships determine how we respond to the toughest times in life.” Here’s Jonah:

There is no easy life. Then, the question becomes, how do we cope with it? That’s really what George Vaillant and the Grant Study have looked at. How we adapt to life, how we cope. Vaillant has found that what determines how well you adapt is who you love and how you love them. Our closest relationships determine how we respond to the toughest times in life. What you find is that people who have close relationships live longer. They’re far more successful. They make more money. They’re much, much happier. If you go down the list of everything we think we want in life it’s all tied up with the ability to love and be loved.

And when Jonah asked George Valliant, who led the Grant Study at Harvard, about these results, what did Valliant say?

“I wrote once that when we are old our lives become the sum of everyone we have loved. That’s still true. I believe it more than ever.”

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This piece originally appeared on Barking Up the Wrong Tree .

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Marriages and Divorces

How is the institution of marriage changing? What percentage of marriages end in divorce? Explore global data on marriages and divorces.

By: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

This page was first published in July 2020 and last revised in April 2024.

Marriage, as a social institution, has been around for thousands of years. 1 With things that are thousands of years old, it is easy to assume that they can only change slowly. But developments since the middle of the 20th century show that this assumption is wrong: in many countries, marriages are becoming less common, people are marrying later, unmarried couples are increasingly choosing to live together, and in many countries, we are seeing a ‘decoupling’ of parenthood and marriage. Within the last decades the institution of marriage has changed more than in thousands of years before.

Here we present the data behind these fast and widespread changes and discuss some of the main drivers behind them.

Marriages are becoming less common

In many countries, marriage rates are declining.

The proportion of people who are getting married is going down in many countries across the world.

The chart here shows this trend for a selection of countries. It combines data from multiple sources, including statistical country offices and reports from the UN, Eurostat, and the OECD.

For the US we have data on marriage rates going back to the start of the 20th century. This lets us see when the decline started, and trace the influence of social and economic changes during the process.

• In 1920, shortly after the First World War, there were 12 marriages annually for every 1,000 people in the US. Marriages in the US then were almost twice as common as today.
• In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the rate fell sharply. In the 1930s marriages became again more common and in 1946 – the year after the Second World War ended – marriages reached a peak of 16.4 marriages per 1,000 people.
• Marriage rates fell again in the 1950s and then bounced back in the 1960s.
• The long decline started in the 1970s. Since 1972, marriage rates in the US have fallen by almost 50%, and are currently at the lowest point in recorded history.

The chart also shows that in comparison to other rich countries, the US has had particularly high historical marriage rates. But in terms of changes over time, the trend looks similar for other rich countries. The UK and Australia, for example, have also seen marriage rates declining for decades, and are currently at the lowest point in recorded history.

For non-rich countries the data is sparse, but available estimates from Latin America, Africa, and Asia suggest that the decline of marriages is not exclusive to rich countries. Over the period 1990 - 2010, there was a decline  in marriage rates in the majority of countries around the world.

But there’s still a lot of cross-country variation around this general trend, and in some countries, changes are going in the opposite direction.

Marriages across cohorts have declined

This chart looks at the change in marriages from a different angle and answers the question: How likely were people of different generations to be married by a given age?

In many rich countries there are statistical records going back several generations, allowing us to estimate marriage rates by age and year of birth. The chart here uses those records to give marriage rates by age and year of birth for five cohorts of men in England and Wales.

For instance, you can look at 30-year-olds, and see what percentage of them in each cohort was married. Of those men who were born in 1940, about 83% were married by age 30. Among those born in 1980 only about 25% were married by age 30.

The trend is stark. English men in more recent cohorts are much less likely to have married, and that’s true at all ages.

There are two causes for this: an increasing share of people in younger cohorts are not getting married; and younger cohorts are increasingly choosing to marry later in life. We explore this second point below.

People are marrying later

In many countries, declining marriage rates have been accompanied by an increase in the age at which people are getting married. This is shown in the chart here, where we plot the average age of women at first marriage. 3

The increase in the age at which people are getting married is stronger in richer countries, particularly in North America and Europe.

In countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the average age at marriage has increased less or broadly remained unchanged.

More people marrying later means that a greater share of young people are unmarried.

According to the British census of 1971 about 85% of women between the age of 25 and 29 were married, as this chart shows. By 2011 that figure had declined to 58%.

