Meaning-Making in Love Stories in Cultural Perspectives: Expressions, Rituals, and Symbols

The meaning of love differs across social and cultural contexts. These meanings are often constructed and reconstructed through narrations. Love narrations impact strongly on the identity of individuals across their life span and can include different concepts of love, descriptions of love expressions, symbols, and meanings. This chapter presents love narrations from individuals in Japan, the USA, South Africa, Israel, and Germany. The aim of this chapter is to explore and compare love concepts and narrations of individuals of different cultural, gender, religious, and language contexts. The research design followed a qualitative study design, using semistructured interviews with 21 questions, exploring narrations on love and culture. The chapter presents findings from a study of 22 individuals of different cultural origin. Findings provide new insight into concepts of love, feelings associated with love, expressions of love, rituals of love, love symbols, and stories of love. Love contributes strongly to meaning-making in connection with the personal and cultural, as well as the environmental, context. Conclusions are drawn, and recommendations for future research are given.