Romantic love myths in a sample of trainee teachers

Abstract

Teaching staff play an important role while preventing and fighting against inequality and gender-based violence, as school is one of the main influences in differential gender socialization. It is for this reason why this paper’s aim is to analyse and evaluate a variety of beliefs and myths regarding romantic love in a sample of future teachers from the Community of Madrid (Spain). The reduced version of Myths Scale toward Love was used, as well as some statistical analyses were applied to the results, in order to study gender-based differences of the sample. The scale mentioned above was applied to 433 trainee teachers (76.7% females and 23.3% males) belonging to different teaching university degrees (master´s and bachelor`s), with an average age of 24.04 (SD = 3.83). The results show that the most commonly believed and accepted myths about love are the ones related to the eternal passion, the omnipotence of love and the “better-half”. In addition, there are statistically significant differences between men and women in the acceptance of romantic love myths, what could be due to the differential socialization of gender. Distorted beliefs about love can justify and encourage gender-based violence, so it is necessary to modify the romantic discourse and promote real equality from all socializing areas.

Keywords

• amor
• evaluación del profesorado en formación
• mitos románticos
• juventud
• estudios de género