Love and Marriage, Part 1

In the original Star Trek, you know, the series from the late 60s, with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley as the triumverate of Kirk, Spock, and irascible McCoy, there was an episode where aliens wonder why so much Earth literature is devoted to love.

If you were to ask evolutionary biologists about love, they might claim it's all about humans trying to pass on their genes. All of this romance business, that's just how human perceive the need to reproduce.

I wonder how difficult a topic love and sex was to teens and twenty somethings fifty years ago, during the 1950s. I suspect it's still something of a challenging, even embarassing topic, and yet, my sense is that, in the right mood, you can get many Americans to talk about the subject. Kinsey managed to do it, but he exuded the kind of dispassionate objectivity of a scientist or a doctor that his subjects were willing to be frank.

I've been around enough single people whose foremost thought is to be in a relationship. As such, many people devote a great deal of time trying to get in a relationship, and then a great deal of time maintaining that relationship. People seem miserable when they don't have someone, and yet, due to traumatic experiences, some are afraid to be involved.

You'd probably get some Indians, particularly of an older generation, who find all this talk of romance and meeting people, quite a mess, and that they'd already figure out the solution to all of this long ago: the arranged marriage. Having been raised in the United States, I find the system we have, of people pursuing relationships far more interesting, even if it means a great deal of work on the part of some to achieve what they want.

I leave this as part 1 because it's getting late. I know I could wait and edit this as a whole, but my fear is that I'll postpone talking about this for so long that I won't get back to it, and I wanted to post this up while it was fresh on my mind.

I want you to think about this question. Why do you want to be in relationship? How do you get yourself into a relationship/ What do you expect from the person you're in a relationship with? How eager were you to get to your first sexual experience? What, in your opinion, is the relationship between sex and love.

You know, I'd certainly like to talk about the human need for aesthetics or their purpose in the universe, but I'm as prurient as the next person, and so I'm curious about the topic that seems of greatest concern to the most number of people: love and sex, and how to get them, and why.