To love or to be loved?

A female Chinese professor has recently come to visit our lab for six months. The other day, we had an interesting conversation (in my halting Mandarin) on the subject of marriage. She told me that when she was young she was considered a beauty and was quite sought after by boys in her university. So people were surprised when she turned down all the best-looking suitors and married a very plain-looking man instead.

Her reason for doing this was because her husband considered himself lucky to have won her, and loved her very much, although she didn't love him. They have a twenty-year old son, and I asked whether after all these years, she had grown to love her husband. She replied very decisively 'No, I have never loved him. But he loves me very much and treats me very well, so I'm happy.'

Who knows what is the right or wrong way to find happiness? In a way, I understand. To love someone is to be vulnerable to being betrayed and hurt. Being with someone who loves you more than you love them gives you security. I think in generations past, when it was more of a stigma to divorce, and people defined women mostly as wives, mothers, grandmothers, women would get married and be expected to stay married, regardless of how they were treated. In such circumstances, happiness may have been a more co-incidental thing. Marrying someone who loved you more gave you more power and security in a society where women had very little power.

In the present day, I think we (men and women) have learnt to demand more. Or maybe, we are more confident about admitting discontentment and not worrying about seeming ungrateful for what we have than our older generations were. Certainly, women have more rights and much more choice than we used to in many parts of the world.

Is that why being with someone I don't love seems so unpalatable to me? I have friends (actually, mostly male) who seem to be looking for partners without appearing to consider love. Or is it that they are too shy to admit that they are looking for love? I think that my mother, although she wishes me to find love, secretly thinks that if I end up with someone who loves me, then that will be enough for my happiness. But I think that in her mind, if I marry someone who loves me more, then in the end I will grow to love them too.

Perhaps this is true in a way. I believe that if both people in an arranged marriage trust that this is the best way to find a partner, then they will grow to love each other and be happy together. I also know that love is gradual, you learn to love someone a little and it grows over time.

And yet.... to know someone loves me more than I love them, means that I would always feel guilty or uncomfortable to accept the things they do for me. A relationship should be about balance and compromise. If the balance of giving and receiving is skewed to one side then it is difficult to maintain it. But who can gauge who is the greater giver or recipient? Being able to give your loved ones happiness is in itself a gift to the giver.

Love is more simple than we think. But it is also more complicated than we think.

mimosa

I've been growing some mimosa seedlings (you might know it as 'shy grass') on my desk for a while now, and the new pinnate leaves have unfurled. I spend a few minutes of each day tormenting the poor leaflets, making them fold up by poking them. It's said that this is a defence mechanism, to hide the leaves from herbivores and generally making them less accessible for munching. I'm not sure if this is the real evolutionary reason, but if I were a sheep, I would definitely be a little taken aback if my lunch started to curl up before I took a bite. At least the birds won't mistake the moving leaves for lunch - worms and caterpillars of such a lucid green tend to be poisonous.

Allergies

To put it mildly, it can be a little awkward when you develop an allergy to your test material.

Having just spent a couple of hours leaning over barley plants, trying to take photos of the leaves and the various symptoms that different cultivars produce in response to virus infection, I've found that an itch has emerged as my very own symptom to the plants, around the neck and wrists. Do you know the kind - the 'hot' irritated area of skin?

I should have known I would be allergic to barley plants. A few years ago I spent a summer working with flowering barley and barley ears - it gets a lot worse around anthesis time. When I came back with my samples my eyes would be streaming. It didn't help that I then had to patiently dissect out each barley grain by hand, with my eyes straining to see. Of course, I did realise it was the barley that set me off, but I didn't expect to have a reaction to the plants prior to anthesis.

As a lot of my work will be with barley, I can hardly avoid it. I will just have to wear gloves and take anti-histamines if needs be. No wonder they told me to go to the Occupation Health unit at the hospital and take regular lung function tests.

I can't wait until hayfever season.

Valentine's day (certificate 12A)

If you're under 11 you won't be able to cope with the rejection so you're not allowed to give anyone a Valentine's day card. If you're over 11 you're ok.
(see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/8510091.stm)

Maybe the headmaster was rejected when he was little and emotionally scarred for life? I remember in primary school that the girls in my class would have been horrified (or pretended to be horrified) by the idea of having a 'boyfriend' (boys? eurgh!).

Does that mean the children won't be told to make Valentine's Day cards for their mothers and fathers any more? Is that now too Freudian?

anti-sense. The antithesis of sense.

I have just spent several days designing primers to amplify bits of DNA from wheat genomic DNA. Lots of days looking at AGTCGTCGTAA and other such sequences.
Now I've just realised that I want the antisense sequence so I have to start all over again.
AAARRGGGGGHHHHHHH
(or should it be AAATTGGGGGCCCCCCC?)

PS this post is unlikely to make sense to any non-molecular biologists. But I'm happy to share the bewilderment.