Love, Marriage, Family Organization and the Puzzle of Neolocality in Non-Industrial Societies: A Cross-Cultural Study

Cross-Cultural Research. 2023. Vol. 57. No. 1. P. 3–22.

De Munck V., Korotayev A., Ustyuzhanin V.

In this paper we answer the question, “What features of family organization promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies?” We also directly address Rosenblatt’s findings and those of a follow up study by Lee and Stone that, counterintuitively, show non-neolocality rather than neolocality to be correlated with love as a basis for marriage. Ember and Levinson and even Lee and Stone have thought this finding to be puzzling. We have recoded Rosenblatt’s original measures on a four-point (0–3) scale: no love, low love, medium love and high love and coded additional cases using ethnographic data taken from eHRAF World Cultures (Human Relations Area Files. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/). Using these data sets we obtained 109 cultures and tested how post marital residence and marriage types affected the importance of romantic love as a basis for marriage using multiple ordinal regression. Nuclear family organization by itself (including polygynous families) is not significantly correlated with our dependent variable.

Keywords: брак, marriage, нуклеарная семья, monogamy, моногамия, romantic love, романтическая любовь, nuclear family, neolocality, неолокальность