Love and Gender

The chapter offers a relational-sociological account of gender, romantic love, and personal relationships. It conceptualizes gender as a social category that prescribes particular kinds of social relationships within and between genders. Traditionally, friends are supposed to be of the same gender, whereas romantic love has long been reserved for heterosexual relationships. Friendships connect transitively to form cliques, whereas romantic love is exclusively dyadic. Romantic love and gender, but also friendship and family, are cultural models (institutions) that bring order into personal relationships. They make for patterns of structural equivalence, with different patterns by type of relationship. The statistical analysis of confiding relations in the 2004 U.S. General Social Survey shows them to be remarkably gendered. Close personal ties to friends, neighbors, and even siblings run predominantly to members of the same gender. Women maintain more family relations, and men confide more in work colleagues.