For older people the trend is reversed – the share of older women who never got married is declining. In the 1971 census, the share of women 60-64 who had ever been married was lower than it is for women in that age bracket in the decades since.

You can create similar charts for both men and women across all countries, using the UN World Marriage Data site . This lets you explore in more detail the distribution of marriages by age across time, for both men and women.

There has been a ‘decoupling’ of parenthood and marriage

The share of children born outside of marriage has increased substantially in almost all oecd countries.

An arrangement where two or more people are not married but live together is referred to as cohabitation. In recent decades cohabitation has become increasingly common around the world. In the US, for example, the US Census Bureau estimates that the share of young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 living with an unmarried partner went up from 0.1% to 9.4% over the period 1968-2018; and according to a survey from Pew Research, today most Americans favor allowing unmarried couples to have the same legal rights as married couples.

The increase in cohabitation is the result of the two changes that we discussed above: fewer people are choosing to marry and those people who do get married tend to do so when they are older and often live with their partner before getting married. In the UK, for example, 85% of people who get married cohabited first. 5

Long-run data on the share of people living in cohabitation across countries is not available, but some related data points are: in particular, the proportion of births outside marriage provides a relevant proxy measure, allowing comparisons across countries and time; if more unmarried people are having children, it suggests that more people are entering long-term cohabiting relationships without first getting married. It isn’t a perfect proxy – as we’ll see below, rates of single parenting have also changed, meaning that rates of births outside marriage will not match perfectly with cohabitation rates – but it provides some information regarding the direction of change.

The chart here shows the percentage of all children who were born to unmarried parents.

As we can see, the share of children born outside of marriage has increased substantially in almost all OECD countries in recent decades. The exception is Japan, where there has been only a very minor increase.

In 1970, most OECD countries saw less than 10% of children born outside of marriage. In 2014, the share had increased to more than 20% in most countries, and to more than half in some.

The trend is not restricted to very rich countries. In Mexico and Costa Rica, for example, the increase has been very large, and today the majority of children are born to unmarried parents.

Globally, the percentage of women in either marriage or cohabitation is decreasing, but only slightly

In recent decades there has been a decline in global marriage rates, and at the same time, there has been an increase in cohabitation. What’s the combined effect if we consider marriage and cohabitation together?

The chart below plots estimates and projections, from the UN Population Division, for the percentage of women of reproductive age (15 to 49 years) who are either married or living with an unmarried partner.

Overall, the trend shows a global decline – but only a relatively small one, from 69% in 1970 to 64% projected for 2020. At any given point in the last five decades, around two-thirds of all women were married or cohabitated.

There are differences between regions. In East Asia, the share of women who are married or in a cohabiting union increased, in South America the share is flat, and in North America and North Europe it declined.

Single parenting is common, and in many countries, it has increased in recent decades

This chart shows the share of households of a single parent living with dependent children. There are large differences between countries. 6

The causes and situations leading to single parenting are varied, and unsurprisingly, single-parent families are very diverse in terms of socio-economic background and living arrangements, across countries, within countries, and over time. However, there are some common patterns:

• Women head the majority of single-parent households, and this gender gap tends to be stronger for parents of younger children. Across OECD countries, about 12% of children aged 0-5 years live with a single parent; 92% of these live with their mother. 7
• Single-parent households are among the most financially vulnerable groups. This is true even in rich countries. According to Eurostat data , across European countries, 47% of single-parent households were “at risk of poverty or social exclusion” in 2017, compared with 21% of two-parent households. 8
• Single parenting was probably more common a couple of centuries ago. But single parenting back then was often caused by high maternal mortality rather than choice or relationship breakdown; it was also typically short in duration since remarriage rates were high. 9

Same-sex marriage has become possible in many countries

Marriage equality is increasingly considered a human and civil right, with important political, social, and religious implications around the world.

In 1989, Denmark became the first country to recognize a legal relationship for same-sex couples, establishing ‘registered partnerships’ granting those in same-sex relationships most of the rights given to married heterosexuals.

It took more than a decade for same-sex marriage to be legal anywhere in the world. In December 2000, the Netherlands became the first country to establish same-sex marriage by law.

In the first two decades of the 21st century legislation has quickly spread across more countries.

Where are same-sex marriages legal?

This map shows in green all the countries where same-sex marriage is legal.

