When two Jane Austin characters made love, they were merely flirting. When Dr Johnson was ‘much caressed’ by Mrs Thrale not a hair of his head was touched: he was just made as comfortable as possible by his friend. We have moved from the emotional to the physical, from the love of God to sexual love. The wonderful statement by St Paul about love in I Corinthians 13:4, now much used in wedding services, has been completely changed from its original. In the King James’s Bible, it is a description of Godly love – the Greek word agape being translated as ‘charity’ – whereas in the modern versions ‘agape’ becomes almost indistinguishable from ‘eros,’ translated just as ‘love.’
The same fate has affected the word ‘relationship.’ Whereas until 1944, in accordance to the Oxford English Dictionary, two bankers in a relationship would have meant that they were in a purely commercial arrangement, the same word would now imply a premarital sexual relation, well before the sixties when Phillip Larkin claimed sex had been invented. If Philip Larkin missed his bus, I did not know the bus even existed, because, although born less than two years after the poet, it was in Buenos Aires, where we were a generation or two behind the times.
My three sons, however, completed my education and gave me experience, albeit vicarious, of eight or ten relationships. Almost all of them good and healthy. Why do I say this? Because there was always something more than physical, a proper sharing of interests and lives because one plus one was more than two. The only problems were when the separations came. My wife and I always formed a loving relationship with the girls, who for us, never having had a daughter, stepped into the empty space. So near us were these girls that one of them, when after a few years she became formally engaged, came all the way from Italy with her fiancé to introduce him to us.
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