Love, Marriage, Family Organization and the Puzzle of Neolocality in Non-Industrial Societies: A Cross-Cultural Study

In this paper we answer the question, “What features of family organization promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies?” We also directly address Rosenblatt’s findings and those of a follow up study by Lee and Stone that, counterintuitively, show non-neolocality rather than neolocality to be correlated with love as a basis for marriage. Ember and Levinson and even Lee and Stone have thought this finding to be puzzling. We have recoded Rosenblatt’s original measures on a four-point (0–3) scale: no love, low love, medium love and high love and coded additional cases using ethnographic data taken from eHRAF World Cultures (Human Relations Area Files. https://ehrafworldcultures.yale.edu/). Using these data sets we obtained 109 cultures and tested how post marital residence and marriage types affected the importance of romantic love as a basis for marriage using multiple ordinal regression. Nuclear family organization by itself (including polygynous families) is not significantly correlated with our dependent variable.