Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

Am I in Love? “He loves me. He loves me not.” Pulling the petals of love from a flower to gauge the status of a relationship seems so arbitrary. How do people decide if they are in love? In western cultures, marriage and long-term relationships have been based on love for decades. And when love is no longer present, couples separate. Marriages dissolve. Some find a second love relationship before an existing one is formally abandoned. Others pause between relationships as if one should end before beginning another. Love is a squishy idea. Love is hard to define in terms of a checklist. But that does not stop magazines from responding to the demand for answers to the question: “How do I know if I’m in love?” Geoffrey W. Sutton, PhD Cite this post Sutton, G. W. (2015, February 13). Am i in love? Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture https://geoffwsutton.blogspot.com/2015/02/am-i-in-love.html A Love Model You might suspect that psychologists st...

Valentine's Day Dance Love   And    Romance 1 “I love you” Who says it first?  Men do but people think women do. Marissa Harrison and Jennifer Shortall (2011) reported that women and men think women fall in love and say “I Love you” first. But men in relationships reported they were the first to say “I love you.” 2 Do young people view interracial dating similarly ? In the U.S., slavery and laws prohibiting relationships between Black and White Americans provide a negative context for relationships between people who appear different based on skin color. There are of course scientific problems with the definition of race and appropriate terms to use. A recent look at mixed race dating showed that young people use the terms Black and White to refer to their own group and members of the other group. In his qualitative study, Todd Schoepflin found the most favorable attitudes toward interracial dating were expressed by black men and white women compa...