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Meeting, Dating, and Selecting a Lover
Learning to love
Hunt (1975) noted that humans take a long time to learn to love. It starts with the holding, stroking, kissing, and nursing of the infant, who learns what it feels like to be loved. Children 3 to 6 learn to love their parents but it is frustrating because you find out "you can't marry mommy" or "daddy." From 6 to 12, we learn more about love: we learn to make friends. But when the juices flow in adolescence, we suddenly feel intense urges for contact with the opposite sex. Our first love experiences, Hunt observed, are often in our imagination...a rock star, a movie star, a teacher. Then we feel attracted to someone real and try to hang out with him/her in small groups. Later, we want to be alone with our boy/girlfriend. These first affairs may be brief because they are based on superficial factors. Yet, through this 12-14 year process, if we are lucky, we learned a lot: to select and attract a lover, to express love, to give of ourselves, to get along, to disclose, to see beyond the surface, to attend to others' needs, to know our needs, etc. Each new love, ideally (but not always), is deeper and more realistic. We usually have from 2 or 3 to 10 "loves" before we marry. All this learning--this "education in love"--is important; however, much more learning is apparently needed since almost half of our marriages still fail (the divorce rate of persons married as teenagers is still higher). Love is serious business; we need to know a lot.
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