How romantic expectations transformed 20th Century marriage
How romantic expectations transformed 20th Century marriage. Love, romance, sexual fulfilment.. a new book by a University of Sussex social historian embraces a period of the 20thCentury that has often been regarded as a golden age of marriage. But beneath the slushy advertising slogans, romantic movies and an eagerness for wedlock, Dr Claire Langhamer suggests in The English in Love (Oxford University Press) that all was not so rosy. Through examining not just the popular culture and media of the years between 1920 and 1970, but also personal diaries and letters of the people of the time, Dr Langhamer discovers that English society was undergoing an "emotional revolution" that brought about just as much disappointment and unhappiness for couples as it did openness and liberation. As she observes from the nation's reaction in 1955 to Princess Margaret ending her relationship with divorcee Captain Peter Townsend: "The royal crisis occurred at a time when the emotional landscapes was changing. Margaret's battle between love and duty was one manifestation of a wider conflict between self-discipline and self-expression." The golden age of marriage began after the First World War when, under the influence of Freudian theories, marriage reformers pushed the idea that that love was the best way to tame sexual desire and both could be tightly bound within the notion of modern marriage.
