All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Read Online Free Page B

hypotheses, and remember all of these. They bear little resemblance to single cells or the proverbial birds and bees, which themselves may bear little resemblance to each other. A great part of our lives, which includes love in its manifold forms, has little to do with being driven by evolutionary forces. We spend little enough of our time reproducing, and some never do, sometimes out of choice rather than failure. I’ll believe in evolutionary psychology more, perhaps, when it’s used less as an explanation for male philandering and female nesting. These natural men and women, after all, don’t still shit in their back gardens.
    Then, too, while it’s exciting to think that neuroscientists have, according to press releases, found love or God spots in our hard-wiring, located chemical compounds in our brains which determine our love choices and their success or failure–and sometimes jump to grand conclusions, based on limited studies in laboratory conditions, about innate gender differences–this may tell us as little about the way we live love as a leap in a synapse in our prefrontal lobes tells us about Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The best of them, whose work I am familiar with from earlier research, would concur. So there is only a little of these kinds of sciences in the love in this book.
     
     
    In drawing limits somewhere, I have concentrated on the Western world, which is, of course, permeated by influences from the East and elsewhere. But the West is what I know best, so it seemed presumptuous to attempt to draw on traditions I could only know in the most cursory manner.
    I have also rarely singled out homosexuality as an altogether specific form of love, or focused on the cultural practices which in various epochs have attended homosexuality. I apologize in advance for this lack and for too often erring on the side of ‘he and she’ rather than the doubling of one and the other–even if in the interviews that have informed this book there have been a variety of homosexuals and in the sources I cite there are many. I have a kind of rationale here, apart from the one of space.
    Societies and religions have long constituted themselves by drawing a line between the permissible and the criminal. But desire, even of the ordinary enough ‘he and she’ kind, always seems to have been something of a loose cannon where rules are concerned. Rapture at bottom contains something of the asocial, the criminal, and desire may indeed be fuelled by the breaking of bounds, whether of clans, families or godly and social rules.
    Through history, everything has been done, while various epochs have sanctioned things for one group of individuals, though perhaps not for another. Shepherds in mountain regions have buggered their sheep, people have pleasured themselves whatever their Church’s edicts; in a gathering tide during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries solitary sexual acts were turned into a medical condition to be disciplined and expunged. The ancient Greeks sanctioned particular kinds of homosexuality but not others, and practised what we would now call paedophilia: we have come a long way towards legitimating homosexual practices and gay marriage, but draw the line at paedophilia. What is clear is that most systems of law and most regimes want to disallow certain aspects of the polymorphously perverse creature that the human animal is–able to take his pleasure in so many ways and to suffer for so many others of them, including unrequited love. The nature of these desires, the love that fuels them or results from them, may in its living-out–when not socially ostracized–depend less on the gender of the couple than on the individuals in play.
    Freud, who thought we were all bisexual–in other words, that we all contained the mental and psychological attributes of both sexes–once noted that the sex of our chosen object in love was not in any simple way related either to our physical sexual character