Many of the countries that allow same-sex marriage are in Western Europe. But same-sex marriage is also legal in other parts of the world, especially in North and South America.

Some perspective on the progress made regarding marriage equality

The rate of adoption of marriage equality legislation over time gives us some perspective on just how quickly things have changed. The first chart shows that in the year 2000, same-sex marriage was not legal in any country – two decades later it was legal in many more.

Changes in attitudes towards homosexuality are one of the key factors that have enabled the legal transformations that are making same-sex marriage increasingly possible. 10

The second chart shows that the number of people living in countries that have legalized same-sex marriage has also increased a lot.

And as the third chart shows, same-sex sexual acts are now legal in a majority of all countries 11 .

Despite these positive trends, much remains to be done to improve the rights of LGBTQ people. In some countries people are imprisoned and even killed simply because of their sexual orientation or gender identity; and even in countries where same-sex sexual activity is legal, these groups of people face violence and discrimination.

Marriage trends show that social institutions can, and often do change quickly

Across the world, fewer people are choosing to marry, and those who do marry are, on average, doing so later in life.  The underlying drivers of these trends include the rise of contraceptives , the increase of female participation in labor markets (as we explain in our article here ), and the transformation of institutional and legal environments, such as new legislation conferring more rights on unmarried couples. 12

These changes have led to a broad transformation of family structures. In the last decades, many countries have seen an increase in cohabitation, and it is becoming more common for children to live with a single parent, or with parents who are not married.

These changes have come together with a large and significant shift in people’s perceptions of the types of family structures that are possible, acceptable, and desirable. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the rise of same-sex marriage .

The de-institutionalization of marriage and the rise of new family models since the middle of the 20th-century show that social institutions that have been around for thousands of years can change very rapidly.

Divorce rates increased after 1970 – in recent decades the trends very much differ between countries

Trends in the rate of divorces relative to the size of the population.

How have divorce rates changed over time? Are divorces on the rise across the world?

In the chart here we show the crude divorce rate – the number of divorces per 1,000 people in the country.

When we zoom out and look at the large-scale picture at the global or regional level since the 1970s, we see an overall increase in divorce rates. The UN in its overview of global marriage patterns notes that there is a general upward trend: "at the world level, the proportion of adults aged 35-39 who are divorced or separated has doubled, passing from 2% in the 1970s to 4% in the 2000s."

But, when we look more closely at the data we can also see that this misses two key insights: there are notable differences between countries; and it fails to capture the pattern of these changes in the period from the 1990s to today.

As we see in the chart, for many countries divorce rates increased markedly between the 1970s and 1990s. In the US, divorce rates more than doubled from 2.2 per 1,000 in 1960 to over 5 per 1,000 in the 1980s. In the UK, Norway, and South Korea, divorce rates more than tripled. Since then divorce rates declined in many countries.

The trends vary substantially from country to country.

In the chart, the US stands out as a bit of an outlier, with consistently higher divorce rates than most other countries, but also an earlier 'peak'. South Korea had a much later 'peak', with divorce rates continuing to rise until the early 2000s. In other countries – such as Mexico and Turkey – divorces continue to rise.

The pattern of rising divorce rates, followed by a plateau or fall in some countries (particularly richer countries) might be partially explained by the differences in divorce rates across cohorts , and the delay in marriage we see in younger couples today.

Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers looked in detail at the changes and driving forces in marriage and divorce rates in the US. 13 They suggest that the changes we see in divorce rates may be partly reflective of the changes in expectations within marriages as women enter the workforce. Women who married before the large rise in female employment may have found themselves in marriages where expectations were no longer suited. Many people in the postwar years married someone who was probably a good match for the postwar culture but ended up being the wrong partner after the times had changed. This may have been a driver behind the steep rise in divorces throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The share of marriages ending in divorce

Trends in crude divorce rates give us a general overview of how many divorces happen each year but need to be interpreted with caution. First, crude rates mix a large number of cohorts – both older and young couples; and second, they do not account for how the number of marriages is changing.

To understand how patterns of divorce are changing it is more helpful to look at the percentage of marriages that end in divorce and look in more detail at these patterns by cohort.

Let's take a look at a country where divorce rates have been declining in recent decades.

In the chart here we show the percentage of marriages which ended in divorce in England and Wales since 1963. This is broken down by the number of years after marriage – that is, the percentage of couples who had divorced five, ten and twenty years after they got married.

