“This is a truly magnificent book—packed with touching and fascinating stories of love around the world. The people, the settings, their words: it’s elegant, authentic, charming and hopeful. And what an astonished achievement by the authors--to capture romance in so many corners of the globe.”
——Helen Fisher, famous anthropologist and bestselling author

I think everyone should read this book because I believe that we all have different experiences with love and sometimes it is comforting to see that we share same or similar thoughts or even love troubles with someone who is perhaps on the other side of the planet, when we thought that whose aches are only ours and that we are completely alone in them.
– Petra Maltarić

I must admit I did not expect much from the book, because the topic can hardly be more difficult and it is sometimes too easy to wander into idealistic spiritual nonsense. However, the book is excellent!! Rostuhar wrote down over a hundred personal experiences of romantic couples (including his own), summarized leading scientific literature, and made a rich historic overview while asking all the right questions. In my opinion, he succeeded in creating an ideal combination of objective scientific approach and of subjective experiences. His style is simple and clear, but the content shows deep contemplation and wide and thorough education and preparation. Definitely worth the read, and I would like to add that I was thrilled with how the writer tells of his own love experience with brutal honesty. It truly leave an impression of him completely exposing himself on the page.
– Eric Milisavljević

★Rights sold to Germany, Serbia!
★The book has sold in over 13.000 copies in its first year and was the No. 1 bestseller in Croatia in 2021!
★On Goodreads, ‘Love Around the World’ has a high rating of 4.7, making it one of the highest rated books in contemporary Croatian literature.
★The book LOVE AROUND THE WORLD is accompanied by a documentary film of the same name, which premiered on ArteTV in France and Germany on February 14, 2021. It has already been seen by a multimillion TV audience in ten different countries and has won audience awards on 80% of the festivals where it competed.
★The author Davor Rostuhar is a travel writer and photographer from Croatia who has been working for National Geographic Magazine since 2003 and has published seven travel books and one photo-monography. His books, both in Croatian and English, have been sold in over 60,000 copies and achieved notable national success.
★This book will take you on an inspirational journey – from different scientific notions of love through intriguing personal stories, offering an unique view on the evolution, the origin and the development of the concept of love throughout history, taking in account its different forms as well as its’ social and personal significance.
★The full English translation is available, translated by the famous American scholar and literary translator Ellen Elias-Bursać.

A newlywed couple turned their honeymoon into a journey around the world, an odyssey which explores the idea of love in different cultures, through the lens of various customs and beliefs. Around 120 conversations in 30 countries provide fresh and precious insights into the fundamental question of human existence: what is love?
From the hypermodern metropolises like Tokyo and New York to closed communities of Saudi Arabia and Iran and all the way to Amazon rainforest and remote Pacific islands in hunter-gatherer communities, a variety of people in different cultures talks directly, openly and sincerely about love providing us a powerful account on this eternal topic.
A curious book this is, both universal and personal. The impressive and meticulous research intertwines with romance, introduced by the story of the marriage proposal at the merciless shore of Antarctica. More precisely, the author and his partner Anđela talk with 120 couples (some of which are odd numbers, including more than two people) on all continents, in 30 countries and 30 languages. They have undertaken an extraordinary venture, extending their honeymoon to a whole year, a year that rewarded them with different form of pleasure, a pleasure of learning, traveling, and questioning personal and civilizational biases and prejudices. To interpret and contextualize their data and observations, this couple reached out to the most distinguished scientists, anthropologists, neurologists, philosophers and linguists, and conducted interviews with them as well, which is then incorporated harmoniously into this magnificent symphony.
In the heart of the symphony lies the curiosity to answer the biggest question of them all: is love universal; is it a product of our culture or it is biologically inherent to all humans? Even if it doesn t provide an unambiguous answer to that question, this book will clarify plenty of other uncertainties and, without a doubt, provide an immense reading enjoyment in the blend of romance, travelogue, photography, essays and, yes, love. A book that tries to cure with love and to cure the love itself.


THE FIELD OF RESEARCH:
Through our field of research, we conducted 120 interviews in 30 countries and in 30 languages:
- We tried to encompass the great cultural diversity of humankind and look into the different types of relationships.
- We mostly talked with monogamous couples, but also with singles who have never experienced love, or were disappointed by it, and with people who are in relationships of more than two people – from traditional polygyny and polyandry, to different versions of modern polyamory.
- We talked about love with hunter-gatherers, agriculturalists, pastoralists, nomads, and city dwellers.
- The same set of questions was asked to street kids in Zambia, mafia members in Japan and Hollywood and Bollywood celebrities.
- We talked with people who are bound in different types of marriages – from forced and arranged marriages to autonomous ones.
- With people from all walks of life we discussed what happens with love when it’s faced with challenges such as adultery, infertility, loss of a child or terminal illness.
- We talked with women who were thrown out of marriage because they were sexually assaulted, who were attacked with acid because they refused to submit their bodies, with lesbians in Iran where being gay is punished by death, with couples who decided to stay together even though their society didn’t allow them to because they belonged to different religions, different castes, different tribes.
- We also explored the situations in which love doesn’t work, so we talked with couples that were going through the process of separation or divorce.

