A brief history of love

In the latter half of the 20^th century

Love is real. Modern love was discovered by Nat King Cole in the early 1950’s. He put out a couple of albums (those are bigger than CD’s and turn slower) that said love was real and something that everyone could have. It was like a researcher today writing an article in the New England Journal of Medicine saying Vitamin E is good for your heart.

People had believed love existed before then, most notably Romeo and Juliet, but no one really proved it like Nat King Cole did. It didn’t help that Romeo and Juliet caused so much trouble in their families and kind of killed each other in the end. This probably gave love a bad name for a while.

Nat King Cole’s theories, including that the very thought of you means our love is here to stay, were unforgettable and caught on quickly with the American public, if, for nothing else, sentimental reasons. You might say it was a big celebrity endorsement for love, but clouds were on the love horizon.

Threats to love. Love went on like that for a while in the Fifties and early Sixties and more people began to have faith in each other. Just as it was reaching the height of its popularity, John F. Kennedy was killed. Then Martin Luther King was killed. Then Bobby Kennedy was killed. John Lennon was shot to death. My mom and dad got a divorce and lots of people said: “See, I told you so. Love doesn’t really exist.” Belief in love took a real nosedive and people began to lose faith in each other.

We open up about sex. Sex, as most of you know, existed before love did, but for a long time sex was not practiced openly. If it weren’t for sex, we wouldn’t be here, so you know it’s been going on for a while, it’s just that people did it in their own little rooms with the doors closed and the lights out. It seemed as if everyone sort of thought they were the only ones doing it and they couldn’t talk about it, even between themselves. Sex began to get more openly popular when a book called “The Joy of Sex” came out. It was full of soft, romantic drawings of people actually having different kinds of sex and people began to think they could talk about it and probably even do it with the lights on. Sex, in this period when love was threatened, was really popular, probably more popular than love and certainly more popular than marriage.

Marriage falters. Marriage, which is not dependent on love or sex, has existed longer than love has but not as long as sex. My mom says that marriage is the only agreement she knows of where two people sign on for tolerating everything awful about each other, spend one another’s money and have sex until they die. She says it’s in the marriage vows.

Whether mom is right or not, marriage began to suffer in the Seventies. People began to stop their marriages like crazy and one person would give the other a house and maybe a car, something they had not done when they were married.

Love rallies. After some time, people began to look at love again. Maybe it would be OK. Maybe they just had to get over their hurt. People relaxed a little, got infatuated, got very excited and allowed as how love might be a good thing after all. This happened after millions of Americans had been through encounter groups and learned how to talk to each other about their deepest feelings. They realized that they had been hiding things all these years and discovered, not only could they love again, they could love everyone. This was a great period for love but, alas, it did not last.

Sex suffers. Following right on the heels of it being OK to love everyone, sex got a real sock in the nose. Somehow that must be related. It was discovered that body cavities were not as clean as we once thought. They carried tiny little organisms that were not friendly. Since it was now well known that body cavities were involved in sex, people’s faith in sex slid down hill faster than me on my Flexi-flyer. God got involved. Those who speak for God said it was his way of punishing some of us, although he’s never said that to me or anyone I know. People began to talk a lot about “safe sex,” which is kind of like talking about Jewish Pope, and they questioned the connection between sex and love.                                                      This has probably always been tenuous, when you think about it, as has the connection between love and marriage, Frank Sinatra not withstanding.

Marriage rebounds. Soon after this people began to think it might be OK to hang out with one person for the most part and eventually some faith in marriage came back. In the eighties, some people got married twice, three times, even four, they liked it so much. Of course, marriage did not mean the same as it did in the Fifties; not much did. People knew marriage might not last forever and they just accepted that, more or less. They saw that ministers, CEO’s, rock stars and certainly actors could have trouble with their marriages, stop their marriage and get another one pretty quickly. This became a fairly popular way to go, provided you could cut your losses with the houses and the cars.

Love changes, again. Love began to change again toward the end of the century. People got smarter and began to love more with their heads, as opposed to with their hearts. They went to classes about love, they knew themselves a little better and they knew how to communicate. They seemed a little wiser about marriage and love and seemed to give it a lot more thought. They even began to decide ahead of time who is going to give the house and the car to whom when they stop loving each other. I suppose that’s smart. Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t recognize it and Nat King Cole probably wouldn’t be interested.

My dad said he was going to cut out the middleman (the attorney) next time he fell in love and just give the woman his house at the get-go.

The present. In some ways things seem pretty smooth, on the surface, but underneath, the trained social observer, like my mom is, can see things. Sex, for instance, now that everything is out in the open, is more of a problem than it used to be, tiny little organisms being what they are. Things now have to be very correct and appropriate; do you know what I mean? It seems like people want things to be exactly right, so that no one will be hurt or even offended. Risk taking, which is part of love, is not popular. It looks as if many people are hurt in some way or have had their “rights” threatened. Lots of people want to take money from others.

People are taking each other to court for just about everything, but especially about love, sex and marriage. Some woman filed a law suit recently because a man had told her he loved her and then, it turns out, he didn’t.  Now, if that’s a trend, half the people in the world will file lawsuits against the other half, because things change. People are suing universities that didn’t want them in the first place, the government, police departments, fast-food restaurants, carmakers, cigarette companies, chemical companies, priests and each other. Isn’t a lawsuit a statement about the failure to love?

Maybe attorneys do have something to do with the ins and outs of love. In fact, if we put the growing number of attorneys in the last twenty years on a graph and the success of love on the same graph, we’d see a serious up and down connection. Is this cause and effect? I ask you.

The future. Love is fragile. That much we know. Perhaps it is born, has it’s up and downs, and then dies. I’d prefer to think not.  I’d like to think that it’s just “out there,” like the Milky Way, the wind in the trees and the ocean at dusk and our job is to become a part of it and stay with it. Love doesn’t go away, we just go away from it.

My mom, who is somewhat of a student of love and has had her share of reversals in this department, says that love is more threatened these days than the ozone layer, which was only recently discovered. Nat King Cole, for instance, had never heard of it.

John Wood