The Cultural Evolution of Love

Angela

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Thanks to Iosif Lazaridis for the link:

First time I've seen someone try to quantify it, although I read "Love in the Western World" by Rougement back in university. I remember tracing it to the troubadours, who seem to have been influenced by Arabic poetry. I particularly remember Queen Eleanor's "Court of Love".

See:
The cultural evolution of love in literary history | Nature Human Behaviour

"Since the late nineteenth century, cultural historians have noted that the importance of love increased during the Medieval and Early Modern European period (a phenomenon that was once referred to as the emergence of ‘courtly love’). However, more recent works have shown a similar increase in Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Indian and Japanese cultures. Why such a convergent evolution in very different cultures? Using qualitative and quantitative approaches, we leverage literary history and build a database of ancient literary fiction for 19 geographical areas and 77 historical periods covering 3,800 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Early Modern period. We first confirm that romantic elements have increased in Eurasian literary fiction over the past millennium, and that similar increases also occurred earlier, in Ancient Greece, Rome and Classical India. We then explore the ecological determinants of this increase. Consistent with hypotheses from cultural history and behavioural ecology, we show that a higher level of economic development is strongly associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction (our proxy for the importance of love in a culture). To further test the causal role of economic development, we used a difference-in-difference method that exploits exogenous regional variations in economic development resulting from the adoption of the heavy plough in medieval Europe. Finally, we used probabilistic generative models to reconstruct the latent evolution of love and to assess the respective role of cultural diffusion and economic development."

Of course, there are scholars who say it really didn't appear in ancient Greece and Rome; it's just that we are projecting into the literature notions of romantic love or "pair bonding" which are more modern that that era, and that it's an anachronism of sorts. I disagree with those scholars. I thought Rougement was wrong even at the time, as I think I proved through the use of Etruscan burial art.

This sure looks like "Till death do us part, to me":

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Or even this:
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Not the loveliest pair in the following, but that's what makes it so moving:

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However, I don't know whether it goes back before, say, ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria. Does anyone know of any archaeological finds before that era showing such "pair bonding"?

Are the authors correct that even if it does, it wouldn't appear until the culture was such that there was enough abundance that people had the leisure to think about anything other than survival, making it a sort of "created" ideal that could only exist in times of relative affluence? I mean, I can't see a hunter-gatherer male having much use for it; more of a, well, there's precious little choice to fill my sexual needs, but here's a likely female, let's bop her over the head and be done with it. I also don't recall any burials showing anything approaching "love" or pair bonding from that era.

Such an "ideal" also presents it's own problems. What's the difference between sexual infatuation and "love"? How many problems arise because people can't tell the difference? Do they know that the first doesn't always mature into the latter?

Are we also expecting too much from such relationships?

Once the ideal is tarnished beyond repair, as seems to be happening nowadays, are we losing something really precious, even if a lot of people can't attain it?


 
This is very interesting. I think that love, relationships changed a lot.
Now those things are not like in the previous centuries
 

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