The Emotion of Love Across Generations: An Intergenerational, Interethnic Perspective

This chapter sheds a new light on the perspective of intergenerational love in South Africa. Love has been studied over a long period; however, intercultural and cross-cultural research on this topic has only recently caught increasing interest. In addition, love in Africa has hardly been researched from emic perspectives. Historic as well as contemporary ethnographic research in African contexts has often reduced, misunderstood and misinterpreted concepts of love, intimacy and marriage in African cultures. Underlying meanings of love have suffered ethnocentric interpretations and provided reduced and stigmatised meanings of African love relationships. L. Murray Bowen’s theory of intergenerational connections is used in this chapter to gain a deeper understanding of intergenerational love concepts in Generation X women. Thereby, the research study aims at gaining a deeper understanding of intergenerational love concepts in this specific context and expanding the theory from African perspectives. In this chapter, it is argued that love research in South African contexts needs in-depth emic approaches to genuinely understand African cultural perspectives on love. Furthermore, these concepts cannot be understood only on an individual level, but also need an intergenerational understanding of love in the context of the family. The chapter presents empirical findings from a qualitative research study within the hermeneutic–interpretative paradigm. It discusses findings from in-depth qualitative interviews with three women from South Africa from different ethnic groups (Xhosa, Sotho and Zulu) who all find themselves in intercultural/interethnic marriages. Findings on concepts of intergenerational concepts are presented and discussed. Conclusions and recommendations are provided.