Davor Rostuhar (Zagreb, 1982) is a Croatian photographer, adventurer and writer from Zagreb where he studied Sociology and History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. So far he travelled to more than 110 countries all over the world – from the deepest jungles of Amazon, through the desserts of Africa down to the icy shores of Antarctica. He published seven books, three of which have been translated into English and became bestsellers in Croatia, had numerous photography exhibitions, shot a documentary film and every year holds more than hundred lectures sharing his inspirational stories with others. His travels began in 2001 and very soon, in 2003, he founded the Club for Expeditionism and Culture (KEK). He worked as a journalist and photographer for several magazines, such as National Geographic Croatia, Meridijani and Geo, while his photographs have often been selected on their covers. Later he dedicated himself to his own projects within KEK first among which was Croatia from Above, the biggest photography project in Croatia, in collaboration with The National Geographic. For several years he was taking photos of Croatia from the birdʼs-eye view and published them as a photobook to a great commercial success. The three-year exhibition of the photographs was seen by over two million people in twenty countries. In 2018, Rostuhar set on the first Croatian expedition to the South Pole, becoming one of 26 people in history who walked from the coast of Antarctica to the point of the Pole. His journal of that expedition, The Polar Dream, was a No 1 bestseller in 2018 as well as an accompanying documentary by the same name shown at more than 160 venues. Love Around the World, the book, the documentary film, and the photo exhibition conducted with his spouse Anđela is his most recent and most personal (ad)venture. At the same time when the book is released, on Valentine’s Day 2021, the documentary produced by KEK and BETAFILM/Autentic production house will be aired on ARTE in prime-time after which it goes in world TV and online distribution.

Anđela Rostuhar (Zagreb, 1985) graduated Economics at the Vern University in Zagreb. She worked as a project manager in a marketing&event agency in Zagreb from 2004 until 2011 when she quit her job and moved to Kenya. There she spent a year volunteering in the local orphanage and school, and developed social networks and communication strategy to help the local community. From 2014 she works at the Club for Expeditionism and Culture (KEK) and oversees PR, social networks, finances and project management. Along with her spouse Davor she’s the co-director of the film Love Around the World.

1. WHAT IS LOVE?
2. THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE
Is there love where there is no word for love?
3. THE HISTORY OF LOVE
How has love evolved as we travelled from trees to big cities?
4. THE ORIGIN OF LOVE
Is love innate in our nature or do we learn about it through culture?
5. MARRIAGE – INSTITUTION OF LOVE
Why are arranged marriages more stable than autonomous ones?
6. POLYGAMY
Are we by nature monogamous or polygamous?
7. PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE
How much are our relationships determined by our parents?
8. IDEALS OF LOVE
What lies behind our strong beliefs and can we ever change?
9. LOVE AND IDENTITY
Do we only seek our own reflection in our partners?
10. SOCIOLOGY OF LOVE
How society shapes our choices?
11. ROMANTIC LOVE
How love hurts in the time of capitalism?
12. FORBIDDEN LOVE
Why love sometimes flourishes in impossible conditions, and defies death?
13. THE END OF LOVE
Why love sometimes fails when everything seems fine, and mocks life?
14. MODERN LOVE
How does the paradox of choice paralyze us?
15. POLYAMORY
Is a modern version of polygamy the “new normal”?
16. THE BOUNDARIES OF LOVE
Where do we draw a line?
17. THE FUTURE OF LOVE
Is there any hope for us?
18. IS LOVE THE MEANING OF LIFE?
19. IS LOVE UNIVERSAL?
20. WHAT IS LOVE?

FROM THE COUPLE’S POINT OF VIEW
A fact persists that in the early 21st century we still don’t know what love exactly is, nor whether it is a phenomenon innate in all of us or learned through upbringing and, as such, different from culture to culture.
From the moment we sealed our relationship, in a way, by getting engaged and setting the date of our wedding, we started thinking about the reasons why we’ve chosen to spend our lives with each other, and not with some of our previous partners we had loved just as passionately. What our love is consisted of? Had we been born in a different time and place, would it be the same? Our families share a similar background – our parents stayed together, regardless of the problems they faced along the way. Is that the thing that keeps us together and creates the illusion that we will overcome all the problems that will inevitably appear? Is our relationship just a matter of decision, practical compatibility and shared values, or is there more to it?
Even though love (between partners) is one of the highest values held by individuals in various cultures and even though it is one of the most common themes of art and its various forms, there is a relatively small number of scientific papers on this subject. Until recently, science generally advocated the idea that romantic love is an invention of modern, Western culture, which spread worldwide through colonisation and globalisation. Recently, however, there have been studies (Jankowiak, Fischer…) that claim that romantic love has been present in about ninety percent of world cultures. But is that really correct? Even today, around fifty percent of world marriages are arranged. Many languages still don’t have the word for love in their vocabularies. The fact persists that in the early 21st century we still don’t know what love exactly is, just as we don’t know whether it is a phenomenon innate to us all or learned through upbringing and, as such, different from culture to culture. We decided to set off on a journey around the world and, through conversations with various individuals and couples, explore to what extent the idea of romantic relationship is determined and filtered by specific contexts (social, geographical, economical). We visited thirty countries, we talked about love, relationships, marriage, challenges, adultery and divorce to people of different cultural and ethnic ancestries in a stubborn pursuit to find an answer on this eternal question.