Love and Sex

Using the Google Scholar research database, I was able to find an article entitled "Love is a Dangerous Thing" by Katharine Wood and Rachel Jewkes.  To find this article, I searched using the words "love" and "sexual relationships".  Many of the articles that this site found for me were books that you had to purchase or have special permission in order to see, however, I was lucky enough to come upon this article.

"Love is a Dangerous Thing" discusses the findings of a study that took place in Umtata, Eastern Cape.  The study interviewed 45 people: 30 people between the ages of 16 and 26, 12 mothers, and 3 policemen.  The study was researching the nature of violence in youth relationships in that city.  The findings were very unreal, with the majority of the young women admitting to being violently beaten by past boyfriends and many of the young men admitting to committing such violence.  Mothers also admitted that they had known what was going one, however, did not intervene in their daughter's relationships or their son's acts because "boys will be boys."  The violent acts committed ranged from being shot, stabbed, beaten, killed, and attempting suicide.  One of the sections that the paper goes in to is called "Constructions of Love and Sex Among Youth."  In this part of the paper, the authors talk about how these young adults referred to love and seemed to define it.  They seemed to come to the conclusion that "love was perceived to necessarily involve sex but not sex to involve love."  For these young people, love seemed negative and daunting as it was referred to as a disease, dangerous, a source of pain, something that gets in the way of a successful future, and a cause of sickness.  The article states that even though romantic relationships were not completely absent, they were extremely rare.

The views of love and perceived notions of love in this article by many young people is extremely negative and haunting in comparison to a lot of the previous articles I have read.  My question is, are these young people's view on love in the Eastern Cape similar to the perception of love for young people in all countries?  Do all young people feel so negative and afraid, frankly, of love?  Or is this definition of love unique to the young people of the Eastern Cape; has their culture socialized them differently to define and view love differently than people of other cultures and in other places?

Wood, Kate, and Rachel Jewkes. 'Love is a Dangerous Thing': Micro-dynamics of Violence in Sexual Relationships of Young People in Umtata. CERSA (Women's Health). Medical Research Council, 1998.