Relationship Satisfaction Across European Cultures: The Role of Love Styles

This study examines the connection of love styles with relationship satisfaction on the basis of cross-cultural research, including Bosnia, Germany, Romania, Russia, and German immigrants from Russia and Turkey. Love styles include romantic love, friendship love, game-playing love, possessive love, altruistic love, and pragmatic love. The validation of the measurement model across cultural groups was successful because partial measurement invariance was secured, which allows for the application of correlation, regression, and path analysis. Results indicate that the effects of love styles on relationship satisfaction were consistent across cultures with the exception of game-playing love that negatively predicted relationship satisfaction for Germans, Romanians, and Turkish migrants but not for Bosnians, Russians, and Russian migrants. In addition, cultural variation occurred with respect to the strength of the associations. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to universality and cultural relativity. In general, the effect of love styles on well-being turned out to be manifold.