Love and its expression may be the single most significant and universal aspect of human experience, yet it is also one of the most diverse and varied in its cultural forms, symbols, and contexts. Recent research indicates, for instance, that Americans to say “I love you” more often than people in most other cultures. Is this an indication that Americans are somehow more loving, affectionate or amorously inclined than people in the rest of the world? At first glance it would seem so. Surely there would seem to be no better evidence of love than its direct verbal expression, and perhaps no better evidence of its absence than lack of such expression. There is some data that seems to correlate America’s disproportionate affirmations of love with a correspondingly disproportionate frequency of loving relationships: the most comprehensive recent international survey in history done on love finds Americans to be among the most loving people in the world, with approximately 80% experiencing love on a daily basis. So, on this account, America’s fondness for saying “I love you”, appears to be causally related to its heightened experience of love. However, the same survey also militates against this connection: many nations/cultures that use direct declarations of love much less frequently, experiencing even higher percentages of love than in the USA—which suggests that the frequency and candor of American’s verbal affirmations of love have little necessary relevance to their experience of it.
“When, In 2003, American McDonald’s launched its “I’m loving’ it” marketing campaign in Germany, translating its slogan literally as ‘Ich liebe es’, Guardians of the German language were not pleased. ‘An American is relatively quick in expressing love for profane things and therefore is able to give his/her heart to fast food. The German translation ‘Ich liebe es,’ however, is just too strong to be squeezed into a styrofoam box together with a fatty burger,’ one journalist argued.”
Many possible explanations have been offered to clarify this situation: differences in the complexity and richness of words/expressions for intimacy and love in various languages, the prevalence of commercial language and cliches in popular culture, the democratizing of society and corresponding informality of communication, and the increasing use of shorthand and informal expressions from texting/email technologies for complex ideas. However, one common reference that researchers frequently draw upon in this connection, is the well-known contrast between “high context and low context cultures” from cultural anthropology. First coined by Edward Hall in his mid-twentieth-century work The Silent Language, these designations were originally criticized as simplistic and culturally naïve– much like Ruth Benedict’s concept of “guilt cultures and shame cultures”, conceived around the same time and similarly derided shortly after some initial popularity. However, also much like Benedict’s controversial concepts, the “high/low context” categories gradually reemerged in the literature –in revised form—with new and more sophisticated applications. The terms “High context culture” Vs. “Low context culture” have come to refer respectively to contrasting cultures in which communication tends to be ‘highly contextualized’, nuanced, and complex (high context) on one hand, and cultures in which communication tends to be relatively abstract, explicit and decontextualized (low context) on the other hand.
High context cultures are heavily-laden with religious, social, class, family, age, and gender roles and traditions. Customs, etiquette, social roles and requirements of tradition in such cultures make the quality of communication complex and context-sensitive. Words, phrases, non-verbal gestures, and behaviors vary in meaning and significance depending upon who they are about, directed toward, or exchanged between—with different words/behaviors having different meanings within different interactions, and many possible words with the same or similar meaning being applicable in different ways in different situations. High context cultures therefore require a good deal of caution and deference in social communication, to ensure that the right message is being communicated in just the right way between just the communicants. High context cultures tend to value tradition, be more hierarchical, have more well-established social classes, have more complex family structures, and support more relational and collectivist conceptions of self-identity. The complex and intricate relationships of extended southern European and Latin American families, for instance, with their elaborate network of traditional roles, rites of passage, respect for age and gender, and multifarious modes of indirect but meaningful communication—through things like song, dance, and ritual—exemplify this high context cultural ethos.
Low context cultures, in contrast, tend to be relatively free from the influence of traditional social, religious, family, age, and gender roles. Their egalitarian ethos tends to make communication styles in low context cultures less formal, nuanced, and contextual than those in high context cultures. Communication in low context cultures is more verbal, direct, and defined by abstract ideas. Since the nuances of traditional social context have less influence over their worldview, low context cultures tend to value direct verbal communication over the subtleties of non-verbal cues and behaviors–and deference to these subtleties plays a less important role in shaping the nature of words, phrases, and meanings for low context cultures. Low context cultures therefor also tend to be more egalitarian, more socially informal and less bound by regard for status, gender, age, or situational factors than high context cultures. The informal, simple, and narrowly conceived relationships in American and northern European families, for instance, with well-defined personal boundaries and respect for individual privacy that necessitate ‘family meetings’, candid conversations, and clear verbal expressions of mutual agreement, exemplify this low context cultural ethos.
Research along these lines has identified Scandinavian nations, Teutonic nations and the British Isles in northern Europe –as well as the USA—as particularly low-context, while many African, South American, Middle eastern and Asian nations tend to be more high context. Thus, these high/low context distinctions may serve to explain why Americans, in their very low-context environment, feel the need to make candid and effusive verbal declarations of love more frequently than people in other cultures, and why high context cultures that seem, by American lights, to be emotionally unavailable or dispassionate in this regard, are just as intimately and emotionally connected and involved with those they love. Lacking subtle distinctions in, and varied expressions for, the experience of affection, devotion and desire, in their democratic, informal, and straight-forward society, Americans find it easier to express these sentiments with a simple “I love….”. Such personal interactions in high context Chinese culture, by contrast, mediated and conditioned by many comparatively intricate dimensions of inter-relational roles, obligations, and identities, are communicated in much deeper and richer ways than a simple word or phrase can do justice to—intimate thoughts and feelings require a multidimensional matrix of actions, behaviors and vocabularies to properly convey. Hence, in Chinese culture, direct expressions of intimacy such as saying “I love you” are very often regarded as too crude, insolent, or inappropriate for most people in most interactions, and are therefore avoided. From the vantage-point of an unaware observer from a low context culture, this reluctance may suggest callous indifference and lack of intimacy. From the vantage-point of a high context culture, direct declarations of love in low context cultures appear inappropriate.
Interestingly, these findings may also confirm what controversial cross-cultural commentators like Amy Chua argues in her famous “Tiger Mom” essay regarding Asian Vs Western parenting. Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal (summarizing views from her longer book) claims that western parents are, in general, too unconditionally effusive in their expressions of praise and affection toward their children. Chinese parents, by contrast, are much more hesitant to make loving comments, but this is not because they love their children any less. Instead, per their more high context cultural values, they believe that love should be conveyed through strict parenting and a strong sense of family obligation, rather than through candid expressions of love and affection. Along these lines, she writes:
“The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners… Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently… There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids’ true interests. For their part, many Chinese secretly believe that they care more about their children and are willing to sacrifice much more for them than Westerners, who seem perfectly content to let their children turn out badly.”
Her claims in this article were extremely controversial at the time the essay was published and her views were widely excoriated in American media as emotionally cold and ruthless. However, viewed within the interpretive framework of High vs. Low Context theory above, both Chua’s views of American parenting and (much of) America’s public reaction to them become much more understandable. Both views exemplified the cognitive dissonance between how love may be acceptably expressed in high context vs. low context cultures.
It may be the case then, that Americans are indeed much more generous with open expressions of love than many other cultures. However, whether this disparity amounts to an actual difference in the nature of love is much less clear.
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