Assessing two domains for communicating romance: Behavioral context and mode of interaction

This paper introduces a new instrument for assessing attitudes toward “romance”; as expressed within two domains: behavioral context, and mode of interaction. The resulting Romantic Communication Scale (RCS) was evaluated with a sample of 1.060 students from eight west coast universities. The context domain dominates the response variance, particularly the single dimension contrasting traditionally romantic with explicitly sexual activities. Mode of interaction clearly plays a secondary role in these students’ view of romance. Males favored the sexual pole slightly more than females, although the response distributions overlap extensively, with both sexes preferring traditionally romantic items. Despite the strong statistical significance of these gender differences, odds are only 3–2 that any particular randomly selected male will score closer to the sexual pole than a randomly chosen female. Females showed a little more affinity for the verbal mode of interaction than males, with corresponding slightly reduced interest in the tactile and proximal modes.