how has the content of love advice changed over the centuries? i dont mean by poetry or paragraph either.

The twentieth century is the first in modern history in
which romantic relationships between women became taboo. Lillian Faderman’s
Surpassing the Love of Men provides a scholarly overview of
romantic friendships between women from the 16th century. According to her, it was the
economic independence women had begun to gain in the 19th century (early feminism) which
created the need for patriarchal antifeminism. Twentieth century sexologists constructed
the term “lesbian” and associated it with all manner of neurosis and mental illness. She
references Dr. Edwin Clarke’s Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls
(1874), who “pointed out that a great variety of illnesses had suddenly beset
the middle-class American girl because she was forcing her brain to use up the blood
which she needed for menstruation” (Faderman 235).

Until
this point in the mid-nineteenth century, however, men and women were typically viewed
as almost different species. Marriage was a social contract, typically carried out by
the families of the betrothed for economic reasons. As such, “love” was not considered
an integral, necessary, expected, or even hoped-for benefit of marriage. Men and women
were not expected to get along socially; they were, for all intents and purposes,
heavily segregated. Love advice, as we think of it today, did not exist before the
nineteenth century. Obviously, as evidenced in literature of the period, many women did
seek the attention of men and did hope to marry and build families. These women,
however, would not have been encouraged to “fall in love,” but rather to rely on their
families to find them a suitable situation in which to
procreate.

The way men and women are expected today to
relate to one another, to fall in love, to have a happy family, would have been foreign
to those living in previous centuries. Love was not a goal of the heterosexual
relationship. In the case of the goal being a heterosexual relationship itself (not
love, per se), advice for its acquisition would certainly look drastically different in
today’s world than in previous centuries. As gender roles change, i.e. what it means to
be a man or a woman, so too does what equals attractiveness in the opposite sex and,
likewise, a mate. Even fifty years ago, a potential wife would have been required to
manifest certain traits; she would have been required to stay at home and be satisfied
with being a good “housewife,” she would have been expected to be a good mother, to
support her husband’s career goals, to entertain her husband’s friends and colleagues.
As a suitor, one would have sought physical attractiveness combined with a demure and
humble attitude. Obviously, as we go further back in history, the woman’s role in
society becomes less and less important and her suitability as a wife becomes more and
more dependent on her subservience. Her parents’ advice to her would have been to
be as subservient as possible.
  

Literature Cited

Faderman,
Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic friendships and love between women from
the renaissance to the present, New York: William Morrow and Company,
1981.