Interestingly enough, where marriage is concerned, love has very little to do with it. It seems that throughout most of the history of Western Civilization love was a flimsy excuse for marriage. Marriage was a matter of survival, power and money. In our modern world, despite our protestations – marriage is still about survival, power, money and we’ve added a fourth ingredient – love. We demand passion in our marriage whereas during the Victorian age, our passion was found in our friendships and affairs, not our marriages.
Interestingly enough – despite lacking ‘love’ – marriages not based on love were more likely to survive. Likely because a wounded heart is as cruel in its passion as it is tender. When your heart is broken, you don’t want to fix the problems, you don’t want to survive, you want to escape. That need to escape and to cut ties is one reason for a high divorce rate. The more we marry for passion, the more likely we are to escape when that passion detonates.
Historically speaking, there’s not a great case to be made for love. In 6th century Europe, a baptized Christian warlord named Clothar takes four wives as part of his political maneuvering. In the 12th century, nobles firmly believed that love was a fleeting thing and therefore only allowed to flourish in affairs while they married for more practical reasons. In the 14th century, the lord of the manor decided whom his peasants could marry or if they could.
According to the French essayist in the 16th century, love is a bore. If a man loves his wife, he must be too dull for anyone else to love. Despite what you see on the signs in Virginia, the state wasn’t always for lovers. In fact, the idea of passion between a wife and a husband was pretty much frowned upon. Protestant ministers would lecture their flocks to avoid loving their spouses too much. Endearing nicknames were also discouraged because it might undermine authority in marriage.
Throughout the Victorian era, women make the journey from the lustier sex to the chaste in large part due to the Queen herself. She elected to marry in white and there was much made of her deep, passionate love for her husband. The chastity of a married woman was so admired that men were encouraged to take their lusts to prostitutes rather than with their own wives.
True intimacy and passion in these times were reserved for close friends and family – not for spouses. In fact, the idea for marriage and the nuclear family and passion in that marriage didn’t really begin until the 20th century – between the dating crazes of the 1920s to the celebration of the nuclear family in the 1950s and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Today, marriage is considered the penultimate expression of love and passion. It’s a goal to be achieved, to be lauded and to be celebrated. Everyone wants to be married. Everyone wants love and passion. Everyone wants to be successful. We want to find the successful relationship that offers all these wonderful things – to us that’s the perfect marriage. So what does love have to do with it?
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