Dear Baya,

     What is love? Why do we fall ‘in love’? Is it something universal or just western and recent? I’d love you (pardon the expression!) to tell me.

     As you know, I’m just at the age when I’m looking for a love partner who will change my life. I am bombarded by descriptions of this emotion all the time, in films, television, magazines, the internet, advertisements. ‘Love, love, love’ as the Beatles sing, ‘all you need is love’. But is it really all you need – and indeed, do I need it at all?

      For whenever I have sailed through the air ‘in love’ I’ve come down with a terrible bump. Is it our biology, our society, cunning capitalists or who that seem to make love so important?

       How do they manage elsewhere? I remember you telling me often that most people don’t marry on the basis of love, but through the arrangements of their relatives. These people look on romantic love as a dangerous, destructive, selfish thing, akin to madness. It is the craziest emotion in an otherwise sane person’s life.

     It would be really great if you could put our current obsessions with love and my confusions into a larger context of how people in the past and other societies have managed. Then I might understand better why I am tugged and jerked by forces beyond my control; why I yearn for that very special person who will help me overcome my loneliness and to whom I can give my own heart.

     It’s a tricky subject, but do give it a go!

Lots of love (!),