Last comes love.

• Author: DiNovella, Elizabeth
• Position: Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage - Book Review

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage By Stephanie Coontz Viking. 423 pages. $25.95.

Since antiquity, conservative social critics have fretted over the crisis in marriage. Even the Roman emperor Augustus promoted a family values campaign, according to Stephanie Coontz in her new book, Marriage, A History. Augustus created a "wave of manufactured nostalgia for the supposed virtues of earlier times, when women were not allowed to drink wine and, according to the satirist Juvenal, wives were too tired from working at their looms to engage in adultery," she writes. Augustus didn't let his own divorce and affairs get in the way, just as President Ronald Reagan did not let his own divorce mar his family values campaign.

Coontz confirms that marriage is in a crisis. It's become more fragile and more optional than ever before. "Marriage has changed more in the last thirty years than in the last 3,000," she observes. For millennia, marriage was the way to organize economic, social, and political life. Not anymore.

Coontz values marriage. She writes, "It remains the highest expression of commitment in our culture and comes packaged with exacting expectations about responsibility, fidelity, and intimacy." But she doesn't insist on it, nor does she subscribe to the view that people should be forced into older forms of marriage. She thinks marriage is more fair and satisfying since both women and men have equal rights.

We are in the midst of a social upheaval that rivals the Industrial Revolution in size and scope. It can be painful, difficult, and messy. But even with these changes, Coontz doesn't see marriage as doomed.

"Over the past century, marriage has steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective in fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history," she concludes.

The radical idea that people should marry primarily for love caused chaos in marriage. Until the eighteenth century, most people didn't have too many options. Family, government, and the church restricted one's choice in mates.

That is not to say that husbands and wives throughout history did not love each other. Coontz acknowledges that people fell in love, sometimes even with their own spouses. But for most of human history, "marriage was not fundamentally about love," she writes. "It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as...