Here we see that for all three lines, the overall pattern is similar:

• The share of marriages that end in divorce increased from the 1960s to the 1990s.
• In 1963, only 1.5% of couples had divorced before their fifth anniversary, 7.8% had divorced before their tenth, and 19% before their twentieth anniversary. By the mid-1990s this had increased to 11%, 25% and 38%, respectively.
• Since then, divorces have been on the decline. The percentage of couples divorcing in the first five years has halved since its 1990s peak. And the percentage who got divorced within the first 10 years of their marriage has also fallen significantly.

Divorces by age and cohort

What might explain the recent reduction in overall divorce rates in some countries?

The overall trend can be broken down into two key drivers: a reduction in the likelihood of divorce for younger cohorts; and a lengthening of marriage before divorce for those that do separate.

We see both of these factors in the analysis of divorce rates in the US from Stevenson and Wolfers. 13 This chart maps out the percentage of marriages ending in divorce: each line represents the decade they got married (those married in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 1990s) and the x-axis represents the years since the wedding.

We see that the share of marriages ending in divorce increased significantly for couples married in the 1960s or 70s compared to those who got married in the 1950s. The probability of divorce within 10 years was twice as high for couples married in the 1960s versus those who got married in the 1950s. For those married in the 1970s, it was more than three times as likely.

You might have heard the popularised claim that "half of all marriages end in divorce". We can see here where that claim might come from – it was once true: 48% of American couples that married in the 1970s were divorced within 25 years.

But since then the likelihood of divorce has fallen. It fell for couples married in the 1980s, and again for those in the 1990s. Both the likelihood of divorce has been falling, and the length of marriage has been increasing.

This is also true for marriages in the UK. This chart shows the cumulative share of marriages that ended in divorce: each line represents the year in which couples were married. A useful way to compare different age cohorts is by the steepness of the line: steeper lines indicate a faster accumulation of divorces year-on-year, particularly in the earlier stages of marriages.

You might notice that the divorce curves for couples in the 1960s are shallower and tend to level out in the range of 20% to 30%. Divorce rates then became increasingly steep throughout the 1970s; 80s and 90s, and eventually surpassed cumulative rates from the 1960s. But, since the 1990s, these curves appear to be falling once again, mirroring the findings from the US.

We don't know yet how long the marriages of younger couples today will last. It will take several decades before we have the full picture on more recent marriages and their eventual outcomes.

Marriages in many countries are getting longer

As we saw from data on divorce rates , in some countries – particularly richer countries such as the UK, US and Germany – divorce rates have been falling since the 1990s. This can be partially explained by a reduction in the share of marriages ending in divorce, but also by the length of marriages before their dissolution.

How has the length of marriages changed over time?

In the chart here we see the duration of marriages before divorce across a number of countries where this data is available. An important point to note here is that the definitions are not consistent across countries: some countries report the median length of marriage; others the mean . Since the distribution of marriage lengths is often skewed, the median and mean values can be quite different. 14

So, we have to keep this in mind and be careful if we make cross-country comparisons. On the chart shown we note for each country whether the marriage duration is given as the median or mean value.

But we can gain insights from single countries over time . What we see for a number of countries is that the average duration of marriage before divorce has been increasing since the 1990s or early 2000s. If we take the UK as an example: marriages got notably shorter between the 1970s to the later 1980s, falling from around 12 to 9 years. But, marriages have once again increased in length, rising back to over 12 years.

This mirrors what we saw in data on the share of marriages ending in divorce: divorce rates increased significantly between the 1960s/70s through the 1990s, but have seen a fall since then.

We see a similar pattern in the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. However, there is still a significant amount of heterogeneity between countries.

Interactive charts on Marriages and Divorces

Recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies (and divorce) dates back to to the third millennium BCE, in ancient Mesopotamia and Babylonia. Bertman, S. (2005). Handbook to Life in Ancient Mesopotamia . Oxford University Press.

UK Office for National Statistics (2014) – Marriage statistics, cohabitation and cohort analyses . Download the underlying data for this chart (.csv)

The average age at first marriage can be measured by directly asking people the age at which they first married. This data is unfortunately not available for all countries, so in some cases, figures correspond to an indirect estimate based on marriage rates by age. You find more details here .

United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Marriage Data 2019 . Download the underlying data for this chart (.csv)

Office for National Statistics (2014). Marriage statistics, cohabitation and cohort analyses. Available online .

