How Has Love Evolved Through History?

[quddusaliquddus]

Do you know anything about the history if love ? Post here ==>

 

[arildno]

Michel Foucault's "History of Sexuality" is quite entertaining..

 

[Adam]

History of love:

1) Breeding pair critters such as humans required shagging to continue. Those which shagged, continued. Others died off.

2) Emotional bonds developed, just chemical interactions, among the successful breeders. Those without it died off.

3) People started telling stories. They made up myths and ideals about those biological drives.

4) Maybe people can do it all without influence of, perhaps in contravention of, those biological drives.

 

[honestrosewater]

Adam, you're a closet romantic, aren't you?

I think the most efficient way to learn about love through the ages is to read and study poetry. I don't mean just "love poems" or romantic, courtly love poetry, but all poetry. Here are some good places to start online:
http://www.bartleby.com/
http://www.promo.net/pg/
http://www.sparknotes.com/
http://thinkers.net/cgi-bin/dir/thinkers.pl?etype=odp&passurl=/Arts/Literature/World_Literature/

Have fun, if you're interested

Happy thoughts
Rachel

 

[Adam]

Adam, you're a closet romantic, aren't you?

Nothing in the closet about me. I'm an openly hopeless romantic. Unfortunately, I don't mean that the good way.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

I think the most efficient way to learn about love through the ages is to read and study poetry. I don't mean just "love poems" or romantic, courtly love poetry, but all poetry. Here are some good places to start online:
http://www.bartleby.com/
http://www.promo.net/pg/
http://www.sparknotes.com/
http://thinkers.net/cgi-bin/dir/thinkers.pl?etype=odp&passurl=/Arts/Literature/World_Literature/

Have fun, if you're interested

Happy thoughts


Thank you

 

[BoulderHead]

As I've been rereading his 'stuff' I'll throw some of it in;

Love essentially is goodwill; thinking well of others and wishing them well. It is a state of the will, not of the animal passions. Even in its earthiest form it is a giving as well as a taking. People who can not give themselves never can know love.

-from the wisdom of Adler.

[edited for typo]

 

[quddusaliquddus]

That's a nice definition.

 

[loseyourname]

Biologically speaking, love didn't develop because it helped with reproductive urges. It developed because humans have extremely complex social behavior that takes a very long time to learn. Because of this, those children with two parents sticking around to raise them fared better than those with only one or with none, propagating the genes for monogamy.

 

[Adam]

Mothers and offspring love each other. No time for learning, it's just there. This is because those animals which did not "care" for their young, died out.

 

[p-brane]

I think the question is "Who, hoo hoo wrote the book of Loooooooovvvvvvvvve"?

 

[franznietzsche]

As I've been rereading his 'stuff' I'll throw some of it in;

Love essentially is goodwill; thinking well of others and wishing them well. It is a state of the will, not of the animal passions. Even in its earthiest form it is a giving as well as a taking. People who can not give themselves never can know love.

-from the wisdom of Adler.

[edited for typo]

Love is the gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everyone else.

-the wisdom of Shaw

 

[Adam]

Shaw was a famously cynical bastich. :P

 

[honestrosewater]

Well, I wasn't going to, but...

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

-the wisdom of Shakespeare?

 

[Adam]

To the nudie bar!

- The wisdom of Al Bundy. :P

 

[honestrosewater]

Mothers and offspring love each other. No time for learning, it's just there. This is because those animals which did not "care" for their young, died out.

Or just had oodles of babies... or few predators... maybe baby sea turtles are born with a love for the ocean ;)

Even if there's no time for learning to love, there's plenty of time for learning to hate, isn't there?

 

[Njorl]

Or just had oodles of babies... or few predators... maybe baby sea turtles are born with a love for the ocean ;)

Even if there's no time for learning to love, there's plenty of time for learning to hate, isn't there?

"You have to be taught, before it's too late,
Before you are six, or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You have to be carefully taught."
-From South Pacific

 

[loseyourname]

Mothers and offspring love each other. No time for learning, it's just there. This is because those animals which did not "care" for their young, died out.

I was speaking of romatic love, which is what I thought this thread was about, not parental love. Parental love is pretty obvious.

 

[franznietzsche]

Shaw was a famously cynical bastich. :P

So was this guy:

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
- H.L. Mencken

 

[BoulderHead]

Oh how I do love the wisdom of the cynics!

 

[franznietzsche]

Oh how I do love the wisdom of the cynics!

A whole hearted non-theistic amen to that!

 

[motai]

I dunno, parental love can be pretty awkward at times:

Homer: "Marge, please. Old people don't need companionship. They need to be isolated and studied so that it can be determined what nutrients they have that might be extracted for our personal use."

and in marriage,

Homer:"What is a wedding? Webster's Dictionary defines a wedding as 'The process of removing weeds from one's garden.'"

One time Lisa was distraught over some sort of breakup, Homer's advice "I guess the lesson here is 'never love anyone'".

 

[quddusaliquddus]

lol @ motai!

 

[honestrosewater]

Homer [Meeting Aliens]: Please don't eat me! I have a wife and kids. Eat them!

What was this post about anyway? Oh, yeah.

Homer: I'm going to the back seat of my car, with the woman I love, and I won't be back for ten minutes!

Happy thoughts
Rachel