I am reading Lisa Appignanesi's All About Love - a book I should have read a long time ago. It talks about the imprinting of early relationships on one's life (so it's not just me then...!) but it also assumes that early relationships are a product of rebellion, carried on in the face of parental prohibition - well hardly! Parental indifference more likely. My mother barely seemed aware of my teenage relationship when I asked her what she thought about it years later.
The Appignanesi book is good - although perhaps not quite as enlightening as I might have expected. It's an odd mix of historical survey of attitudes coupled with psychoanalytic views, this therefore contains a lot of material I have thought about, or was aware of, combined with some new stuff that I wasn't aware of, so in that sense it isn't blowing my mind intellectually and changing my whole outlook, rather complementing and perhaps occasionally correcting some of my knowledge and opinions on the matter. Nevertheless it's a pleasure to see this material gathered together.
I notice she dismisses evolutionary biology quite early on - so we are getting a cultural history of love, rather than All About Love. Much as I loathe the conclusions of ev. biol, I don't think they can be entirely dismissed, although I do believe that the requirements of complex human societies enable vast numbers of us to transcend the simplistic level of relationship that evolutionary biology sometimes seems to propose. We are not hunter-gatherers any more!
I think there is a scientific element to love - or at least sexual attraction, which isn't dealt with. So it doesn't carry quite as much new interesting info. as say, Jared Diamond's books.
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