First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Happy Ever After

Is Chemistry Overrated?

January 6, 2010 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Here’s an excerpt from the always wonderful Ariel Levy, writing in The New Yorker about a new memoir on the trials of marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.

For all the variability in the meaning of marriage, one fairly consistent element over time and place was that it had nothing to do with love. “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,” [Stephanie] Coontz writes. In fact, loving one’s spouse too much was considered a threat to social and religious order, and was discouraged in societies as disparate as ancient Greece, medieval Islam, and contemporary Cameroon. The modern Western ideal of marriage as both romantic and companionate is an anomaly and a gamble. As soon as people in any culture start selecting spouses based on emotion, the rates of broken marriages shoot up.

FYI, Stephanie Coontz is the writer of Marriage, a History.

(Illustration by Sophie Blackall from her site, Missed Connections.)

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