"These days, few people think of marrying without having feelings of love for their
partner. Love is what brings us together, and the lack of it drives us apart.
But it hasn't always been this way. There was a time when the question of love
was not an issue.

Beginning in ancient Greece, the consent of marriage as given by the father of the bride, who wasn't allowed an opinion of her own. So it was the father who had to be convinced of the interest the union of his daughter with a rich and prestigious, or at least worthy family, would bring. The ability to seduce and convince the young girl that she was loved could
nevertheless make her more accepting of this situation between simple physical
attraction and pure calculation of interest.

In the middle Ages, the Catholic Church instituted the sacrament of marriage. The
blessing given to the spouses was supposed to transmute physical love into a
more spiritual one. So, since true love was supposed to be a consequence of the religious wedding, it may have been unnecessary to have true feelings for the person whom one was about to marry. Love was supposed to arise in marriage and from marriage, so that the feelings felt before marriage were of little consequence.

By the end of the 11th, and throughout the 12th centuries, when the poets of
southern France invented 'l'amour courtois' (courtly love), love emerged as an
essential theme in the relationships between men and women. Courtly love was a
brand new, even revolutionary idea, that was opposed to marriage and its
sacrament. With this conception, true love only existed in a chaste form and was
not linked to marriage, because marriage was only the glorification and
sanctification of a physical and ordinary love. In his famous thesis dedicated
to the myth of love, Denis de Rougemont (1939) showed that chivalrous love
towards a noble lady is mainly symbolic. This Lady in thoughts represents the spiritual and angelic part of the human being, the true self. In this way, the stories and characters in early novels such as Tristan and Iseult merely reflect man's adventure in the conquest of his own
soul.

This spiritual heresy was hidden under the appearance of gallantry and romantic
love. The deep meaning of these early novels progressively faded and
the myth of love generalized so as to become a requirement that should be
fulfilled at all times. The statistics of divorce nowadays are the consequence of this omnipresent myth that has become a veritable tyranny of feelings: love is owed to everyone and is expected at all times. Everyone claims the right to a love similar to that seen in movies and
novels, yet this is only a pale reflection of the initial myth whose meaning
has now been lost. Everyone lives with the nostalgia of the perfect love, the
wonderful 'happy ever after' love that continually eludes us because we have
forgotten that true love is primarily found within ourselves."