What Love Means: Young Adults’ Lived Experiences Across Gendered and Cultural Contexts

This study explores how young adults interpret and navigate love within the intersecting contexts of culture, gender, and family. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with eight participants, and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the findings reveal love as an emotionally and morally complex experience. Rather than describing love as an unqualified good, participants portrayed it as something to approach with care, often shaped by past disappointments, relational expectations, and cultural scripts. Four themes were developed: protecting the self through emotional restraint; fulfilling love as a moral duty; managing the risks of intimacy; and longing for recognition and emotional reciprocity. Across accounts, love was narrated not simply as a feeling but as a situated practice, filtered through gendered norms, family dynamics, and histories of vulnerability. For some, particularly those from collectivist backgrounds, love was enacted through duty, presence, or sacrifice rather than verbal affirmation. Others reflected on the unequal labor of care and the emotional toll of silence. These findings challenge individualist models that equate love with openness or secure reciprocity and instead foreground the need to understand love as a relational and ethically negotiated experience, shaped by structure, history, and the uneven conditions of emotional life.