Structural Analysis of Romance and Religion in Eastern vs. Western Cultures
by Edwin L. Young, PhD
November 12, 2005

What I am engaged in at this time is an exploration of the nature of a culture as a whole and how certain salient aspects (in this case romantic love and religion) of a culture influence complementary personality aspects in almost everyone, if not everyone, in that culture. The population, the individual people in the culture, is unaware of how the culture is shaping them. There should be variations in how such a cultural aspect influences each individual. At a level below the culture as a whole, there are many subgroups such as sects; class; ethnic identification; demography; affluence; education; and so forth that influence many of these variations. Nevertheless, the broader cultural influence is universal. In other words, as an example, a highly mature person’s self-concept as a mate in an intimate love relationship could be defined by contrasting it with the romantic notions and behavior of the larger population of the somewhat less mature people and even more different from the very immature. Yet, everyone in the nation or culture’s population lives under the same canopy of the myth of romantic love. The same is true with respect to the essence of the religious myths common to a culture. Even a highly educated professor of philosophy or literature whose life is dedicated to knowing and understanding romantic love and religion in their culture is subject to the influence of the essential features of dominant myths of religion and romance.

The belongingness need, common to both romance and religion, seems to be common to almost all humans, just as it seems to be for many other genus and species. Yet, the belongingness need, however, is distinctly different from the need for an intimate love relationship. In other words, each type of trait that is genetically determined by virtue of the species to which one belongs can be used to differentiate biological determinism from cultural determinism with a useful level of accuracy. Sub-groupings may influence variations in traits, especially in a species as malleable and adaptable as the human species. However, in the broadest sense, the influence of a nation’s evolved culture is the most powerful and ubiquitous influence, albeit virtually unconscious in all members of a culture.

One very interesting aspect of romantic relationships is that when a person is involved in one, how one tends to see and describe the meaning of their relationship changes from stage to stage and when being in versus being out of the relationship. Individuals can follow idiosyncratic scenarios through stages, nevertheless, all stages and their unique scenarios are infected with the romantic love virus. Similar effects can be seen in stages of religious involvement. Actually, stages can be plotted and variations at different stages can be loosely categorized, yielding quite a neatly charted variety of patterns. Nevertheless, in our culture, every pattern, or variation on the theme, whether romance or religion, is infected, or affected, by universal aspects of the dominant, salient romantic or religious myth.

In short, my concern at this point is not the individual. Rather, my concern is how the structure of a nation’s culture shapes structures and processes in individuals. It is that structure-centric versus person-centric model again. My next essay will attempt to include a wide range of themes and show how they are integrated in a closely knitted, overarching, global system.