As mercilessly unsentimental as it is to say this, children would have less of an impact on marriage if the institution itself weren’t so heavily burdened by romantic expectations—which, as we saw in chapter 1, are relatively new. Before the late eighteenth century, marriage was a public institution, inseparable from raising families and binding individuals to the broader community. But sometime around the late eighteenth century, as Jane Austen was completing her first draft of Pride and Prejudice, a different idea began to take shape: marriage was for love. Today, 94 percent of singles in
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This is speaking to the modern romantic ideal of a marriage is diametrically opposed to what children bring.
