Radical Idea Marrying Love Coontz. Use 2

¶ … Radical Idea Marrying Love" Coontz. Use 2 quotes 2 paraphrases, proper citation. Include a Works Cited page (addition 2 1/2 -3 pages text).

"The radical idea of marrying for love"

According to Stephanie Coontz: "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" (Coontz 2005). Two notions have tended to predominate, according to Coontz, both of them erroneous. One is that love is a Western notion and never existed before the birth of modern, bourgeois capitalism. This belies the many romances that were written before the modern era. The second is that love and marriage have always been conjoined. There has been a celebration of romantic love for a long time, historically speaking, but the idea that love and marriage are associated is a relatively new one, and would seem very strange in ancient cultural contexts.

In some cultures, such as ancient Greece, love was seen as a mental affair -- a meeting of the minds, rather than a product of spending one's life with someone in wedlock. In other cultures, love was thought to evolve after marriage, but to love someone before marriage was to engage in something profoundly, socially disruptive to the accepted order. This was the case in ancient India, where arranged marriages were the accepted order of the day (Coontz 2005). In ancient China, producing a son was considered far more important than loving one's spouse, to the point that it was considered acceptable to take a concubine if one's wife did not produce an heir (Coontz 2005). Arranged marriages were also the norm in 16th and 17th century Europe, where it was thought that young people did not have the proper emotional or intellectual equipment to select a mate (Coontz 2005).

While love was demonized in some cultures or viewed as dangerous, in other cultures it was celebrated, but not as a part of marriage. In the Middle Ages, courtly love, in which a knight pined for a married woman was considered the ideal. This allowed the lover to be chaste in the eyes of the beloved, and the woman to be remote and perfect in the knight's conception. Love was never sullied with the practical realities of everyday life. Love within marriage was seen as dull, and anathema to the true principles of what constituted love.

Coontz admits that not all cultures demonized love to such a degree. However, even in Rome, which had a less indulgent attitude towards adultery than the aristocracy in the high Middle Ages, married men and women were not supposed to engage in public displays of affection (Coontz 2005). Excessive love for one's wife was seen as strange, in some cultures love in marriage diverted the male from giving proper allegiance to God or other institutions (such as one's lord in the Middle Ages, or to the state in civic-minded Rome). It was not that there were not exceptions to the rule: "There were always youngsters who resisted the pressures of parents, kin, and neighbors to marry for practical reasons rather than love, but most accepted or even welcomed the interference of parents and others in arranging their marriages" (Coontz 2005).

Coontz's analysis seems to parallel how modern culture views assuming a profession in American society. In America, there is often a great deal of pressure to select a job that pays the highest salary one can obtain, and to bow to the pressures of one's parents. Of course, there are successful people who do not go to college or take unconventional career paths. But while our media culture celebrates people who 'break the mold,' it only tends to do so when they are wildly successful, like Steve Jobs, and overall takes a rather suspicious attitude towards selecting work purely for pleasure.