Romantic Love in America: Cultural Models of Gay, Straight, and Polyamorous Relationships

(Hardback)

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American Lovers: A Study of Romantic Love, Gender, and Sexuality introduces the reader to the love and sex lives of fifteen people: two are polyamorous, five are gay, and eight are straight. Coupled with rich interview material, this book provides a guided tour through the variable geography of love relationships as studied in the social sciences. Victor de Muck describes evolutionary, cognitive, social, prototypical, triadic, and neural and style theories of romantic love and sex, concluding with a generic American cultural model of romantic love that importantly delves into its relational properties as a dyad.

Reviews

Victor De Muncks Romantic Love in America promises to introduce the reader to the love and sex lives of fifteen people two of whom are polyamorous, eight of whom are straight, and five gay. This fascinating volume delivers on this promise and does so in a theoretical context which incorporates both cognitive and evolutionary frameworks. An absorbing read for those interested in the experiences and conceptualizations of individuals who experience romantic love or who indulge in a variety of sexual encounters with or without the justification of love. -- Robert L. Moore, Professor Emeritus, Rollins College
De Munck has given us an exciting and timely application of the idea of culture as consisting of shared, collectively held cultural models which provide the frame within which individual goals, knowledge, and agency play out. The issues which he explores through a rich mixture of extended interviews and analytic theory involve sexual identity, romantic love, and sexan area of culture in which individual participants stake is large and in which there exists substantial individual variation and nuance. -- David Kronenfeld, University of California - Riverside

Author Bio

Victor de Munck is professor in the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies at Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University.