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During class last week, Vidya brought up the idea of love across cultures. Specifically, she mentioned that some cultures and religions do not allow sex before marriage and may have even stricter taboos on certain behaviors prior to marriage. In such cases, perhaps love is redefined to exclude sexual arousal. This made me think of two potentially conflicting phenomena/practices: love at first sight and arranged marriages.

I'm defining love at first sight as a person's self-reported experience that he/she "fell in love" with another person upon seeing that person for the first time (without having had any interactions with him/her). Love at first sight is perhaps too "floofy" of a concept to discuss in terms of its relation to science, but to some extent I think that love at first sight (if it does exist) is based-- at least to some extent-- on sexual arousal. To what extent do these feelings relate to love? Are people who believe they experienced love at first sight just experiencing the cascade of behaviors and emotions we described in class (i.e. arousal, emotional attachment, empathy) faster than other people (who don't believe in love at first sight)?

Conversely, there is a question of arranged marriages and love. In such scenarios, a family enters into a contract with another family to wed their offspring. Whether this union is arranged for socio-political reasons, religious beliefs, or cultural practices, the element of choice is not necessarily involved in the contract; in some cases the bride and groom may have never seen one another prior to their wedding day. Despite the lack of familiarity with one another, however, some couples may consider themselves to be in love at their wedding or shortly thereafter (this information is anecdotal-- 2 couples in my extended family were/are in arranged marriages). Are arranged marriages actually more similar to love at first sight than initially thought? To what extent do choice, familiarity, and culture affect how we view love? (And what implications does that have for how we choose to study it?)