Men in Romance: A Scoping Review to Explore Men's Experience in Romantic Relationships in the Patriarchal Cultural Context

Abstract

The current body of literature is weighted to the female perspective in exploring the perception and experience of romantic relationships. The paucity of literature on the male perspective provides an opportunity to highlight the unique masculine view attached to relationships. The current scoping review is aimed at summarizing the available literature about the perception and experience of men in various romantic, heterosexual relationship contexts. The findings were drawn from 163 studies published in the last 10 years that were extracted from multiple databases, including SCOPUS, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Pubmed. The current masculine perceptions associated with romantic relationships were captured and grouped through four contexts: man as a relational being, man in a state of singleness, man as a partner, and man as a parent. Power and sex appear to be the key drivers of research about men across relationship contexts. This study contributes to the literature by identifying the current research gap and providing clearer directions in research about romantic relationships that take into account the perspectives of men.