How Love Has Changed Through the Centuries

And Yet! Love Has Its Own History!

Despite the fact that love is experienced as a deeply personal and spontaneous emotion, in reality, it is a "social invention" that has evolved over the centuries and is closely linked with the concept of marriage. People haven’t always fallen in love in the way we do today!

Transactional Love

In earlier times, powerful people would marry as part of commercial or territorial agreements, enhancing their wealth and power. The success of the couple's union was directly correlated with how beneficial the merging of families was to the economy and military strength.

We find examples as early as the first kingdoms of Mesopotamia in the 18th century BC, with the most notable being the union of the region of Yamhad with the neighboring Mari. Similar marriage agreements also found fertile ground in European monarchies of more recent history, such as the famous union between the Duchess of Austria, Marie Antoinette, and Louis XVI of France, which aimed at achieving the much-desired peace between the two countries.

Lyrical Love

In the early Middle Ages, people in lower social classes began to dissociate love from interest. The characteristic troubadours fell deeply in love and created poems with a single theme: love. Through this lyricism, a notion of love was created that did not involve marriage, family, or children. In an inherently unrealistic framework, it was about a romantic madness, expressed by people in love with the very idea of love.

As many poems suggest, the young man in love might have seen his beloved’s eyes only a few times or perhaps never, and could have been hundreds of kilometers away from her. Lyrical love was not necessarily concerned with reciprocity or physical contact, and the lack of practical, everyday problems contributed greatly to the intensity of the emotions.

A few centuries later, William Shakespeare popularized the most tragic story of a sudden love that could lead two young people to suicide. Even in our century, the same lyrical perception guided Gabriel Garcia Marquez's hand to celebrate unfulfilled love in "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Romantic Love

The explosion of Romanticism in literature prioritized emotion over reason and impulse over tradition. Finding its place in daily life and thought, Romanticism gave rise to the belief that marriage should be a consequence of love. Parental objections, class and economic inequalities, and anything else that stood as a barrier between two people in love were flattened by the enthusiasm accompanying the romantic notion of love.

The village of Gretna Green in northern Scotland became a symbol for lovers and oppressed couples who fled puritan English society to get married, supporting the newly emerged notion that people should choose for themselves with whom they want to share their lives.

Free Love

Reaching the modern era, what stands out is the pursuit of the freedom of love. Starting from the 1970s with the hippie movements and up to today's Gay Pride events, our era has claimed the right to nudism, homosexual relationships, and premarital intercourse, challenging the very notion of monogamy or "until death do us part" marriages.

Today, marriage is directly associated with companionship, sexual attraction, starting a family, and social and economic advancement and security. In turn, divorces, and their steadily increasing rates, certainly place temporality in the list of characteristics of love in our time.

If we view history as a continuum, it is easy to conclude that we are simply another stage in this evolution. It is certainly interesting to consider that people in the future will not fall in love as we do, but perhaps it is also worth thinking about what example they will take from us.