A different way to slice the data is to calculate the proportion of children who live in single-parent households. When calculated this way the ranking of countries changes, and the US stands out as the country with the highest share of children living with a single parent. You find a discussion, as well as a map with cross-country estimates of this alternative metric here .

This is based on estimates from 2016 published in the OECD Family Database (Table SF1.3.A. Living arrangements of children by age, online here ).

The concept of “risk of poverty or social exclusion” corresponds to the intersection of several vulnerability dimensions. It covers persons who are either at risk of poverty, severely materially deprived, or living in a household with a very low work intensity. You find more details about this in Eurostat here .

For a discussion of historical remarriage patterns see for example Van Poppel, F. (1998). Nineteenth-century remarriage patterns in the Netherlands. The Journal of interdisciplinary history, 28(3), 343-383. Available online .

For details see Adamczyk, A., & Liao, Y. C. (2019). Examining public opinion about LGBTQ-related issues in the United States and across multiple nations. Annual Review of Sociology, 45, 401-423.

For more details see Jean-François Mignot. Decriminalizing Homosexuality: A Global Overview Since the 18th Century. Annales de démographie historique, In press, 1.

You can read more about the driving forces of family change in Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and divorce: Changes and their driving forces. Journal of Economic Perspectives , 21(2), 27-52. Available online .

Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and divorce: Changes and their driving forces.  Journal of Economic Perspectives ,  21 (2), 27-52. Available online

As the UK Office for National Statistics notes:

"The median duration of marriage at divorce in this release is represented by the middle value when the data are arranged in increasing order. The median is used rather than the mean because the duration of marriage for divorces is not symmetrically distributed. Therefore, the median provides a more accurate reflection of this distribution. The mean would be affected by the relatively small number of divorces that take place when duration of marriage exceeds 15 years."

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• Based on ‘hope and love,’ UB celebrates opening of FOXG1 Research Center

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Based on ‘hope and love,’ UB celebrates opening of FOXG1 Research Center

Members of the FOXG1 Research Center pose for a photo after a ribbon cutting officially opening the new center. Photo: Douglas Levere

By TOM DINKI

Published September 26, 2024

Hope and love aren’t often mentioned in the same breath as scientific research, but they’re exactly what UB’s FOXG1 Research Center (FRC) was founded on. 

“Love for every individual living with FOXG1 syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as their caregivers, and hope that we can find a cure for FOXG1 syndrome and related disorders on the basis of scientific discoveries we are making,” Soo-Kyung Lee, director of the FRC and the parent of a child with FOXG1 syndrome, told a crowd gathered to celebrate the center’s official opening Tuesday. 

The occasion included a ceremonial ribbon cutting and science symposium in the Buffalo Room of Capen Hall, as well as a tour of the Cooke Hall lab where the center’s researchers are developing a promising viral gene therapy against the rare disorder.

“This research center really represents a bold step forward, not only for the University at Buffalo but for the future of science,” said Robin Schulze, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “The center means we are that much closer to finding a cure for the neurodevelopmental disorder FOXG1 syndrome. Today’s ribbon cutting clears the way for innovative research and creative collaborations.”

The center is led by Lee, Empire Innovation Professor and Om P. Bahl Endowed Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences, and her husband, Jae Lee, professor of biological sciences.

The Lees’ teenage daughter, Yuna , is one of only about 1,000 people in the world diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome. It’s caused by a mutation of the FOXG1 gene, one of the most important genes for early brain development, and causes cognitive and physical disabilities, as well as life-threatening seizures. Those affected require 24/7 care.  

Soo-Kyung Lee (seated, left) and Jae Lee (right) listen to speakers during the ceremonial ribbon cutting for the FOXG1 Research Center. Photo: Douglas Levere

Since Yuna was diagnosed in 2012, the Lees, who joined UB in 2019, have dedicated their careers to studying the disorder. They’ve found that the FOXG1 gene and protein remain active in mice after birth, providing hope that some symptoms can be alleviated, and hope that therapy of the FOXG1 gene may be transferable to more common disorders like autism and Alzheimer’s disease.

This new center will support the Lees’ ongoing development of a viral gene therapy . A postnatal injection of the therapy into day-old mice rescued abnormalities in parts of the brain responsible for language, memory and social interaction. Their goal is to begin human clinical trials as early as spring 2026, pending U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval.

