Abstract
“LOVE,” “MARRIAGE,” AND “FAMILY,” are fluid concepts.¹ Legal, economic, social, and religious attitudes vary significantly in different times and places, and discrete societies construct divergent normative gender roles, sexual interactions, and family arrangements. Many today regard the 1950s affection-based Western nuclear family as the “conventional” model of family life, but social scientists have argued for decades that the companionate marriage based on emotional satisfaction and romantic love was itself a significant departure from earlier historical formulations.² Today, that nuclear model has declined, and concepts of marriage have undergone “a transition from the companionate marriage to what we might call the