In the 17th century, one's family would pick the person one was going to marry based on social class and economic status.
Symbolic interaction theorists believe that shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motives behind people's actions.
[4]: 31 Cultural norms regarding the experience of love vary so that the emphasis in relationships is on sexual attraction, romantic courtship, intimate friendship, or commitment.
"[5]: 1 When people open their hearts and show their flaws, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses to the wrong person, it can result in heartbreak, then causing feelings of regret.
[7] Expressions of love can include acts such as self-sacrifice, compromise, courting, kissing, sex, and physical contact.
In France, people show their love by holding hands, kissing, and initiating sexual relationships.
[9] In the 19th century, many marriages were enforced by the parents of the individuals to satisfy political or economic factors in families.
[14] Factors such as gender, race, economic status, age, religion, education, and ethnicity can influence an individual's views on both marriage and love.
[17] Young adults are predominantly influenced by unrealistic depictions of love, witnessed in film and social media.
For example, The Notebook depicts love as a force that can conquer all, the idealisation of one's partner, and the idea of soulmates.
The feelings love brings: happiness, empathy, mutual respect, a sense of purpose, can lead to stronger motivation, less stress, a positive outlook on life, and hope.
When a dog wags its tail or licks its owner after being parted for a few hours, this is interpreted as happiness.
However, people who are foremost with expressive traits of sex hormones tend to be enchanted by their opposite kinds.
From an anthropological point of view, a male tends to choose a female with a visual sign of youth and beauty, which indicates her high oestrogen level and strong reproductive ability.
However, a female with a more pragmatic and realistic goal, tends to choose a male with education, ambition, wealth, respect, status and masculine appearance.
In some Western cultures, falling in love with one's first cousin could be seen as possibly 'taboo' and therefore morally and lawfully wrong.
However, now that the society of the United States has changed drastically, it is common and completely acceptable to find couples of different races.
As an individual crosses over from a child to a teen to an adult, this type of love becomes more relevant in their life.
[20]: 20 Psychiatrist and psychologist John Bowlby was the first to develop the attachment theory of love in Western culture.
It starts with attachments made in infancy, stating that it is important for children to have a relationship with their primary caregivers in order to experience normal development.
[34] This thought pattern can lead these individuals to self-sabotage, causing them to tend to go after partners with a dismissive-avoidant style.
This includes criticism over Bowlby's wording of "partial deprivation" to describe a relationship with a caregiver that is unsatisfying.
Other criticism stems from Hilda Lewis’ research which was not able to show a connection between separation from the mother and behavior.
[40] Social psychologist, Philips Shaver, and colleagues found that attachment processes could be represented in a hierarchy.
"Love" is a basic level that concept includes super-ordinate categories of emotions: affection, adoration, fondness, liking, attraction, caring, tenderness, compassion, arousal, desire, passion, and longing.
For example, Beverly Fehr and James Russell examined the concept of love by carrying out the fifth experiment, the Sustainability of the Subcategory.
They asked other groups of participants to judge how weird or natural those sentences sounded when the word "love" in those definitions was substituted by targeted sub-category terms.
However, when a peripheral sub-type, such as infatuation, took the place of "love" in the definitions, it yielded subjectively peculiar results.
"In sum, Fehr identified a set of features of love that appear to have a clear prototype structure in terms of some features being better and some being poorer exemplars of the concept of love, and this difference appears to affect other aspects of the way love-related phenomena are processed.
"[43] Later Arthur Aron and Lori Westbay expanded the underlying structure of love prototype of Fehr's research.