Psychology

The world has been familiar to a William Shakespeare play entitled, Romeo and Juliet. The story tells the classic tragic love story where in two young lovers had to face the most difficult feats, including death, just to prove and keep their love for each other. The lovers had to face such harsh situation due to one incontestable dilemma Juliets parents are not in favour of their relationship.

This situation would easily ring a bell even in the contemporary time of today. Nowadays, despite the perceivably more modern and liberated societies, there are still a lot of people who experience being restricted by their parents in loving another person. This has indeed been one of the most inescapable realities when it comes to relationships. Abraham Bunk and his colleagues paid a closer scrutiny in this universal relationship dilemma. With their knowledge of the fact that this kind of dilemma is very common and general, they conducted a research where in they analyzed the nature and implications of parent-offspring conflict when it comes to mate preferences in a more scientific light. In this study, the evolutionary approaches in looking at this kind of conflict were greatly considered. The study considered the fact that since time immemorial, mating decisions were really influenced and somewhat controlled by parents and their kin. The researchers hypothesized that aside from the general tendency of parents being over-controlling as to their childrens mates, parents also tend to have conflicting preferences with their children since they usually have a stronger preference in terms of parental investment and in-group cooperation. The conflict happens since the younger generation tend to choose mates in terms of positive inheritable traits.

The research involved an empirical study consisting of 768 participants from different cultures. The main argument of the study revolves on the claim that love is universal. Since love is universal, it can also be assumed that almost all people experience the kind of rush and pleasure brought by the feeling of falling in love. However, research showed that although love is indeed inescapable, the sense of responsibility among parents is as universal and inescapable too. This kind of responsibility is on how they try to secure a good and promising future for their children. Although most parents wanted their children to be happy with the person they are going to choose as mates, more parents would prefer to make sure that their children end up with the person who will be able to give them a bright future instead of just love and happiness alone. In some studies conducted in the United States, a considerable number of parents still showed some intentions in arranging their childrens marriages to people with promising future. This observation was seen to be not that exclusive to Americans though, the authors noted that different  culture  have their own practices of arranging childrens marriage that obviously violates the free will of such children in choosing their partners in the future. The reason found for this peculiar practice is the fear of elders that love might ruin the established social stratification. Aside from this, the authors also considered the grandmother hypothesis as one of the potent factors for this behaviour. The authors note that, this concept relates to the tendency of elders to care more on benefits of health  which requires a good source wealth for support  aside from the benefits of continued production  which only requires a ample energy and drive to reproduce  - which the younger generation obviously prefers. Thus, after going about all these arguments, Buunk, Park and Dubbs found that indeed parents tend to be over-controlling of their childrens choices when it comes to their mates. However, although this was their major finding, they also inferred that children and parents do not completely have conflicting interests when it comes to mating since they naturally possess overlapping genetic interests.