The History of Marriage: When Did Love Become a Reason?

In 1865, the Scottish lawyer John Ferguson McLennan published a slim book in London titled Primitive Marriage.^[1] In it, he argued that humanity had originally lived without fixed pairings, mixing indiscriminately. Then, he claimed, the widespread killing of female infants created a shortage of women, pushing societies into a phase of marriage by capture — raiding neighboring tribes for wives — before finally arriving at the monogamous marriage we know today. Around the same time, the Swiss jurist Johann Jakob Bachofen and the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan sketched similar pictures in their own ways. In his 1877 book Ancient Society, Morgan proposed a scheme in which the human family “evolved” from promiscuity through several stages to reach monogamy.^[2] Friedrich Engels, while organizing Karl Marx’s posthumous notes, adopted this scheme wholesale in his 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which helped spread it widely throughout the 20th century.^[3]

But there’s a decisive problem with this story: it isn’t true. In 1891, the Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck published The History of Human Marriage, directly refuting this staged theory.^[4] He gathered his own data by sending questionnaires to 125 missionaries and travelers around the world. The result: there was no evidence anywhere that humans had ever lived in indiscriminate, unpaired mixing. Instead, he concluded that pair-bonding was in fact an extremely old and stable feature of human history.^[4][5] Today, the field of anthropology has sided with Westermarck. The staged theories of McLennan and Morgan turn out to have been less the product of actual fieldwork than a story Victorian Europeans pieced together to place their own era’s marriage system — monogamy — at the finish line of human progress.

This fact helps clarify the nature of the question this article is actually asking. There is no answer to “When did humans move on from animal-like mating to marrying for love?” — because that evolutionary staircase never existed in the first place. The real question is a different one. The institution of marriage itself is extremely old. But when, and where, did the idea take hold that the reason to marry should be love?

Marriage Was Never Originally an Institution Built for Love

What Westermarck refuted was the claim that “marriage was primitive” — not the claim that “marriage was always based on love.” In fact, quite the opposite is true. For most of history, in most societies around the world, marriage was decided not by the feelings of two people but by the interests of two families. The American historian Stephanie Coontz, in her 2005 book Marriage, a History, lays out how marriage long functioned as a means of securing property, labor, and political alliances.^[6] Royal and noble houses used marriage to end territorial disputes or forge alliances, and even in ordinary farming households, marriage was a contract that merged two families’ land, livestock, and labor.

Nowhere is this contractual nature of marriage clearer than in royal courts. In 1659, France and Spain, after years of war, signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees to end their conflict. One of the treaty’s central provisions was the marriage of France’s Louis XIV to Maria Theresa, daughter of Spain’s King Philip IV.^[7] The two had never once met, yet this marriage functioned as a diplomatic instrument that sealed the long-standing hostility between the two royal houses and cemented France’s influence within Europe. The bride’s personal feelings or preferences were never a consideration to begin with. Far from being an exception, this was close to the standard in premodern European royalty.

Traces of this contractual logic survive today, well beyond royal courts, in the marriage customs of ordinary people. Bride price — payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s family — and its mirror image, dowry — assets the bride’s family provides for her — are found, in one form or another, in roughly three-quarters of societies anthropologists have surveyed; different in form, but identical in substance as economic exchange.^[8] Bride price tended to function as compensation to the bride’s family of origin for the loss of her labor and childbearing capacity, while dowry operated more like a form of inheritance, passing property to a daughter in advance.^[8] Neither custom had anything to do with love — both operated on a thoroughly economic logic.

Legal systems, too, treated marriage as a framework for transferring property between families rather than as a matter of individual feeling. English common law, along with that of several other regions, established the principle of “coverture,” under which a wife’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s upon marriage.^[9] A married woman lost the right to own property or enter into contracts, and legal authority over her children passed to her husband. This principle took hold in England from around the 13th century and persisted all the way until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870.^[10] Even the wedding ring — an object widely seen today as a symbol of love — began as an iron contract ring handed to a bride in ancient Rome: a token that legally sealed the marriage rather than expressed affection, as explored in detail in The Origin of Jewelry and Accessories.

