Wondered into being by: everyone who ever lived
Wonderspan: less than 10 min
Thanks to Sunniva S for sending in her smile quotient findings for the Victoria Line, which scored a creditable 25%. It's difficult to create a smile count for the universe by averaging only two scores, but let's - the provisional World Smile Quotient is now ((9/36)+(56/500))/2, which is 18.1%. There is still time for others to join in. If anyone else has a go and lets me know how they get on (just leave a comment at the bottom of this post) then I'll report back here and add it to the global Smiles Map for Incidental Life Enhancement (S.M.I.L.E.).
So, we've looked at all manner of ways of loving since January - from a man who stood in front of a Chinese tank to a woman who has spent 20 years counting ants, to a man who opens his home to everyone, to women singing their protest song, to scientists marvelling at our precisely balanced and abundant universe, dancers dancing, musicians playing on the streets, people who make bicycles, watch the northern lights, murmurations of starlings or even just trains, rapt with love for the thing - all ways of loving, all wonder-full in their way, and there's more to come. What we haven't done yet, at least not directly, is spend a little time wondering at people being in love with each other.
So let's go back to 1968, credited as it is with bringing in a new era of love and freedom. The Vietnam War sinks to new depths and protests against it reach new heights; the civil rights movement reaches its acme - it's shaking up the old orthodoxies so much that Martin Luther King is assassinated, following Malcolm X's assassinatation five years earlier (whose legacy lives on in 1968 with the black power salute at the Mexico Olympics); Eastern Bloc people's resistance movements begin to stir as Czechoslovakia tries to act independently of the Soviet Union in the Prague Spring and Russian tanks roll in to stop it; cultural sanctions against apartheid South Africa begin this year; feminism gathers momentum as a social and political force, women strike for equal pay in Dagenham and win the political argument; Baader-Meinhof revolutionary activists wreak havoc in Germany; Poland erupts with student protests, mirroring the Prague Spring and triggering a national crisis; Paris explodes with student/worker revolutionary protests and new avant-garde arts and political movements, which nearly bring the government down; the first manned orbit of the moon is completed by the US ahead of Russia, just to remind us that the Cold War rumbles on and gets a little scarier each year; amid this tumult there's a shared sense (so we're told) that whatever mess we are making of the world, new ways of being and doing are becoming possible...and then there's a whole lot of loving in the wake of the Summer of Love the year before. Loving, loving and more loving - free love, Easy Rider love, polygamy and polyandry, experimental love, lots and lots of making love.
Or was there? Some older have told me that there wasn't that much free loving going on. On screen, you could see people starting to have covered-up sex, people talked about sex a bit more than before, men and women could study together in universities, but for most people life wasn't very different from how it had always been. Love played second fiddle to marriage, which meant marrying the right person, and that didn't necessarily mean a good person. For many, marriage for love was saved for fairy tales and sex kept in a cupboard with the best china for special occasions or dragged out like a half-empty bottle of whisky whenever they (or just he) felt like it. But the hippy revolution was having some kind of effect - at least people were starting to try things differently - the idea that you could marry for love, maybe even ought to, was gaining ground.
It was around 1968 that a social scientist called John Lee started to wonder what people meant by love. He noticed that when people talked about their partners, they used the word 'love' to mean some quite different, sometimes very different, things. He decided to collect statements about love from books - fiction, non-fiction, the Bible and so on - and he gathered these until he had hundreds. He set about wondering whether the statements could be clustered together and managed to order them into six broad groups, each corresponding, so he reckoned, to a different attitude of 'love' for a partner. He called these six attitudes 'colours of love' and in 1973 published his theory in Colours of love: an exploration of the ways of loving. Magazine editors were delighted - they had a new 'What kind of lover are you' quiz for their irrationally and insatiably quiz-ravenous readership.
For today's way of loving, you'll be finding out, without too much gravity, which love 'colour' is most you and you'll be directed accordingly to your very own Monday wonder, which will be waiting for you and it to ravish one another, hold hands, or at least say hello. First, we need to find out which love colour is yours. Please don't assume this is real science, but have a look at the six groups of questions below, which are based on an abbreviated, modified version of Hendrick and Hendrick’s (1990) love attitudes scale to fit John Lee's theory. As you go through, think about which group of statements you most agree with, then follow the links below. The questions ask you about your partner - if you ain't got one (and many of us ain't) then think of the last partner you had. Off you go...
Group One
- My partner and I were attracted to each other immediately when we first met.
- My partner and I have the right physical chemistry.
- The physical part of our relationship is intense and satisfying.
- My partner and I were meant for each other.
- My partner fits my ideal standards of physical attractiveness.
- I try to keep my partner a little uncertain about my commitment to her/him.
- I believe that what my partner doesn’t know about me won’t hurt her/him.
- I could get over my relationship with my partner pretty easily.
- When my partner gets too dependent on me, I back off.
- I enjoy playing the field.
- It is hard for me to say exactly when our friendship turned into love.
- To be genuine, our love first required caring.
- Our love is the best kind because it grew out of a close friendship.
- Our love is really a deep friendship, not a mysterious or mystical emotion.
- Our love relationship is satisfying because it developed from a good friendship.
- I considered what my partner was going to become in life before committing myself to her/him.
- I tried to plan my life carefully before choosing a partner.
- In choosing my partner, I believed it was best to find someone with a similar background.
- An important factor in choosing my partner was whether she/he would be a good parent.
- Before getting very involved with my partner, I tried to figure out how compatible our goals were.
- If my partner and I broke up, I don’t know how I would cope.
- It drives me crazy when my partner doesn’t pay enough attention to me.
- I’m so in love with my partner that I sometimes have trouble concentrating on anything else.
- I cannot relax if I suspect that my partner is with someone else.
- I wish I could spend every minute of every day with my partner.
- I would rather suffer myself than let my partner suffer.
- I am usually willing to sacrifice my own wishes to let my partner achieve her/his goals.
- Whatever I own is my partner’s to use as she/he pleases.
- When my partner behaves badly, I still love her/him fully and unconditionally.
- I would endure all things for the sake of my partner.
The science behind this looks a bit dodgy but there's probably something in it (and some social science research supports parts of the the theory). Maybe we need more words for love: I'm ludicrously ludic about you; I'm feeling so pragmatic about you right now that I could kiss you; you bring out in me a great and enduring mania, darling, do I do the same for you? Say I do, say I do!... This would all aid communication considerably. Love should be to us as they say that snow is to the Inuit - we need more than one word for all its textures.
On 14 May 1904 Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a letter to a protégé poet:
To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.(And when it comes to love, we're all young!)
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www.waysofloving.com
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