ABSTRACT
The pervasiveness of the economic contract marriage pattern still dominates historical research, especially with regard to nineteenth-century middle-class families. At the same time, in recent decades, historians of emotions have repeatedly privileged the connection between romantic love and Western modernity. This chapter is an attempt to attune these seemingly incompatible ideas by exploring middle-class conjugal relations in nineteenth-century Greece as both calculative contracts and emotional and moral choices. The research material includes a selection of texts from a corpus of correspondence that Greek middle-class men and women exchanged during the second half of the nineteenth century and a wide range of normative discourses on romantic love and marriage of the same period. Switching between small-scale auto/biographical perspectives and wider public views on the topic, the contested ways in which the authors of the mentioned correspondence present in it the emotional load of their intimate relations is explored. Subsequently, the chapter turns to the ambiguous and inconsistent correlations between emotions and interests to show that the boundaries between reason and emotion, mercenary interest and selflessness, esteem and love, and arranged marriage and free choice were in constant negotiation and therefore vague.
