From ‘Real love’ to ‘Rational Love’: a Phenomenological Study (Lived experience of married actors in Isfahan)

Family is the foundation of every society, and it strengthens the romantic relationships of its couples. Accordingly, this paper by the principles of descriptive phenomenological method, seeks to describe the lived experience of love in the early years of marriage from the perspective of the actors themselves. The data were collected, by purposive sampling, from among married people living in Isfahan who had been married for less than seven years, and from deep interviews with them. The results of the multilevel phenomenological analysis in this study showed that the experience of marital love from the perspective of the actors includes temporal and non-temporal phenomena. The temporal phenomena  under the title of ‘changeable love’ refer to the transformation of love over time from ‘true love’ at the beginning of marriage to ‘logical love’ with the onset of common life. Sex is also constructed as part of a ‘changeable love’ experience through two patterns of ‘non-acceptance -acceptance’ and ‘acceptance-acceptance’. Non-temporal phenomena, i. e. love experiences that do not belong to a specific time, refer to the experiences of ‘popular love’, ‘memories’, ‘unity’, and ‘spousal approval’.