Social and Cultural Factors of Love as Interpersonal Attraction

This chapter describes several social and cultural parameters that influence love as an interpersonal attraction. Among those are homogamy, endogamy, and propinquity between individuals. However, socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic segregation also contributed to this social factor of attraction. Various types of homogamy, such as social, economic, religious, and educational, have substantially determined mating preferences for centuries across all societies. The chapter also explains how economic and social reasons, as well as the rationality of economic and social exchange, have played their roles in interpersonal attraction. In such conditions, the motivations of social mobilities contributed to attraction between individuals. Consumption-based relationships can often motivate interpersonal attraction in certain social and relationship contexts. The chapter also shows how social similarities and complementarities, homogamy and heterogamy, affect interpersonal attraction in modern societies. Cultural evolution has substantially changed interpersonal attraction, and the modernization of socioeconomic factors involved in interpersonal attraction has taken place.