“[The Lees’] groundbreaking viral therapy offers renewed hope for patients and families affected by this rare disorder. Their personal journey and unwavering dedication to this cause are truly inspiring,” said Venu Govindaraju, vice president for research and economic development, whose office is supporting the center. 

Govindaraju added that between the FRC and the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education — which will use artificial intelligence to assist children with speech and language disorders — UB is dedicated to addressing the unique challenges faced by individuals with disabilities.

“The potential of artificial intelligence in drug discovery and personalized medicine is immense,” he said. “As a leading scientific research community and our excellence in AI and life sciences, we are committed to exploring innovative approaches that can accelerate the development of effective treatments for FOXG1 syndrome and other neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The Lees take ribbon-cutting attendees on a tour of the research center in Cooke Hall. Photo: Douglas Levere

The FRC is also supported by the FOXG1 Research Foundation, where Soo-Kyung Lee is chief scientific officer. The foundation’s CEO, Nasha Fitter, who is also the parent of a child with FOXG1 syndrome, recalled first connecting with Soo-Kyung Lee via a Facebook group in 2017. 

“I honestly almost fell off my chair that we had a neuroscientist who was also a parent and no one had told me this,” Fitter said. “And then I learned that her husband was also a neuroscientist.”

Fitter and others co-founded the FOXG1 Research Foundation shortly after. She traced the organization’s rise, from its humble first symposium in 2018 to now having raised more than $7 million toward human clinical trials, and credited a large part of that success to its partnership with the Lees’ lab.

“They have built an entire gene therapy lab at the University at Buffalo. It is exceptional for an academic medical center to develop treatments,” Fitter said. “That does not usually happen at university campuses, and that is what is happening here.

“We’re literally creating the drug that will be given to our children in a clinical trial,” she added. “It’s a monumental step that this has happened in seven years.”

Jae Lee concluded the day by thanking children with FOXG1 syndrome for making their families whole.

“I feel we are closer to the finish line to find the cure for FOXG1 syndrome,” he said.

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Olivia Newton-John

Widow John Easterling opens up on finding love again after 'supernatural' marriage to Olivia Newton-John

26 September 2024, 11:37

By Thomas Edward

Listen to this article

It was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love.

That's precisely how John Easterling describes his marriage to Grease legend Olivia Newton-John .

And even after her death in 2022, having lost her battle to breast cancer, he is still very much in love with his late wife.

But it's that love that remains he pours into his work with the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund, a project she started over a decade ago to help eradicate cancer and care for those suffering from it.

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Talking to People in a new interview, Easterling said: "I'm doing super fantastic. I'm staying very busy with the Olivia Newton-John Foundation Fund and the research that's going on there."

"We're sponsoring plant medicine and cancer research. And the beauty of that is that we're seeing quite stunning results in the early stages."

Whilst he's keeping busy, Olivia's memory lingers in the home they shared together. So Easterling has decided to sell it and move on.

"I'm still at the ranch, but we just put it on the market," referring to their sprawling ranch in Santa Ynez, California.

"I've got the animals here, the horses and cat and dog. We're all just moving forward."

"We had such a lovely time here, but it was our place and now I'm recognising it's time to let somebody else enjoy that peace and serenity and beauty," he says, reflecting on the home they shared together.

"People who are in a similar circumstance I know would understand."

Easterling intends to spend his time living between Florida and Peru, yet his heart will remain in Santa Ynez, and with Olivia.

"I have that very strong presence of her all the time. And sometimes even last night with the full moon, she was so present.

"And then today I was just listening to the song ' My Dream ', the Jim Brickman song, and it was just so spectacular," he gushed, talking about his late wife's long-lost recording that was recently released.

"It really just sent me into a supernatural space of emotion and joy."

The widow still feels so strongly connected to Olivia, that he finds it difficult to consider the possibility of finding new love, because his love with Olivia was extraordinary and unique.

John first met Olivia in 1993 when they were with other partners, yet began dating in 2007 and married a year later.

"Olivia and I had a love so big and so indefinite in time," John said. "We embraced it as something even bigger than ourselves."

"We never had any petty arguments or anything like that. I mean, our whole life experience and the things that we shared and believed in were just too important. I didn't even think love could be like that."

Whilst it has only been two years since the death of his one true love, Easterling believes: "That's not going to happen again, I mean, I don't expect it.

