Thursday 10 February 2000

Pic of the day: An outdoors picture from Norway, as per your request. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the text, though.

While I was struggling to wake up this morning, the clock radio played a love song: "Don't you know that love is forever?" sang Jahn Teigen and Anita Skorgan.

The irony of this is not obvious to my foreign readers, so allow me to quickly explain: These two popular song artists worked together, fell in love, had a baby girl, and divorced. (Well, actually it would seem that she divorced him. Afterwards, Jahn Teigen made a beautiful love song to her, one of my all time favorites. But anyway, life goes on.)

Oh yes. Love is forever. To quote another favorite of mine: "It's written in the Scriptures, it's written there in blood ..." But, as the cold daylight of reality shows: Love may be forever, but romance is not. The love of man is fickle, and the love of woman doubly so.

In Denmark, where gay and lesbian marriages have been recognized for some years, there are tentative data on how long these last. Intriguingly, gay marriages had on average half the likelihood of breaking down compared to hetero marriages, a report showed. For lesbian marriages, the numbers were roughly equal to those in the larger society. Now, neither of these in themselves are of any personal interest to me, but it verifies the general impression that in two out of three divorces, the break is initiated by the woman.

I have at times pondered this, as I tend to ponder things that are far away and of no immediate use to me: Dinosaurs, distant galaxies and romance. And I wonder: Is it due to basic biological factors, like hormones, or are there cultural roots? For instance, the fact that romance novels are consumed in mass quantities by women and largely ignored by men? You'd expect a whole subculture like that to have some influence on the larger society. Of course, the mass consumption of romance novels could have biological reasons, too ...

Another shameful secret: I read romantic short stories as a kid. However, I have an excuse.
I learned to read when I was something like five years old. I know I could read books and newspapers before I started school at age 6, and I am pretty sure I could write reasonably well (except for the content, of course) on a typewriter before I started school too. Anyway, my family were poor farmers. While they used a disproportionate amount of their meager earnings on literature, the selection was still somewhat limited for a literary omnivore like me. At the worst, I would find myself reading Postgirokatalogen, a list of all Norwegian companies and persons with a Postal Money Transfer account, sorted by post office. I'm not kidding, and I took some interest in finding what kind of shops were represented in the various villages...

Particularly in the summer, relatives would come visiting. And my aunts brought with them sometimes large stacks of weekly magazines; there were food recipes, stories about more or less ordinary people, letters with strange questions that got answered (so adults asked questions, too?) and bland jokes and comic strips (ooh! comics!) and lots of romantic short stories. Typically also novels running over months, where I would jump into the middle of the story after the kissing had begun and the jealousy. While not on a level with fairy tales or Donald Duck, everything went down into the gaping maw of my impressionable mind. ("And look what happened!" shouts the crowd.) My all time favorite was the one where this guy wagered a modest amount of money with his friends that he would get a certain young woman to sleep with him. Now this wasn't done overnight, and meanwhile he fell wildly in love with her, much to his surprise. Then, much to the surprise of them both, she found out about the wager. Ooops. I never got the end of that story. That's the problem with magazines. You have to buy them regularly. So I guess I'll never know ...

Onward to sociobiology. Note that I only know this theory from popular science magazines, and I an not quite sure how much of it is science and how much is popular. Anyway, the idea is that falling in love is a biological thing. (Well, obviously it is: There are some rather measurable changes in body chemistry. Nobody disputes that, I think. But what is cause and what is effect?) Anyway, the idea is that it's all about procreation, not recreation. The first, dizzy period of falling in love is to get the pregnancy started (and it is known to be quite effective, too). Then the effect lasts for a while, to keep the club-wielding brute lurking around and chase off any hyena looking for immobilized woman or tender baby flesh. And then it gradually wears off, as the baby is supposed to be weaned. (This takes a couple more years in the wild than in modern societies ... stone agers tend to have their babies ca 4 years apart if nothing untoward happens. Sadly it often does. The stone age is not nearly as cool today as it was in Jean M Auel's books.)

So when approximately three years are gone, the romance is supposed to be stone dead, and then the circle starts anew. Unless there is something better at hand, the female may well fall in love with the same guy over again, but there is a certain amount of "immunization", which is supposed to encourage genetic diversity. Meaning basically that if there are two acceptable guys around, the woman will put one egg in each basket, as it were.

And thus has the new American lifestyle of serial monogamy got a scientific explanation going back to the stone age. Funny thing that people could forget all this for several thousand years, and think that "love is forever" and not just for three years, renewable.

Of course, it could also be that this is the first time in 4000 years that things are seen from a female perspective. What would I know? I've never seen things from a female perspective. And the romance novels tend to end before the romance does.

Hmm. If one song could do this, I guess I better stay in bed on Valentines Day.