4 What is love?

What is love?

Dear Lily,

As an English teenager, you will have been bombarded with images of romantic love – at the cinema, in magazines and on television. You will be encouraged to think that the way to happiness lies in finding Mr. Right.

Much of your life will be a quest for love. What is particularly unusual about the world of passionate love which we idealize is not that we feel such emotions, but that we make them a pre-condition for marriage.

Romantic attachments, an overwhelming love and desire for another, can be found in all societies. Often this is between members of the opposite sex and often the feelings are strongest in the period around the arrival of sexual maturity. So ‘love’ is not confined to what we would call ‘love marriage’ societies.

Yet in most societies, as in India, China and much of Africa and the Near East, where marriage and the bearing of children is the basic political, economic and social mechanism for the future, marriage is too important a matter to leave to the individual. Self-centred and irrational emotions should not dictate who should have children with whom.

While teenagers may sing love songs and even, in some societies, have sexual relationships, marriage and child-bearing have to be arranged by older members of the family or professional matchmakers. Elaborate economic exchanges are organized and individuals are exchanged between groups. Marriage is arranged on the basis of relationships between the older generation. Individual feelings have nothing to do with marital strategies. Someone does not choose when or who to marry. This is done by others.

I remember my shock when, even after knowing all this in theory, I went into a friend’s house in a Nepalese village and asked him what he was doing the next day. He said he was getting married. I congratulated him, but commented that he had not mentioned this the day before. He replied that this was because his parents had only told him that morning that it had been arranged. I asked him whether his bride was pretty and nice. He said he had no idea as he had never met her.

Where did love come from?

Contrast this to the long literary and legal tradition in England. From Anglo-Saxon poetry, through medieval love poetry, to Chaucer, Shakespeare and the great poets and novelists, English literature is awash with love, and its relationship to marriage. It is the single most important theme. This is not just the flirtation of youngsters. It is endless reflection on this strange, irrational, overpowering, feeling that can sweep one human being into a life-long, unbreakable commitment to another. Endless advice, letters and sermons revolve around the theme of how to recognize and react to love, and how, without love, a marriage cannot work.

Nor is this just a literary phenomenon, some idealistic and airy-fairy convention unrelated to real life. We can look at village records, court cases and legal treatises in the past. These show that a boy of fourteen and a girl of twelve could get married without a priest and without the presence of the parents for much of the period up to the sixteenth century. The decision as to when and who a person married was not a family or community one. It was an individual matter. A close emotional partnership with a ‘married friend’, a companionship to provide mutual help and to overcome loneliness was too important a matter to be left to the decision of others.

Of course there were exceptions. At the level of the aristocracy there were often battles between parents and children. No doubt this also happened at a lower level as well. And of course many people routinely look for shared interests, social compatibility and financial potential in their future partner. Yet behind all of this is a system which is concerned about the weighing up of emotion and practical advantages, of choices between various desirable goals.

Why marry at all?

In the past it was very difficult to stay single. The Yanomamo people of Venezuela always know when a man is a bachelor because he is dirty, his hair uncut, badly fed, often sick. Without a wife he is hardly a person. Likewise in many societies unmarried women after the age of twenty are barely conceivable; they are poverty stricken, unprotected, a shame to their family. Basically, in order to obtain the pleasures of life, including the blessing of children, people had to marry. Most people in the past saw no alternative to marriage, even if this often condemned women in particular in many societies to a life of drudgery, perpetual child-bearing and physical and verbal abuse.

England has long been exceptional in tolerating, even encouraging non-marriage. My forbears, four hundred years of Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge University, were not allowed to marry (on pain of losing their Fellowship) but were looked after by servants. Up to a quarter of men and women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in England never married. Marriage was an option. For the English, on the whole, children’s marriage plans could be embarrassing, annoying, disappointing or heartening. Yet, in the end, it was up to them. It was their life.

Now there is a widespread move away from permanent relationships and marriage, particularly among women. In Japan, India, Europe, America, even China, many young women are reaching their thirties and forties without marrying or having children. They live comfortably, have good jobs and are quite affluent. They realize that marriage, child-bearing and subservience to a man would threaten this, it seems like a form of imprisonment or sacrifice. The question for many women nowadays is not why should one stay single, but why should one marry and have children. Even though most of us dream of that soul-mate who will love us above all the world, unless someone absolutely special comes along we are not prepared to settle for the second-best.

Many marriages of my parents’ generation and above occurred and were maintained under parental and wider social pressures. Better marriage than ostracism and a slight feeling of failure, of being the last ‘unbought tin on the shelf’. But it is different now. It is quite possible that, beautiful though you are, you will not move beyond boyfriends to a life-long partnership. In this you will be one of the wave of new, independent, ambitious women who stand alongside men as equal but somewhat alone in the world. Your motto may well be, ‘who needs a man’?

You may think that this is something new. Yet when we visited an ethnic group in south-western China recently we found a society which for some centuries had given up marriage entirely. The men were away for up to half the year carrying goods down to India. The women were left in charge.

