 |
|
Plastic
Love |
"Love and marriage, love and marriage; they go together, like horse and carriage...".
What a beautiful song Frank Sinatra sang! The relationship between these two things was supposed to be so "elementary" that one could find out the truth just by asking the gentry. This song, of course, comes from a Sinatra movie. In real life, Frank Sinatra had so much love to share that he had four marriages. As a Hollywood star, rather a superstar, everyone knows that there would be times when horse and carriage might not go together. FRANKly speaking, to expect otherwise would be almost unthinkable.
In a world where "sacred" does not mean anything anymore, it is understandable that the idea of family has also become less important and relevant. While love is more of an emotional thing; sex is more of physical appetite, though these two are not mutually exclusive.
There is nothing deep about the fact that the newborns who come through a relationship that is based on love and some sacred bond may have better chance to have their own existence and reality be explored, understood, and regarded in a loving and sacred manner. However, those who come to this world merely on the roller coaster ride of sex, without any necessary link to "love and marriage" may tend to regard the whole life from the very same perspective that brought them to this world.
Sex passions are transient. It does not take very long to build the sexual passion: feed it to the climax, and it is all gone. Permanence does not mean anything in this context. Love does have a continuity and meaning. One can see in the nature that even in the animal kingdom examples abound that birds, apes, have sex generally with two implications: they build nests (or their homes) and they reproduce. It is not much different for the humanoids.
How old fashioned Mark Twain had been when he said, "Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century." (Mark Twain's Notebook) Sometime he had
a different thought too: "It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony." [Mark Twain, a Biography].
All those nostalgic connections are so utterly outdated to our free-bird like spirit. Apparently, the old fashioned view is that a marriage can never take place without another marriage: that is between tying of the knot between marriage and love. But in the aftermath of the sexual liberation movement, our kewl attitude has no room for such kind of interTWAINining (deliberate misspelling) relationship as mentioned by Twain.
Making Love: The transformation of meaning
The whole idea of marriage has undergone a most radical transformation. There was a time when marriage meant a "union of a man and a woman as husband and wife". Some older dictionaries (e.g., The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English of 1973 edition) has only one meaning of marriage as I just mentioned. We can't take it for granted that words mean the same as it used to. These days whenever someone is getting or got married, we have to politely ask whether it is "heterosex marriage" or "same-sex marriage". Who knows soon there might be marriages between human beings and animals?
After all, we do have ancestral relatives (!) - according to some - living
on and jumping from trees to trees. Since morally right or wrong is just relative thing, shouldn't everyone have his or her own definition? Therefore, what's all this fuss?
Ads by Google:
Advertisements not controlled by IslamiCity
|
To understand this, let's first take a peek at the historical background of the changes we have experienced and what essentially we are undergoing. This period of radical cultural change was shaped by popular attitude regarding sex - as expressed by famous singer Tina Turner - "What's love got to do with it?" Indeed, love and sex became synonymous, as love as a euphemism for sex is found to be common to a lot of pop music from that period.*
In the past, love used to "happen." People did not use to MAKE love like they made wagons, wars or fortunes. Yes, "making love" as an expression has been used centuries earlier, but not in the sense in which it is used now. For example, Shakespeare has Macbeth say to the murderers: "And thence it is that I to your assistance do make love." The phrase has been used by authors as diverse as John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Jane Austen; Thomas Hardy; Henry James and D H Lawrence.
However, until comparatively recently, the phrase meant something like this: 'to declare one's passion.' It had nothing whatsoever to do with having sex. Thus one finds in W. Somerset Maugham's 'Of Human Bondage' this interchange:
"Did he make love to you?" he asked. The words seemed to stick funnily in his throat, but he asked them nevertheless. He liked Miss Wilkinson very much now, and was thrilled by her conversation, but he could not imagine anyone making love to her.
"What a question!" she cried. "Poor Guy, he made love to every woman he met. It was a habit that he could not break himself of."
Lines like these can cause much unintentional amusement to those who don't realize that the phrase once had a very different meaning. Martin Stent recalls having a class of A Level students howl with laughter when it got to this section of Austen's 'Emma':
.....but scarcely had she begun, scarcely had they passed the sweep-gate and joined the other carriage, than she found her subject cut up - her hand seized - her attention demanded, and Mr. Elton actually making violent love to her .....
Apparently, "make love" as an exclusive euphemism for having sex is a more recent coinage. Some relate it to the period during the 60's in the US when the anti-war movement was chanting slogans like "make love not war". Peter Frewer's "Mrs Grundy - Studies in English Prudery" just lists the phrase as appearing with that meaning in the late nineteenth century. Stuart Berg Flexner in "Speaking Freely" says the twentieth, but again with no clear citation.
Valerian's search on an excellent cd-rom library of pre-twentieth century texts showed every single one of the more than sixty authors cited used the phrase in its earlier meaning only - without any connotation of sex whatsoever. Not even DH Lawrence adopted the sexual definition, although he used the exact phrase in his 1913 novel "Sons and Lovers." This research does not include a reasonable search on twentieth century texts to trace the current usage.
Pages :
1 |
2
