Search

Although an individual may report showing love to his or her spouse in a particular way, there is no guarantee the partner will notice the behavior, much less recognize it as a display of love. In the current study, we investigated whether husbands and wives see their partner expressing love in the ways partners indicate they show it, and if feelings of marital satisfaction are higher among spouses whose reported displays of love are better recognized as such by their partners. To accomplish this objective, we asked 302 married couples from Croatia and 456 married couples from Serbia to indicate the ways they show love to their partner, the ways their partner shows love to them. All analyses controlled for spouses’ feelings of marital love. Overall, results showed concordance between spousal pairs in perceptions of each other’s propensity to show their love in particular ways. Partners showed the most agreement for displays of love through physical and verbal affection. Interestingly, husbands were better than wives at recognizing their spouses’ reported displays of love. For both husbands and wives, reporting that one’s partner expressed love was tied to higher levels of marital satisfaction.

According to sociostructural theories, men and women are predisposed to express love differently because they are socialized into different gender roles. The goal of this study is to examine to what extent gender differences in showing love could be explained with gender per se, and to what extent with gender related attributes (expressiveness and instrumentality) and attitudes toward gender roles in marriage. We gathered data from 302 married couples from Croatia and 456 married couples from Serbia of different ages (20-82 years) and various urban/rural backgrounds. Instruments that were used in this study were the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ ; Spence, Helmreich & Stapp, 1975), the Attitudes toward Gender Roles Scale (Kamenov, Jugović & Jelić, 2009), and the Ways of Showing Love Scale that was constructed for the purpose of this study. As expected, women were more expressive, less instrumental, and held more egalitarian attitudes than men, but gender accounted for only a small amount of variance for these gender-related attributes and attitudes. We performed regression analyses to examine the extent to which individuals’ trait expressiveness, trait instrumentality, and attitudes toward gender roles (versus gender) predicted their tendency to report showing love to one's partner in various ways. Results have shown slightly different patterns for the Croatian and Serbian sample. While expressivity proved to be a significant predictor for all the different ways of showing love in both cultures, instrumentality was a more important predictor in the Serbian sample and gender attitudes in the Croatian sample. Overall results have shown that although men and women differ in two expressive and two instrumental ways of showing love, gender itself accounted for more variance in domestic and public instrumentality, whereas emotional openness and support and physical affection were better explained by gender related attributes and attitudes.

Although love has been tied to different behaviors for men and women, it is unclear whether individuals intend to express their love through such behaviors. In order to identify the ways in which men and women report showing love, we developed the 40-item Ways of Showing Love Scale. The specific ways of showing love fell into six broad categories: (1) communal and sacrificial behaviors, (2) physical affection, (3) verbal affection, (4) domestic instrumentality, (5) emotional openness and support, and (6) chivalry. Upon identifying the classes of behavior individuals report using to express love, we examined: (a) gender differences in the ways spouses report showing love ; (b) the stability of these differences across three generations of couples ; and (c) whether feelings of love predicted the ways spouses report showing love. To do so, we gathered data from 302 Croatian and 456 Serbian married couples, who came from a wide range of education and employment backgrounds. In order to test for generational differences, couples were divided into three age brackets (20–35, 36–54, and 55–87 years). Lending support to the validity of our scale, spouses’ feelings of love predicted all six ways of showing love. Both 56 husbands and wives reported expressing love through affection and by respecting each other’s needs. Whereas women indicated they show love by being open and supportive, as well as by doing housework, men indicated they show love through physical affection and acts of chivalry. Results were stable across generations and cultures.

Research project "Love and gender in Croatia" was presented, along with preliminary results regarding gender differences in ways of showing love.