The Nature of Love

MSN Lifestyle has a piece on the two kinds of husbands. To my eighteenth century eyes, this looks like the distinction between Enlightened love and Romantic love. Using the MSN terms, it would seem that a marriage to Husband was the ideal in the early eighteenth cenury, and by the very end of the century and into the nineteenth, Boyfriend was the ideal partner. There is a missing stage, between Englightenment and Romanticism, was the Age of Sensibility, and love in this period is love of the soul mate, the abandoning of the rest of the world for a immursion in the couple. Its the most domestic love. It lacks some of the passion and fire of Romantic love, but none of the depth.