What is love?

As an English teenager, you will have been bombarded with images of romantic love. 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 idealise is not that we feel such emotions, but that we make them a precondition 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 call “love marriage” societies.

Yet in most societies, as in India, China and much of Africa and the Near East, where marriage and having children are 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. Marriage and child-bearing have to be arranged by older members of the family or professional matchmakers. Elaborate economic exchanges are organised and individuals are exchanged between groups. Someone does not choose when or who to marry. This choice is made by others.

I remember my shock when I went to 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 that morning told him 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.

What has love got to do with marriage?

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 “institutionalised 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 that just a brief sexual coupling.

Are you a separate person?

You take for granted that you are “Lily” and that Lily is a person who is different and distinct from other people. You have a very strong concept of yourself as an individual. You probably assume that this is how all people think of themselves. Yet while it is true that most people have some sense of their separateness, being English you belong to perhaps the most individualistic society in history. So your concepts of your separateness and individuality are especially strong.