Re: Still true today, no?

But these days, marriage is treated much less like a career and more like a personal lifestyle choice. In Regency times, a woman who didn't want to resign herself to being a dependent on a male relative - if not financially, then certainly socially - had to marry, and ideally marry well. The pressure was less absolute on men, but still, if they wanted to not be seen as eccentric, and if they wanted to have children to continue their family, they too had to marry. Thus, if you could find someone you liked and with who you thought you could come to an understanding, you might consider entering a marriage with them even if you did not love them - it was, in those cases, essentially a business transaction. Think of it in these terms, if you were to set up a business with a partner, you'd pick someone with who you got along well, with whom you knew you could work together well without constant arguing, and who could bring something into the business you needed. You wouldn't wait for a potential partner with whom you could fall in love, but you wouldn't pick someone whom you couldn't stand or whom you knew to be a catastrophe to work with either.

These days, of course there are still marriages entered more out of convenience than love - for financial reasons, for reasons of social acceptance and improvement, to bring up children together or simply out of friendship - but there are a lot of options other than marriage that offer financial security, social improvement, etc. so that for a lot of people it is not necessary to enter a marriage in order to gain what they seek, making the percentage of those couples who marry for love higher than in previous times - and, sadly, on the other hand there are those who would like to marry for love but are barred from doing so.