In non-western cultures the groups tend to be the main unit of concern and these are known as ‘collectivist’ cultures. Here individuals are encouraged to be interdependent whereas individualistic in western cultures may promote freedom of choice in relationships. Collectivist cultures greatly shape relationships through family, group or community. Here relationships may in tern be involuntary in many cases where arranged marriages are factored in. With arranged marriages, parents play a significant role in who their children marry. This is based on the assumption that marrying on love would be a disaster and parents know best for their children. This is backed up by research showing voluntary marriages from individualistic cultures actually have lower levels of satisfaction.
Epstein found that in cultures with reduced social mobility, non-voluntary relationships appeared to work very well, with lower divorce rates than Western marriages.
Similarly, research by Umadevi show that people in arranged marriages can be happy also. They compared female Indian students from professional and nonprofessional backgrounds. Both groups were happy with the idea of having an arranged marriage if they gave consent.
Furthermore, Grupta and Singh studied couples living in areas where they had been in arranged marriages. They found that love was high in love marriages but then decreased. Whereas in arranged marriages love exceeded 10 years after the love marriages. Showing that happiness can be found in arranged marriages.
However, in collectivist cultures such as china, has now seen an increase in love relationships with a move from arranged marriages. Whyte et al found that women who had freedom of choice and who married for love were happier than women in arranged marriages. This study supports the claim that freedom of choice is more important, going against arranged marriages.
A limitation of these studies is that they are based on women in one part of china and therefore the likelihood of cultural bias may exist as there may be unique culture that exists within that area but not anywhere else.
Also research is gender bias as the men were not asked on how happy they were in the relationship. Even though the women reported happiness, this may not have necessarily been the case for men.
There may also be a historical bias in much of this research. There has been a significant increase in the number of voluntary & temporary relationships in the West in the past several decades. This would also explain the significant increase in voluntary relationships in non-Western cultures such as India and China.
Moreover, even when studying cross cultures there’s always differences within the cultures so it makes findings hard to generalise even within the cultures because not one person is the same. This represents a cultural bias where a culturally specific idea is applied to a culture where it is less relevant showing imposed etic.
In conclusion, these explanations provide a valuable explanation to how relationships form under the influence of the culture. However, not everyone in the culture will follow the social norms so it’s hard to generalise the findings to each culture saying that’s how they do things.
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