For most of our history, marriage was not a relationship based on mutual love between a breadwinning husband and an at-home wife, but an institution devoted to acquiring wealth, power, and property. Picking a mate on the basis of something as irrational as love would have been considered absurd. Only in the nineteenth century did marriage move to the denter of people's emotional lives.

Stephanie Coontz is the director of Research and Public Education at the Council on Contemporary families and teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She divides her time between Makaha, Hawaii, and Washington. The author of the award-winning The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, she has written about marriage and family issues in many national journals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, Chicago Tribune, Vogue, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Family Therapy Magazine. Her work has been translated into japanese, German, French, and Spanish.