Effect of religion and religiosity on romantic relationship: Love values and relationship satisfaction

Abstract

Objectives The current study aimed at investigating the impact of religion and religiosity on the three components of love (i.e. intimacy, passion and commitment) in Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love and relationship satisfaction. Most pervious studies were focused on the relationship between romantic relationship and other variables, such as gender, attachment, and pervious romantic experience. Thus, this study was carried out to understand the influence of religion and religiosity. Only Christianity was considered in this study because the doctrine of it emphasizes more love than the most popular religion – Buddhists and Taoists in Hong Kong. Methods 435 young adults were participated in the current study. Slightly more than a half of them were Christians who have attended church for nearly 7.9 mean years. Convenience and snowball sampling were used to distribute questionnaires. Intimacy, passion and commitment were measured by the Intimacy, Passion and Commitment Scale (Lemieux and Hale, 1999, 2000). Relationship Assessment Scale (RAS) (Hendrick, 1988) and Religiousness Scale (Strayhorn, Weidman & Larson, 1990) were adopted to investigate the quality of romantic relationship and the religiosity respectively. Results The results indentified that Christians had less passion and more commitment than people without religion (PWOR). Besides, Christians with higher religiosity were found to have more commitment in romantic relationship than those with lower religiosity. Regarding relationship satisfaction, no religious difference was found between Christians and PWOR whereas a significant relationship between religiosity and the satisfaction was revealed. Conclusions The current study implicated the effect of religion and religiosity on the components of romantic relationship and relational satisfaction. Some limitations of this study were addressed. For future studies, it is suggested to use longitudinal design to investigate the causal relationships among religion and religiosity, the three components of love and relationship satisfaction.