Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

"I love this book! It is sheer pleasure: trenchant analysis, interesting data, and graceful prose. I can think of no other modern scholar who so perfectly helps us explore the themes of modern marital malaise or who helps us understand who we are now--and how we got there. This book is the best source we could possibly use to credibly inform us about how modern marriage was created and what our past tells us about our future. Stephanie Coontz has delivered another path breaking, dialogue creating, scholarly tour de force!"
--Pepper Schwartz Ph.D., author of American Couples: Money, Work and Sex and Love Between Equals, How Peer Marriage Really Works

"Fair, lucid and enormously informative, it may outlive us all, for Coontz has captured our times like a bug in amber."
--Dr. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Love

"This is a magnificent, beautifully written book on an eternally interesting--and politically timely-- subject. Coontz's vast knowledge and superb scholarship should make this book the resource for anyone who is married, was married, wants to marry, can't marry, hates the very thought of marrying, or thinks they know what the one right kind of marriage is."
--Carol Tavris, Ph.D., author of The Mismeasure of Woman

"Marriage, a History is filled with amazing stories and examples for all eras. Coontz is scholarly, incisive and entertaining. She tackles our most central questions about the meaning of marriage with evidence, not platitudes. Her powerful book is timely and profoundly apt."
--Dr. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

"This is an engaging, highly-readable guided tour of marriage from its beginnings to its current state. Stephanie Coontz shows us convincingly that marriage's history is, at heart, a love story."
-- Andrew Cherlin

"Stephanie Coontz has written an extraordinary book with a powerful message: that today's marriages are fragile not because Americans have become more self-centered and career-minded, but because we expect more from marriage than any previous generation. Scrupulously researched, filled with fascinating detail, and written with grace, humor, and wisdom, this book reveals that marriage is not a static, unchanging, and increasingly unattainable ideal, but a relationship whose success or failure ultimately depends on our willingness, as individuals and as a society, to adapt to social realities unlike any that existed in the past."
--Steven Mintz, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History, University of Houston

Stephanie Coontz teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She also serves as director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families. Her work has been featured in newspapers such as the New York Times, as well as scholarly journals such as Journal of Marriage and Family, and she is frequently interviewed on national television and radio.

Coontz debates the idea that there is a "biological" basis for marriage -- that it is, as many have argued, the human version of the instinctive pair-bonding seen among many animal groups. Primates, our closest animal kin, she notes, don't come together to create such bonds. And, she deadpans, "One scientist who believes there is such a biological base in humans claims that it is limited to about four years." Coontz rejects the theories that marriage came into existence among our Stone Age ancestors so that men could, alternately, protect or subjugate women. The "protective or provider theory of marriage," according to which human society evolved via women's trading sex for food and protection, she writes, is "the most widespread myth about the origins of marriage."

She rejects, too, the "oppressive theory" according to which marriage came into being to allow men the free exchange and exploitation of women. Too many women benefited from it, she says, for the institution to be summed up simplistically as an exercise in pure oppression. In some ancient cultures, it was men, not women, who were exchanged. And sometimes individual women, like Cleopatra, took the bull by the horns (as it were) and played the marriage game to their advantage, though the frequency of such experiences probably shouldn't be exaggerated.

Coontz argues that, rather than existing to oppress or protect women within the bounds of an exclusive and isolated male-female relationship, the marriage bond evolved because it served the needs of much larger kinship groups -- creating cooperative ties for the purpose of sharing resources and keeping the peace that stretched far beyond individual families or tribes.

She also rejects the notion that the breadwinner/homemaker model that we associate with normal or "traditional" marriage is either normal or traditional. In the past, she argues, the economic needs of families required both spouses -- and their children, for that matter -- to work, usually side by side. The idea that a man's place was out in the world of lucre and a woman's was one of non-remunerative homemaking became a cultural ideal only in the 19th century. And not until the mid-20th century could most families in Western Europe and North America actually survive on the earnings of a single breadwinner. This economic development, though, was -- and has continued to be -- understood as a sentimental and moral achievement.

"Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households," Coontz writes of the post-World War II period. "Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. And never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was 'normal.' " Today, it's the normality of 1950s-era "family values" rather than the uniqueness of that social and economic postwar situation that looms large in the American collective imagination.

