ABSTRACT
FRANK SINATRA MADE A LOT of money singing those words from the Rogers and Hammerstein song. The recording, made more than twentyfive years ago, is still played today, and the sentiment underlying it is as unchallenged in the American psyche as the law of gravity. As complex and full of turmoil as relations between men and women are in the United States, the central ideal of marriage is based on an incredibly simple theory: people meet, fall in love, and get married. Americans tend to perceive this sequence of events as the normal, even inevitable, course of life, but the welding together of marriage with the emotions of romance, especially as the one and only justifiable reason for staying together as a couple, has prevailed for no more than about a hundred years even in the United States.