"More recently, I'm getting messages coming from Olivia when I'm in Peru at our special places there, and those messages are like 'Love life, live life.

"Life is very, very precious, and don't waste a moment of life because it's a very thin veil that separates us.'"

Easterling added that love "can express itself in many forms and many ways. It's having loving relationships with everyone in your life. It's just different expressions."

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"I couldn't imagine it being possible the first time," he said about finding love with Olivia. "So I can't imagine it being possible again."

Though he might not ever be ready to move on from his marriage to the ' Hopelessly Devoted To You ' icon, Easterling does believe he'll see her again.

"I see and feel her presence all the time, and I know we'll be completely reunited again. So that's giving me the strength and the energy to really push forward."

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90 day fiancé: are kimberly rochelle & tj goswami still married.

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20 Best Reality TV Shows Right Now

90 day fiancé’s daniele gates & yohan geronimo reveal shocking relationship status after cheating scandal, 90 day fiancé: the real reason kimberly rochelle & tj goswami split up.

Tejaswi "TJ" Goswami and Kimberly Rochelle are struggling to make their marriage work after tying the knot in 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way season 5. The couple met on social media and felt that their love was destined, with Kimberly believing that TJ was sent to her by her spirit guides. Despite their close ages and initial feelings of love and affection, Kimberly and TJ faced challenges in dealing with their cultural differences, which led to several fights. Kimberly even had a heated argument with TJ's brother, Yash, who accused her of being egotistical and unwilling to compromise.

TJ also accused Kimberly of starting fights with him and not appreciating his efforts, such as building a new apartment for them to live in after marriage. Kimberly felt restricted living with TJ's family and believed they were hostile towards her. For instance, TJ's mother, Alka, was disappointed to see her daughter-in-law wearing inappropriate clothing in front of the elderly in the house. Alka criticized Kimberly for disrespecting Indian traditions . Despite not being truly happy in India, Kimberly eventually married TJ in an extravagant traditional Indian ceremony. However, the couple's issues only worsened after they got married.

Why Did Kimberly Leave India After Marrying TJ?

Kimberly felt depressed & lonely in india.

Shortly after getting married on the 90 Day Fiancé spin-off, TJ and Kimberly got into one of their most explosive fights. Living in their own place above TJ's family, Kimberly opened up about feeling depressed and voiced her frustration to TJ about their communication struggles.

Reality TV is more popular than ever. With so many to choose from, here are some of the best reality TV shows to stream or watch right now.

She felt like she wasn't receiving enough emotional support from TJ , prompting him to suggest she return to the United States if she wanted to part ways. Feeling unable to meet her duties as a wife and lonely in India, Kimberly made the choice to return to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to be with her family.

Why Did Kimberly & TJ Briefly Split?

Kimberly & tj experience challenges in communication.

To resolve her marital issues with TJ, Kimberly moved to India in mid-2024. Unfortunately, the time apart didn't rekindle their love.

Kimberly held an Instagram live session to explain why she was returning to the United States, revealing her marital problems. She claimed that TJ had physically abused her before their marriage, and his behavior drastically changed after they got married. She struggled with communication problems with TJ due to a language barrier and felt rejected when he didn't give her physical affection. After getting repeatedly rejected, Kimberly tore some of their wedding pictures, which had her name misspelled .

Kimberly & TJ Are Still Married

Kimberly is still in love with tj.

Although Kimberly claimed in her last live video that she was ready to leave India, she apparently changed her plans and decided to give her marriage another chance.

She recently shared a sweet video with TJ on their joint Instagram account called @twoepisodes , suggesting they reconciled after their intense fight . In the video titled, "when you try to tell him you love him," Kimberly expresses her love for TJ while he shyly turns his face away from the camera and gently grabs her shoulder. Hopefully, the 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way couple can repair their relationship this time.

90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way airs Mondays at 8 p.m. EDT on TLC.

Source: 90 Day Fiancé /YouTube, Kimberly Rochelle /Instagram @twoepisodes /Instagram

90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way

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90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way flips the script on the original series. Couples who have never met face to face and have 90 days to get married switch roles. The Americans in the relationship will now head overseas for their culture shock. India, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Russia are just some countries where the show observes the blossoming (or faltering) 90-day relationship that will end happily ever after or a one-way ticket back home alone.

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