What does "the free world" mean to me?

Hello world,

Surely, you have once read or heard something about matriarchy, something like indigenous peoples wearing loin cloths and living in a form of society where the women are boss of a family.
And surely, in the current debate about the modernisation of Islam, you have heard about polygamic families, which means that one man has several wives. (And not the contrary!)
And for one last example, everyone in the western world knows from the movies or from novels, how our society has been only a couple of decades ago, where sometimes parents chose their children's bride, where divorce was a sin that didn't exist as a word, where sex was a service from a wife to her husband, almost on a level with doing the dishes and raising the children.

What I mean by "free world" is that we live in a society, where role models still exist, but there are so many to choose from! There are people who decide not to have sex before marriage, there are people who decide that sex and love are quite separate, there are people cheating their partner and people living in an "open relationship", and there is something like a majority of people who --if there biography is seen in retrospect-- have engaged in what sociologists call "serial monogamy" which means so much as being faithful to one partner until they break up and start over with someone else.

Of course, society and culture still impose a lot of behaviors, much of the traditional legal rules have been revised but some are still in place and there is even a new trend of governments to "subsidize" the raising of children in ways that encourage some form of living together over others. And of course, there's a strong influence of the media, selling texts and pictures that transport attitudes and live styles. But still, I think, people in the western world are quite free, nowadays, in the question of with whom to share their lives, with whom to share their secrets, their intimacy and what to give on to their offspring.

There's a freedom for people to decide, which is their way to love and to live, independent of other's expectations, following their inner voice. And this freedom allows us to observe, to look at people and to try getting a glimpse of what are their true desires and needs, which they are following now. Most people are unable to state their needs clearly, instead we say "we have to try out things" and when we are older we speak of "the experiences we have made".

What I want to do in this blog is to take a broader view and to ask:
what do human beings really need from love?
and how can they get it?

You are invited to join the quest.. for truth and happiness!