Discourses of individuals from different sexual orientations on romantic love

The aim of this study is to examine how individuals living in Turkey construct the meaning of romantic love in the current discourses and the intertative repertoire they use with discourse analysis while creating this construction. Although love is one of the issues that most people easily talk about, experience, and whose representations are frequently encountered, it also attracts attention with its complexity and incomprehensibility. In this study, it is tried to understand the individuals' discourses related to romantic love not only from heterosexuals but also from all sexual orientations by going beyond the heteronormative point of view. The participants of the study consist of 15 people from different sexual orientations between the ages of 21-43. 15 individual in-depth interviews were conducted with each participant. The interviews were recorded with a voice recorder and transcribed. Interview texts were analyzed with discourse analysis. As a result of the analysis seven interpretative repertoires has been obtained; 'love unlike affection', 'love taken as reference', 'love as strategy', 'love nurtured by obscurity', 'love as influence', 'love as a need' and 'non-heterosexual love' . When the findings are examined in general, it is observed that romantic love has reflections in different fields and different discursive contexts. In the "love unlike affection" repertoire, which is the dominant repertoire, love is constructed by separating from affection. In the repertoire of "love as strategy", romantic relationships are constucted within the framework of gender roles with strategies such as "match, game, marketing". In the repertoire of "love nurtured by obscurity", it is observed that love is constructed on "unknownness" and "discovery". Although in the discourses of participants there is a common world of meaning regarding romantic love, the situation differs about "non-heterosexual love" discourse. Unlike heterosexuals, within this discourse, it is observed that gay participants try to construct love out of the dominant culture. While romantic love, in the patriarchal order of dominant culture, is oppressed with gender representations, heteronormative discourses, and love representations and subjective experiences pumped by popular culture, it does not seem to be possible to define it in a single way. Key Words: Romantic love, culture, discourse, sexual orientation, interpretative repertoires