To What Extent Can There Be A Sociology Of Love Sociology

Introduction to sociology

“Can there be a sociology of love?”

Introduction

Sociology is the scientific study of people’s social relationships and institutions. Sociology’s subjects are diverse, encompassing crime to religion, from the family to politics, from the divisions of race and social standing to the beliefs of a common culture, and from social stability to radical change in whole societies.

The question set focuses on one such institution the idea of love. But what is love? A good definition of love could be “An intangible connection between two people that feels exceptionally good.” This is a good definition as it encompasses all sorts of love, from romantic love to the simple joy of acceptance and love from parents and children.

To start with, just the one word can represent so many different meanings and understandings: sexual love, intimate love, companionate love, romantic love, parental love, friendship love, inter-species love, love for places, belongings, views. It is a word that is used prolifically to mean so much, which means it is incredibly difficult to define and study. Love has a significant impact on our culture, society and lives, and yet we can know relatively little about what it means. Love is not something we can ‘know’- we must investigate how it is represented socially and culturally. In the UK we are structured by the norm of the loving couple, this is seen as keeping families and society together and stable.

In 2015 open university researchers aimed to understand this couple love and the everyday moments on a relationship by creating the Enduring Love? Study. It was a large-scale study and used a quantitative survey to collect data and statistical information on 5445 relationships. After acquiring copious amounts of data, they concluded that the romance wasn’t as important as the every day things that shows us that we are loved from something as little as having been brought a cup of tea every day without being asked. It is the little things that build a foundation for enduring love (Gabb and Fink,

The main tenet of conflict theory is that society is composed of groups that are competing for scarce resources. How can this theory help us analyse Love? Focusing on how men’s and women’s love and relationships have changed, men have dominated women for a long time, and women had little alternatives other than to accept their exploitation. As the world became more industrialized, women started gaining the ability to meet their basic survival needs without being married. Love played an important part in women’s emancipation: the rise of romantic love and its link with marriage, meant women increasingly had more choice in their future partners., so the love that does endure is more mutual and based on little things like Gabb and Fink (2015)