The biggest myth that Coontz takes apart, however, is the idea that marriage today is in a unique and unprecedented state of crisis. Marriage certainly is in flux, she admits -- people are marrying and having children later than ever, more people than ever are cohabitating or remaining single, and many more children are being born out of wedlock, at all levels of society -- but there's nothing new about all this change or instability. It's been part of the institution since the 18th century, when the traditional model of marriage as a political and economic bond contracted by families fell away and was replaced by a new and revolutionary type of relationship: the love bond. Critics have been crying "crisis" ever since. And, Coontz writes, they've been right, because "personal satisfaction" is an inherently unstable foundation. "From the moment of its inception," she writes, "this revolutionary new marriage system already showed signs of the instability that was to plague it at the end of the twentieth century. . . . The very features that promised to make marriage such a unique and treasured personal relationship opened the way for it to become an optional and fragile one."

Coontz is perhaps at her very best when she calls into question the pearls of wisdom proffered by today's traditionalists, pro-marriage pundits and advice-mongers. Books such as The Rules and its sequel, The Rules for Marriage (published just as one of its two authors filed for divorce), are fatally flawed, she argues, because they tend to rest upon clichés, not on the latest sociological or psychological data. As a result, they can give some pretty outdated advice, such as encouraging women to play dumb to catch a man or to down-pedal their education and careers in favor of early marriage and child-rearing. This may have been sound advice once upon a time, when male breadwinner/female homemaker marriages, with all their attendant benefits and limitations, were the norm, but it no longer makes sense economically or any other way. Surveys now show that young women don't want to marry older, more powerful men and that young men don't want to be with less-educated and lower-earning women. Although it used to be true that highly educated or extremely successful professional women had a harder time getting married, now female college graduates and women with higher earnings are more likely to marry than are women with less education and lower wages.

The people having the greatest problems getting and staying married today, Coontz notes, are the poor. And what's hurting their chances is not a lack of family values (the very people who have the weakest family ties are often those who hold the most traditionalist views, she points out), but a lack of education and employment. Many women must leave the workforce when their children are born, and this more "traditional" division of labor "often destabilizes their relationships and increases their stress rather than relieving it," she writes. "The big problem doesn't lie in differences between what men and women want out of life and love. The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumptions that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice." Relationships between men and women, she implies, are basically healthy -- probably better than they've ever been in the past. It's our society that's sick.

Reviewed by Judith Warner
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

George Bernard Shaw described marriage as an institution that brings together two people “under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions. They are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”1

Shaw’s comment was amusing when he wrote it at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it still makes us smile today, because it pokes fun at the unrealistic expectations that spring from a dearly held cultural ideal that marriage should be based on intense, profound love and a couple should maintain their ardor until death do them part. But for thousands of years the joke would have fallen flat.

For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage. In fact, many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists used to think romantic love was a recent Western invention. This is not true. People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply.2

But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order.

In some cultures and times, true love was actually thought to be incompatible with marriage. Plato believed love was a wonderful emotion that led men to behave honorably. But the Greek philosopher was referring not to the love of women, “such as the meaner men feel,” but to the love of one man for another.3

Other societies considered it good if love developed after marriage or thought love should be factored in along with the more serious considerations involved in choosing a mate. But even when past societies did welcome or encourage married love, they kept it on a short leash. Couples were not to put their feelings for each other above more important commitments, such as their ties to parents, siblings, cousins, neighbors, or God.

In ancient India, falling in love before marriage was seen as a disruptive, almost antisocial act. The Greeks thought lovesickness was a type of insanity, a view that was adopted by medieval commentators in Europe. In the Middle Ages the French defined love as a “derangement of the mind” that could be cured by sexual intercourse, either with the loved one or with a different partner.4 This cure assumed, as Oscar Wilde once put it, that the quickest way to conquer yearning and temptation was to yield immediately and move on to more important matters.

In China, excessive love between husband and wife was seen as a threat to the solidarity of the extended family. Parents could force a son to divorce his wife if her behavior or work habits didn’t please them, whether or not he loved her. They could also require him take a concubine if his wife did not produce a son. If a son’s romantic attachment to his wife rivaled his parents’ claims on the couple’s time and labor, the parents might even send her back to her parents. In the Chinese language the term love did not traditionally apply to feelings between husband and wife. It was used to describe an illicit, socially disapproved relationship. In the 1920s a group of intellectuals invented a new word for love between spouses because they thought such a radical new idea required its own special label.5

In Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, adultery became idealized as the highest form of love among the aristocracy. According to the Countess of Champagne, it was impossible for true love to “exert its powers between two people who are married to each other.”6

In twelfth-century France, Andreas Capellanus, chaplain to Countess Marie of Troyes, wrote a treatise on the principles of courtly love. The first rule was that “marriage is no real excuse for not loving.” But he meant loving someone outside the marriage. As late as the eighteenth century the French essayist Montaigne wrote that any man who was in love with his wife was a man so dull that no one else could love him.7

Courtly love probably loomed larger in literature than in real life. But for centuries, noblemen and kings fell in love with courtesans rather than the wives they married for political reasons. Queens and noblewomen had to be more discreet than their husbands, but they too looked beyond marriage for love and intimacy.

