The *victory* of the romanticization of marriage is a relatively recent phenomena, but it goes back a bit further. The concept of "married love" first appeared in Calvinist divines in the 16th century, and was brought to full flower in the works of Spencer, Shakespeare, and Milton. The "myth of the housewife" (as Maggie describes it among the upper classes in boston) was almost literally invented by Milton in *Paradise Lost* (and for a very long time PL was as widely read among upper and "middle" classes as Seinfeld was watched by the mass tv audience).
[The early history of "romantic love" is itself of interest, and it is curious that on this point Engels and the reactionary Anglican C.S. Lewis tell the same story. The Romans regarded "romantic love" as essentially a disease, like a common cold. (This was from a male perspective of course.) Ovid's *Art of Love* is essentially a medical text on how to "cure" the disease by seducing the woman. Ovid *also* in the marvellous tale of Baucis & Philemon, placed almost exactly in the center of *Metamorphoses*, provides the most powerful story of marriage as mutual *companionship*: marriage comes first, love (not "romantic" love) follows in the ideal ancient, or at least Ovidian, case.
[The Provencal poets turned romantic love into essentially an adulterous relationship between a man and a married woman. In one late medieval (spanish) romance, hero and heroine do marry at the end, and when hero starts to repeat one of his many romantic harangues, the heroine (now his wife) says in effect, "What are you doing? We're married now; we can't be in love any more." This of course is the "business relationship" Maggie refers to. The various versions of the Tristram tale seem to echo some sort of clash between ideals of "romantic" love (adulterous and a sort of sickness: the love potion) and marriage as companionship based on "economics" (the two Iseults). (I worked this through about 20 years ago, and other than giving it out to undergraduate lit classes have not worked it over since. My presentation may be a bit wobbly.)]
Myths require a grounding in and express real social relations, but the precise form they take depends on the story tellers, that being what a myth is, a *story*.
Carrol