Of course, this doesn’t mean personal affection was entirely absent from marriage. The tradition of courtly love that developed in 12th-century southern France, and the ideal of free choice celebrated by the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, contributed enormously to shaping the very concept of romantic love within European literature. But this literary ideal was far removed from actual marriage practice. Most marriages in medieval Europe were still arranged by families, and marriage at a young age remained common. How this tradition of courtly love later connects to the culture surrounding Valentine’s Day is explored in The Origin of Valentine’s Day.

Why Marrying for Love Was Once a “Dangerous Idea”

What needs to be underscored here is not simply that “love wasn’t historically the basis for marriage.” Coontz’s central argument is far more provocative than that. Before the late 18th century, in most societies around the world, the very idea of basing marriage on love was considered irresponsible and dangerous.^[6] Marriage was a momentous institution that determined the survival of a family line, the transfer of property, and the stability of a community — so entrusting a decision of that magnitude to something as fickle and potentially fleeting as love looked like a reckless gamble. This is why Coontz subtitled her book “How Love Conquered Marriage.” Love was not marriage’s longtime companion; it was closer to a late-arriving intruder that shook a rock-solid institution to its foundations. A marriage driven by romantic love was seen as something that could pull an individual out of the control of family and community — and, in that sense, was treated as an antisocial, even dangerous, impulse.^[6]

So why did this long-standing line of defense begin to collapse in the late 18th century? The literary movement of Romanticism is often credited as the cause, but Coontz reverses the order of cause and effect. Romanticism, in her account, merely supplied the language to explain and justify a change that was already underway; the force that actually drove the change lay elsewhere. That force was economic. As wage labor spread across Europe and North America, young people were, for the first time, able to support themselves without inheriting land, a dowry, or a family trade from their parents. The authority to choose a marriage partner shifted, quite naturally, from the family to the individual. As parents’ economic leverage weakened, children gained the real power to marry a partner of their own choosing instead of one chosen for them. The Enlightenment-era emphasis on individual rights lent this shift further legitimacy.

Why this shift matters becomes clear once you consider the order it reversed. Previously, the assumed sequence was: marry the right person, and affection will grow over time. Now, a different sequence began to establish itself as the ideal: fall in love first, then marry on the strength of that love. This order, which seems entirely self-evident today, is — viewed across the full span of human history — an extremely recent idea, and one that was once considered precarious.

English-speaking readers have a familiar literary marker for exactly this transition. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813 — squarely inside the period Coontz describes — opens with the famously ironic line that “a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” announcing marriage as an economic transaction before the novel spends the rest of its pages quietly arguing against that premise.^[18] Elizabeth Bennet turns down a financially secure proposal from her cousin Mr. Collins and eventually marries for love and mutual respect, while her friend Charlotte Lucas takes the older, more pragmatic path and marries Collins for security alone. Austen doesn’t resolve which choice is right; she simply lets both exist side by side on the same page. That, in miniature, is the uneasy, transitional moment this article is describing: one convention still standing, a new one not yet fully arrived.

It Became a Mass Norm Only in the 20th Century

If the shift of the late 18th century was an ideological and economic change that began among the European and North American upper classes and the emerging middle class, it took more than another century for this idea to change the actual marriage practices of ordinary people around the world. And while the pace of that change varied enormously from country to country, it was concentrated, almost everywhere, in the 20th century.

Japan offers a striking example. According to multiple rounds of the National Fertility Survey conducted by Japan’s National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 69% of married couples in 1930 had been paired through arranged matchmaking, known as miai (見合い).^[11] But by the 1960s, love marriages overtook arranged marriages in frequency for the first time, and by 2015, the rate of arranged marriage had fallen to just 5.2%.^[11] The basic mode of marriage was overturned within a single lifetime.

