When love is thought of simply as feelings of the individual subject directed toward various person-objects, the possible variations are almost infinite, because the linkages are acquired and not inborn. Human beings live in groups, however, and certain things are true of group living whether the members of the group are Hottentots, Wisconsin farmers, New York suburbanites, or howler monkeys. For example, all groups develop leaders and followers and rules of possession. The very nature of the group narrows the range of possible behavior, but it also enriches and intensifies experience within these limits.
The chief force which leads love feelings to become fixated upon a person as object, and thus to become true love, is the reciprocal activity of the object itself. We love someone who does, or did, or might love us. In the remainder of this chapter we shall think of love as a relation between persons and not merely as the behavior and feelings of each person separately.
It has been said that “two is company, three a crowd.” But choice is always made from a larger group, which also in some ways furnishes an audience and at the same time chaperonage. Even friendly gossip contributes to the positive values of courtship. In the “Middletown” of 1890, the Lynds tell us, young people went about a great deal in groups of one sex, the two sexes occasionally mingling. Today “pairing-off” is permitted and even artificially stimulated. Drive through the suburbs and recreation areas around New York or Detroit on a Sunday afternoon when most people are at leisure, and later do the same in a relatively populous area of the southern Appalachians.
A striking difference will be noted. In the first region the heterosexual pair will be a most common sight, in the latter it will seldom be seen. Modern urban society demands and also supplies more privacy for the pair than did our traditional society; it also forces people to depend more upon pair relationships for love and lighter companionship. Through privacy an individual may be simultaneously engaged in several pair relationships of considerable feeling, and nobody but himself may know the whole picture.
Some of these may be competitive, but only the individual at the center is conscious of the competition. In the simple, small-community life of years ago, in “sacred societies,” the individual probably had more numerous bonds of tender and friendly affection than he does now. He loved and was loved by his relatives, his neighbors, his community, in a sense which is not true today.
This distributed affection may have given him a sense of security which made romantic or other intense pair-love less imperative. On the other hand, pair-love was under stricter surveillance. Courtship was a serious business and being alone with a person of the opposite sex was apt to be regarded as evidence of sexual intercourse or else a conscious step toward marriage.
Hits: 75