Introduction

Part 1 In Search of Traditional Marriage
Chapter 1 The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love
Chapter 2 The Many Meanings of Marriage
Chapter 3 The Invention of Marriage

Part 2 The Era of Political Marriage
Chapter 4 Soap Operas of the Ancient World
Chapter 5 Something Borrowed: The Marital Legacy of the Classical World and Early Christianity
Chapter 6 Playing the Bishop, Capturing the Queen: Aristocratic Marriages in Early Medieval Europe
Chapter 7 How the Other 95 Percent Wed: Marriage Among the Common Folk of the Middle Ages
Chapter 8 Something Old, Something New: Western European Marriage at the Dawn of the Modern Age

Part 3 The Love Revolution
Chapter 9 From Yoke Mates to Soul Mates: Emergence of the Love Match and the Male Provider Marriage
Chapter 10 "Two Birds Within One Nest": Sentimental Marriage in Nineteenth-Century Europe and North America
Chapter 11 "A Heaving Volcano": Beneath the Surface of Victorian Marriage
Chapter 12 "The Time When Mountains Move Has Come": From Sentimental to Sexual Marriage
Chapter 13 Making Do, Then Making Babies: Marriage in the Great Depression and World War II
Chapter 14 The Era of Ozzie and Harriet: The Long Decade of "Traditional" Marriage

Part 4 Courting Disaster? The Collapse of Universal and Lifelong Marriage
Chapter 15 Winds of Change: Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s
Chapter 16 The Perfect Storm: The Transformation of Marriage at the End of the Twentieth Century
Chapter 17 Uncharted Territory: How the Transformation of Marriage Is Changing Our Lives

Conclusion: Better of Worse? The Future of Marriage
Conclusion
Notes
Index