Love and Marriage Through the Lens of Sociological Theories

Abstract

This paper seeks to apply sociological theories to the concepts of love and marriage inorder to better understand their construction and how they function in modern Western society.Illustrated by examples from my own life, the paper attempts to examine love using sociologicalmicro-theories such as phenomenology, symbolic interaction, rational choice theory and the dramaturgicalperspective. Macro-theories such as conflict theory, functionalism, and post modernismare used in order to analyze love as it relates to marriage and the ways in which themeanings of these concepts and their positions in society have changed.