Love Narratives and Senses among Heterosexual Spanish Young People

Abstract

This study focuses on love narratives among heterosexual Spanish youth. The discursive analysis of 24 in-depth interviews and 6 focus groups allows me to identify the main notions of love circulating among Spanish youth and to analyze which narratives, concepts and metaphors are their building elements. The research shows that nowadays very different –even contradictory– meanings of "love" coexist. On the one hand, young people use expressions linked to work and effort when talking about their love relationships in the everyday, but sometimes they need to appeal to romantic meanings in order to explain their iced experiences. A third type of more modern, individualistic and reflexive senses, completes this amalgam of different meanings within which these young people constantly dialogue and negotiate. Beyond the identification and description of these three different "love codes", this study concludes that despite the contradiction present in the romantic model –It combines the intensity of feeling love with the stability of the relationship-and although sometimes young people reflexively reject it or inhibit its appreciation by approaching it with humor or irony, it is the more powerful (performative) model because it reigns at the core of their dreams and desires. A situation that entails paradoxes and ambivalences.