Romantic Passion: A Universal Experience? shakes the Eurocentric foundations of our ideas about love in the far-flung corners of the world, showing that we've been looking for love in all the wrong places. Social observers from the West, the authors contend, have projected their own rigid ethnocentric notions of love and marriage onto cultures to which such a formula simply doesn't apply.

The contributors find expressions of love almost everywhere they look, from the Inuit woman who went hunting and sealing with her husband because she could not bear to be apart from him for even an hour, to a Moroccan youth who reportedly said to his lover, "If I do not see you for just half a day I go crazy.".

The contributors to Romantic Passion look beyond each society's "official" institutions in their search for expressions of love. They find, for instance, that arranged marriages and polygamy do not necessarily indicate a lack of romantic passion but rather that people in such cultures may expect to look elsewhere for love. As they investigate the presence of love around the globe, contributors also look at the other side of the equation: rejection and grief.