Out of this arose a situation where marriage, if it had earlier existed, totally disappeared. When a boy reached puberty at between thirteen and sixteen he would be encouraged to find a female partner in another house. He would then start a pattern which would continue until old age whereby he went off in the evening to sleep in his partner’s house.

Each courtyard house was planned so that there was a main area where the older woman and the young children, that is all the children born of the women of the family, lived. Along another side were the animals, pigs and cows. The third side had enough bedrooms so that each adult female who was in a relationship with an outside visiting partner could have a room. They were visited at night by these partners, who left at dawn to return to their own female relatives’ house where they ate and worked.

There were no problems of property or inheritance since the land and house belonged to the whole female headed group and all children born within it. If a partnership ended, the children stayed with the women and the biological father was not expected to contribute to the child’s upbringing. There was no marriage ceremony, no word for marriage, no words for relatives through marriage like brother in law or sister in law.

Not very dissimilar are the west Indian and other patterns of mother-centred households found in the Caribbean and many parts of the world. Here the woman stays in a house and brings up the children, living temporarily with a succession of men who beget one or more children and then move on. Some have ascribed this to the weak economic position of unemployed men, others to the legacy of slavery or of an earlier African family system tracing relations through the women. Whatever the reason, the patterns of temporary unions and children who live together, though they do not share the same parents, is increasingly widespread.

What has love got to do with marriage?

One important component of our own marriage pattern was Christianity. The distinctive nature of Christian marriage was early established, the basic features being present by the ninth century. This was a religion that encouraged non-marriage (celibacy), one to one marriage (monogamy), a freedom of choice and a severe sexual code prohibiting sexual relations before and outside marriage.

The ideals of celibacy, the late age at marriage, the battle between biological desire and religious injunctions are clearly a part of the pattern of romantic love. Passion was herded into marriage, sex and marriage were synonymous in a way that is unusual in world civilizations. Biological urges were channelled into art and fantasy. These special features were present in western Europe for many centuries before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

In closely knit, family based societies any obvious display of emotion between husband and wife would clash with other family relations. Many of us have noticed that we become inhibited if we are with our relatives. When wider family links are strong, marriages are arranged and affection between husband and wife is a secondary force.

The rise of love marriage is linked to the degree of involvement of the small family in wider family ties. We now know that the family system based on a close partnership between the husband and wife was present in England from Anglo Saxon times onwards. There is little evidence that wider family groupings were important in everyday life among the mass of the population. Romantic love was a system which could both flourish and hold together this individualistic society.

If family groups do not arrange marriages, why marry at all? One reason was that to have sexual relations outside marriage was considered a serious offence in the Christian world. Linked to this is the idea that the ‘passion of romantic love’ binds people together in long term associations which would otherwise not occur. Rational, profit-seeking, individuals might not settle down into fixed relationships at all were it not for the 'institutionalized irrationality' of romantic love. We might see this as a necessary drive to ensure the nurturing of children by a couple. It encouraged longer-term bonding, rather than just a brief sexual coupling.

Is love blind?

Choice, whether in the market of marriage or other goods, is always difficult. The information is always insufficient, the variables too complex. It is bad enough buying a new computer or television, when one often has to trust the salesman and a hunch – but if it goes wrong it is disposable. Choosing a partner for life is infinitely more complex and the guesswork involved is immense.

Some external force of desire is needed to help the individual to choose. Hence passionate 'love' overwhelms, justifies and provides an apparently external and compulsive authority. On the other hand, love within marriage is not necessarily as passionate or 'irrational'. It can be calm, calculating, very like any other 'work'. Yet if a decision is made to sever a relationship, the loss of that mysterious 'love' is often given as the justification.

Love thus seems to be at its most intense when uncertainty and risk are greatest, in that phase when humans have to choose. When they make the most momentous decision of their lives, which will turn a contractual, arbitrary, relationship into the deepest and most binding in life, love steps in as though from outside, blind and compelling. The heart has its reasons, even if the mind is perplexed.

So we might suggest that the pattern of romantic love, both before marriage and within marriage, is the result of a number of forces. The biological urge to mate, based on a deep attraction between males and females is universal. But the way in which cultures encourage, use, or discourage it varies enormously. In the majority of societies, the feelings have not been encouraged, marriage and love are not connected, and marriages have been arranged. This has made it possible to knit people together by family links.

How does love fit into our lives?

It is certainly ironic that as societies become more bureaucratic and ‘rational’, so at the heart of the system there grows an impulsive, irrational emotion which has nothing to do with making money. There is a desire for the totally overwhelming, irrational escape into romantic love.

Romantic love gives meaning in an otherwise dead and cold world. It promises that fusion with another human being which is so conspicuously lacking in the lonely crowds of autonomous individuals. It overcomes separation and gives the endlessly choice making individual a rest, a categorical imperative which, momentarily at least, resolves all the doubts and indecisions.

The desire, to have, own, possess, fits well with those similarly irrational desires to accumulate, possess and own which are the basic drive in the economic world. In the modern world it is obvious that consumer society has harnessed the romantic passions to sell goods. The marketing of love has raised this emotion to a high cultural pinnacle. Love provides the promise of freedom, of a deeper meaning in life, perhaps even a return to the innocence of the lost paradise of Eden.