Love, Sex, and Marriage

Next: Women and danger

People have likely always fallen in love. It's almost certainly a human universal. However, the idea that people should pursue romantic love, do what they love, and that life should be, in some sense, lived for love seems largely a recent invention. It probably dates primarily to the German romantics of the late 18th century. The first really big statement of it was Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which catapulted its author to international fame (and led to people dressing up like Werther and killing themselves...possibly the first recorded copy-cat suicides). The idea was further developed by the philosophers who gathered at the University of Jena in the 1790s including Fichte (1762-1814) and Schelling (1775-1854). Both promoted strongly idealistic philosophies that focused on the development of the self, particularly in relation to nature. The English Romantics (like Blake, Coleridge, Byron...) and American Transcendentalists (like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman) were profoundly influenced by the Germans. The ideas that one should live for love, love the work one does, or the person one is married to would have struck earlier generations as misguided at best and evil at worst.

But all of this begs the question of the relationship between love and sex. There clearly is one but it seems more likely to go in the direction of we love those with whom we have sex than we have sex with those we love. The link between mind and body is close and that which our body does our mind often follows. For example, behave as if you are happy and there's a very good chance that you will soon feel happy. The idea, of course has its limits. To tell someone who is truly depressed to just behave happy not only won't likely work but will also be deeply offensive. Similarly, to tell someone who is the victim of sexual violence that they will come to love the perpetrator is wrong and offensive. And, it's true that sometimes sex in marriage was (and is) a form of rape. However, much more frequently it isn't. And, for this reason, although the success or failure of marriage had little to do with love, married partners probably did come to love each other.