A similar shift unfolded in neighboring Korea. According to a nationwide survey conducted in 1979, a majority of respondents at the time still said they preferred choosing a spouse through matchmaking over dating — arranged marriage was still the dominant mode.^[12] But over the following decades, the center of gravity in Korean society shifted toward love marriage as the majority practice, and related academic research suggests this shift unfolded alongside a broader trend of delaying marriage and rising time and cost involved in finding a spouse.^[13]

China’s case followed a somewhat different path. Here, it was state law, rather than an organic shift in personal values, that moved first. The 1950 Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China banned forced marriage, concubinage, and child marriage, and codified a marriage system based on free choice of spouse.^[14] Naturally, a law alone couldn’t overturn deeply rooted customs overnight, and resistance and compromise persisted for a long time on the ground. Still, this law remains a defining 20th-century example of a state actively working to redefine the basis of marriage — from a decision made by families to a choice made by individuals.

It would be premature, though, to look at these cases and conclude that “the whole world is converging toward Western-style love marriage.” India is a strong counterexample. According to a 2018 survey, roughly 93% of all marriages in India are still arranged by families, while purely self-chosen love marriages account for only about 3%.^[15] That doesn’t mean, however, that most of these marriages are forced on people against their will. What has been spreading rapidly in urban areas in recent years is a “semi-arranged” model: families or matchmaking platforms introduce a potential match, but the individuals themselves date and get to know each other before deciding whether to marry.^[16] In other words, even under the single label of “arranged marriage,” there is a real difference between a marriage a family decides unilaterally and one in which a family’s introduction is accepted only with the individuals’ own consent. Which is also to say that a bare percentage — “X% of marriages are arranged” — tells you nothing about how much say the people getting married actually had.

The Nature of Marriage Changed — It Didn’t Necessarily Improve

There’s a temptation to sum up everything covered so far as “the story of marriage progressing from savagery to civilization, from oppression to freedom.” But that summary falls into essentially the same trap as the 19th-century staged theory this article began with. Just as McLennan and Morgan placed their own era’s monogamy at the pinnacle of evolution, we today can easily place our own era’s love marriage at the moral finish line and judge past eras and other cultures as backward by comparison. What actually happened, though, looks less like progress than a change in character. Marriage shifted its center of gravity from an economic contract toward a relationship centered on emotional bonds — it did not advance from a primitive form of the act itself toward a perfected one.

And this change in character came at a cost. This is the paradox Coontz points to.^[6] Once the basis of marriage narrowed from property and family to love alone, the other reasons to stay married — the ones that used to hold even when love cooled — disappeared along with it. In the past, there were reasons to remain married even without love: shared property, family reputation, a child’s future, among others. But once love became the sole pillar holding marriage up, a single wobble in that pillar could shake the whole structure. In a sense, the price love paid for conquering marriage was that marriage became a far less stable institution than it used to be. The rise in divorce rates seen across many countries since the latter half of the 20th century is not unrelated to this structural shift.

This shift echoes a pattern also visible in the history of kissing. As explored in The History of Kissing, cultural customs tied to romance are not fixed, universal human instincts — they are a domain of choice, to which every society and era has supplied a different answer. Marriage is no exception. The practice of pairing off and living together is roughly as old as humanity itself, but the basis on which that pair is chosen — love, property, or family — has been a rule rewritten again and again, differently, across time and place.

Beyond the changing character of marriage, the boundary of who marriage could exist between has also never been fixed. In the United States, several states banned marriage between people of different races well into the mid-20th century, until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia struck down these bans as unconstitutional nationwide.^[17] Beginning in the 2000s, starting with the Netherlands, a growing number of countries began to legally recognize marriage between same-sex couples, a shift that continues today at different speeds across different countries and regions.^[17] Just as with the change that made love a condition for marriage, these cases show that the boundaries of who is eligible to marry were never settled and fixed at some point in time — they are the result of an ongoing social agreement, one each era has had to reach for itself.

Just as Victorian-era scholars drew their own marriage system as the endpoint of human evolution, we too are prone to treating love-based marriage as the final form of marriage itself. But what the history of marriage actually shows is not a final destination — it’s an institution continually rewoven to fit whatever problem each era had to solve. In eras when protecting property and family was urgent, marriage was a contract. In an era when individual economic independence became possible, marriage became a matter of feeling. Love has been the reason for marriage for only a few centuries out of the whole span of human history — and there is no reason to believe that reason will stay the same forever.