This sharp distinction between love and marriage was common among the lower and middle classes as well. Many of the songs and stories popular among peasants in medieval Europe mocked married love.

The most famous love affair of the Middle Ages was that of Peter Abelard, a well-known theologian in France, and Heloise, the brilliant niece of a fellow churchman at Notre Dame. The two eloped without marrying, and she bore him a child. In an attempt to save his career but still placate Heloise’s furious uncle, Abelard proposed they marry in secret. This would mean that Heloise would not be living in sin, while Abelard could still pursue his church ambitions. But Heloise resisted the idea, arguing that marriage would not only harm his career but also undermine their love.8

Even in societies that esteemed married love, couples were expected to keep it under strict control. In many cultures, public displays of love between husband and wife were considered unseemly. A Roman was expelled from the Senate because he had kissed his wife in front of his daughter. Plutarch conceded that the punishment was somewhat extreme but pointed out that everyone knew that it was “disgraceful” to kiss one’s wife in front of others.10

Some Greek and Roman philosophers even said that a man who loved his wife with “excessive” ardor was “an adulterer.” Many centuries later Catholic and Protestant theologians argued that husbands and wives who loved each other too much were committing the sin of idolatry. Theologians chided wives who used endearing nicknames for their husbands, because such familiarity on a wife’s part undermined the husband’s authority and the awe that his wife should feel for him. Although medieval Muslim thinkers were more approving of sexual passion between husband and wife than were Christian theologians, they also insisted that too much intimacy between husband and wife weakened a believer’s devotion to God. And, like their European counterparts, secular writers in the Islamic world believed that love thrived best outside marriage.11

Many cultures still frown on placing love at the center of marriage. In Africa, the Fulbe people of northern Cameroon do not see love as a legitimate emotion, especially within marriage. One observer reports that in conversations with their neighbors, Fulbe women “vehemently deny emotional attachment to a husband.” In many peasant and working-class communities, too much love between husband and wife is seen as disruptive because it encourages the couple to withdraw from the wider web of dependence that makes the society work.12

As a result, men and women often relate to each other in public, even after marriage, through the conventions of a war between the sexes, disguising the fondness they may really feel. They describe their marital behavior, no matter how exemplary it may actually be, in terms of convenience, compulsion, or self-interest rather than love or sentiment. In Cockney rhyming slang, the term for wife is trouble and strife.

Whether it is valued or not, love is rarely seen as the main ingredient for marital success. Among the Taita of Kenya, recognition and approval of married love are widespread. An eighty-year-old man recalled that his fourth wife “was the wife of my heart....I could look at her and no words would pass, just a smile.” In this society, where men often take several wives, women speak wistfully about how wonderful it is to be a “love wife.” But only a small percentage of Taita women experience this luxury, because a Taita man normally marries a love wife only after he has accumulated a few more practical wives.13

In many cultures, love has been seen as a desirable outcome of marriage but not as a good reason for getting married in the first place. The Hindu tradition celebrates love and sexuality in marriage, but love and sexual attraction are not considered valid reasons for marriage. “First we marry, then we’ll fall in love” is the formula. As recently as 1975, a survey of college students in the Indian state of Karnataka found that only 18 percent “strongly” approved of marriages made on the basis of love, while 32 percent completely disapproved.14

Similarly, in early modern Europe most people believed that love developed after marriage. Moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries argued that if a husband and wife each had a good character, they would probably come to love each other. But they insisted that youths be guided by their families in choosing spouses who were worth learning to love. It was up to parents and other relatives to make sure that the woman had a dowry or the man had a good yearly income. Such capital, it was thought, would certainly help love flower.15

I don’t believe that people of the past had more control over their hearts than we do today or that they were incapable of the deep love so many individuals now hope to achieve in marriage. But love in marriage was seen as a bonus, not as a necessity. The great Roman statesman Cicero exchanged many loving letters with his wife, Terenti...