Related to Speculation regarding the future evolution of mind (c.1850-1940)
Description:

Morris's 'News From Nowhere' is primarily concerned with imagining the organization and activities of a society that has taken on the ideals of the arts and crafts movement. The psychologies of the inhabitants of this future utopia are however characterized as in most respects identical to those existent in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, there is some discussion of the different attitudes and beliefs that Morris believes would prevail given the realisation of his ideal.

For example, the subject of love arises during a conversation between the protagonist (or 'guest'), and an elder statesman of the new society. The statesman makes it clear that although men (and, by implication, women) still suffer from the trials and tribulations relating to it, they are able to accept these with greater equinamity than in times past:

'we of these generations are strong and healthy of body, and live easily; we pass our lives in reasonable strife with nature, exercising not one side of ourselves only, but all sides, taking the keenest pleasure in all the life of the world.  So it is a point of honour with us not to be self-centred; not to suppose that the world must cease because one man is sorry; therefore we should think it foolish, or if you will, criminal, to exaggerate these matters of sentiment and sensibility: we are no more inclined to eke out our sentimental sorrows than to cherish our bodily pains; and we recognise that there are other pleasures besides love-making.  You must remember, also, that we are long-lived, and that therefore beauty both in man and woman is not so fleeting as it was in the days when we were burdened so heavily by self-inflicted diseases.  So we shake off these griefs in a way which perhaps the sentimentalists of other times would think contemptible and unheroic, but which we think necessary and manlike.  As on the other hand, therefore, we have ceased to be commercial in our love-matters, so also we have ceased to be artificially foolish.  The folly which comes by nature, the unwisdom of the immature man, or the older man caught in a trap, we must put up with that, nor are we much ashamed of it; but to be conventionally sensitive or sentimental—my friend, I am old and perhaps disappointed, but at least I think we have cast off some of the follies of the older world.”

He paused, as if for some words of mine; but I held my peace: then he went on: “At least, if we suffer from the tyranny and fickleness of nature or our own want of experience, we neither grimace about it, nor lie.  If there must be sundering betwixt those who meant never to sunder, so it must be: but there need be no pretext of unity when the reality of it is gone: nor do we drive those who well know that they are incapable of it to profess an undying sentiment which they cannot really feel: thus it is that as that monstrosity of venal lust is no longer possible, so also it is no longer needed.  Don’t misunderstand me.  You did not seemed shocked when I told you that there were no law-courts to enforce contracts of sentiment or passion; but so curiously are men made, that perhaps you will be shocked when I tell you that there is no code of public opinion which takes the place of such courts, and which might be as tyrannical and unreasonable as they were.  I do not say that people don’t judge their neighbours’ conduct, sometimes, doubtless, unfairly.  But I do say that there is no unvarying conventional set of rules by which people are judged; no bed of Procrustes to stretch or cramp their minds and lives; no hypocritical excommunication which people are forced to pronounce, either by unconsidered habit, or by the unexpressed threat of the lesser interdict if they are lax in their hypocrisy.  Are you shocked now?”

“N-o—no,” said I, with some hesitation.  “It is all so different.”

“At any rate,” said he, “one thing I think I can answer for: whatever sentiment there is, it is real—and general; it is not confined to people very specially refined.  I am also pretty sure, as I hinted to you just now, that there is not by a great way as much suffering involved in these matters either to men or to women as there used to be."' (81-83)

As this quote makes clear, Morris is less concerned with imagining ways in which human psychology might evolve in the future, than with imagining a situation in which the concerns of those living in the late nineteenth century might be ameliorated and made satisfactory to those that hold them. Love is the much same as it was in 1890, but men and women have learnt to organize their lives in such as way as to make its vagaries less painful to those that experience it. An useful comparison in this regard is George Bernard Shaw's 'Back to Methusela' (1921)