This article examines predictors of intimacy between husbands and wives. Emphasis is on equality of spouses. A causal model is presented.

Based on work by Rosenblatt (1966), this article tests a hypothesis relating sexual freedom to romantic love. Findings suggest a relationship between premarital and extramarital sexual permissiveness equality for women and men and romantic love.

Previous cross-cultural studies of romantic love have, in the authors' view, been plagued by vague definitions of the concept and a conflation of cultural, bio-psychological, and social factors. Thus, the authors distinguish between the social aspect of romantic love (which they argue is a universal human predisposition) and the variable cultural valuation of romance. In a large cross-cultural sample, the authors test the hypotheses that gender equality and family organization are important predictors of the cultural valuation of romantic love.

This paper presents research on the factors that promote romantic love as a basis for marriage in non-industrial societies. After a discussion of the previous literature on romantic love in ethnographic societies, the authors used the SCCS, EA, and data from eHRAF to create a data set of 109 cultures and then utilized multiple ordinal regression to test the relationship between different types of families and post-marital residence practices and the importance of romantic love in marriage. The findings show that monogamy is significantly correlated with romantic love, while nuclear family organization and neolocal post-marital residence are not significantly correlated. The presence of polygyny is found to lower the probability of romantic love being a basis for marriage. These findings contradict previous research, which found a relationship between non-neolocal post-marital residence and the presence of romantic love in marriage.

This study focuses on preferences for thinness or fatness in women cross-culturally. Results contradict previous studies and the hypothesis that preference for fatness in women is predicted by resource scarcity. Alternative explanations for valuation of fatness are explored, including climate and male dominance.