The love match is a recent invention

In most societies documented by anthropology, alliance is a matter between families, arranged by elders, and the feelings of those concerned are not the criterion. What marriage organises is a transmission, a political alliance, a labour force.

This does not mean that romantic feeling would be a Western invention. A comparative study conducted in 1992 by William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer finds traces of it in the great majority of the cultures examined. What varies is not its existence but the role assigned to it in the decision to unite.

In the twelfth century, the Occitan troubadours sang of fin'amor, in which the poet serves an inaccessible lady, often married to another. Distance there is the condition of the feeling. Andreas Capellanus, who codified its rules around 1185, goes so far as to write that true love cannot exist within marriage, which belongs to the order of duty.

The position looks strange today; it was coherent: marriage was not asked to produce a feeling, and feeling was not asked to found a marriage. The two registers were separate, and that separation spared a good many disappointments.

The considerable success of Julie, or the New Heloise, published by Rousseau in 1761, marks a turning point: the sincerity of feeling becomes a value superior to social convention. The Romanticism of the following century completes the making of individual feeling into a legitimate reason for deciding a life.

The displacement is massive. Marriage, which was an arrangement from which happiness was not expected, finds itself charged with providing it. That is a new requirement, and a considerable one.

In Love in the Western World, published in 1939, Denis de Rougemont argues that Western passion feeds on obstacle, and that modern marriage is therefore asked for two contradictory things: passion and duration. His thesis is much contested, notably because it imposes a single grid on heterogeneous works.

It nonetheless has the merit of naming a real tension. The nineteenth-century novel, from Madame Bovary to Anna Karenina, takes precisely that tension as its object, and it judges it severely.

These observations do not say that marriage by inclination would be a mistake, nor that one should return to something else. A recent practice is no less legitimate than an old one, and antiquity has never counted as justification.

What history brings is more modest: it undoes the sense of obviousness. Knowing that the demand made of couples today is a dated construction allows one to regard it as a choice, which is different from undergoing it as a fact of nature.