Choosing Marriage on the Basis of Love

Prior to the eighteenth century in Western Europe and elsewhere around the globe, marriage between a man and a woman had little to do with lifelong loving companionship. What is more, a betrothed couple had little to say in the matter; it was often not even their choice to get married! In her research on the history of marriage, Coontz (2005) writes that, over many generations, most societies held marriage as an important political and economic institution that ensured that nobility could acquire vast wealth and/or political power through making alliances with other families. Also, for people of less means, marriage allowed families to pool resources, such as land and an adequate labor force, to support a family business. It wasn’t the two people getting married who made the choice to marry; it was their parents, community elders, clergy or politicians. That two people can choose to get married on the basis of their love for each other has only been around for a little over two hundred years.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century influenced relations between men and women in radical ways. Societal ideals such as individual liberty, freedom of speech and the equality of men began to challenge older conceptions of marriage. In Western Europe and America, the freedom to choose whom you could marry was an utterly new idea. It ushered in a new realm of personal responsibility for one’s marriage. One could argue that without the fundamental opportunity to choose, a person or a couple had no real sense of responsibility for the quality of one’s marriage. Prior to this time, two people could live in a state of matrimony and pay little attention to the quality of their relationship. For thousands of years, societal norms allowed husbands to wield great power in marriage. Husbands owned all the property in the family, including his wife’s possessions, made family decisions, often unilaterally, and punished his wife if she disobeyed him. There was little equality between the sexes, no real freedom of speech or any real focus on the quality of one’s marriage. All this began to transform during The Enlightenment.

Coontz (2005) writes that with the rise of the market economy during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, men were freed from their families to earn a living and husbands were now seen as the person in the family who was responsible for being the the main economic provider. A wife’s role was to set the standards for moral behavior and to attend to the emotional needs of family members. Married couples began to set up their own households and their homes became places of refuge from one’s work and community responsibilities. The emotional climate in the home began to be an important factor in the health and well-being of one’s marriage.

With men and women being able to choose whom they could marry, couples began to marry for one simple little reason: They loved each other. Now men and women had a dual task in their marital life: How to keep their experience love alive and stay committed to each other over a lifetime. This was squarely their job now.

Reference

Coontz, S. (2005) Marriage, a history: How love conquered marriage. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

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