HOW LOVE IS PORTRAYED ON TV

How Love is portrayed on TV?

How Love is portrayed on TV?

Introduction

The concept of love has been defined in different ways. It applies to such notions as a brief love affair, an intense and enduring bond based on mutual feelings of love, a sudden flare-up of romantic passion, and a strong amorous fascination of one person for another. Many of these and other dimensions of romantic love have occurred as a dominant or central idea of legends and tales in most cultures (Segrin, 2006). Telling and retelling stories on the subject of romance is regarded as part of the socialization process of family values and sex roles. Through romantic tales, diverse moral propositions on love and relationships are propagated. The perils of romantic relationships that do not comply with customary norms or may disrupt established social ties, for instance, are illustrated by stories in which the lovers are left damaged or disappointed. Media portrayals of romance can affect viewers' attitude toward romantic relationships, and some research has described the responses of children and adolescents in this regard (Pardun, 2007).

Discussion

Love is very powerful, and has the power to make people very happy. At the same time, however, love has the potential to make people very unhappy. A look in the newspaper confirms that love sometimes leads to violence, going as far as the murder of loved ones. Still, whereas there has been much contemplation over the years about love in philosophy, there was relatively little research on love in psychology until a bit more than 30 years ago (MacKinnon, 2007). Only then did a broader scientific interest in the empirical study of love arise.

A number of analyses into the status of romantic portrayals in mass media cultures have described the romantic theme as dominant and ubiquitous. Bachen and Illouz speak of an obsession in our culture for stories about romantic love and call Television and advertising the privileged discourse of sexual and romantic desire (Haferkamp, 2009). Romantic portrayals in Television are described as a textbook example of how the figural dominates in a postmodern culture. (Gallician, 2007) points out that compared to the verbal narratives of the past, the present-day visually vivid and lifelike imagery of romance is more likely to evoke mechanisms of identification and to elicit sexual affect, fantasy, and daydreaming.

Romantic representations of love on television are rarely discussed from an academic viewpoint, however. Certain studies have examined the nature of romantic portrayals in Television, describing, for instance, how the principal theme of romantic Television has changed over time (Bachen, 2006). Whereas characters in Television from the 1930s typically were torn between a marriage for money or a marriage out of love, in the 1950s and 1960s, the principal theme of romantic Television had become sexual attraction and an idealized vision of bachelorhood, termed “the playboy fantasy.” Television from the 1970s and 1980s were characterized by an ambiguous visualization of a desire for authentic romance, on the one hand, and a cynical attitude toward romantic love, ...