Last comes love.

Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage By Stephanie Coontz Viking. 423 pages. $25.95.

Since antiquity, conservative social critics have fretted over the crisis in marriage. Even the Roman emperor Augustus promoted a family values campaign, according to Stephanie Coontz in her new book, Marriage, A History. Augustus created a "wave of manufactured nostalgia for the supposed virtues of earlier times, when women were not allowed to drink wine and, according to the satirist Juvenal, wives were too tired from working at their looms to engage in adultery," she writes. Augustus didn't let his own divorce and affairs get in the way, just as President Ronald Reagan did not let his own divorce mar his family values campaign.

Coontz confirms that marriage is in a crisis. It's become more fragile and more optional than ever before. "Marriage has changed more in the last thirty years than in the last 3,000," she observes. For millennia, marriage was the way to organize economic, social, and political life. Not anymore.

Coontz values marriage. She writes, "It remains the highest expression of commitment in our culture and comes packaged with exacting expectations about responsibility, fidelity, and intimacy." But she doesn't insist on it, nor does she subscribe to the view that people should be forced into older forms of marriage. She thinks marriage is more fair and satisfying since both women and men have equal rights.

We are in the midst of a social upheaval that rivals the Industrial Revolution in size and scope. It can be painful, difficult, and messy. But even with these changes, Coontz doesn't see marriage as doomed.

"Over the past century, marriage has steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective in fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history," she concludes.

The radical idea that people should marry primarily for love caused chaos in marriage. Until the eighteenth century, most people didn't have too many options. Family, government, and the church restricted one's choice in mates.

That is not to say that husbands and wives throughout history did not love each other. Coontz acknowledges that people fell in love, sometimes even with their own spouses. But for most of human history, "marriage was not fundamentally about love," she writes. "It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love."

To prove her point, she traces the developments in marriage from the Stone Age to President Bush's 2004 State of the Union Address. Coontz is quick to note that "many of the things people now see as unprecedented in family life are not actually new." Stepfamilies, out of wedlock births, even same sex relationships existed throughout human history.

After a brief tour of the Stone Age, Coontz stretches back to ancient Greece and Rome to develop her first point about marriage: It fulfilled economic and political functions of distributing land, wealth, and power. Athens gave marriage a legal framework. But Athenians did not see marriage as the home of "true love." That rested in the relationship between an adult man and a much younger male.

The central purpose of marriage in Rome was to produce legitimate heirs. Coontz states that Romans didn't have too many rules about marriage, nor did they have too many rules about divorce. No-fault divorce wasn't a product of the 1960s; Romans had it, too.

Coontz argues that the "love revolution" began in Western Europe with the spread of the market economy and wage labor, urbanization, and Enlightenment philosophies that advocated individual rights and the pursuit of happiness. Romantic ideals placed love and the emotional relationship between spouses at the center of marriage, a break with thousands of years of tradition.

"Critics of the love match argued--prematurely, as it turns out, but correctly--that the values of free choice and egalitarianism could easily spin out of control," writes Coontz. What strengthened marriage as a personal relationship weakened it as a social institution.

As soon as people could decide to be with someone because of love, they wanted to be able to get out of that arrangement when the love ended. And divorce rates did increase. "In 1891, a Cornell University professor made the preposterous prediction that if trends in the second half of nineteenth century continued, by 1980 more marriages would end by divorce than by death," writes Coontz. "As it turns out, he was off by only ten years!"

This "love revolution" laid the foundation for the love-based marriage model we have today. In her previous work, The Way We Never Were, Coontz argued that the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet ideal was a "short-lived historical fluke." Now that she has a longer view of marriage, she sees the male breadwinner/female homemaker couple as the culmination of 150 years of history.

At the end of the twentieth century, this unstable institution was confronted by what she calls "the perfect storm" of historical forces, including widely available birth control, changes in family law, women's increasing economic independence, and a vast consumer culture that valued pleasure and individualism.

We find ourselves in a unique situation today. The 2000 census shows that for first time ever, there are more single-person households than those with a married couple and children. Marriage is no longer the primary way individuals organize their sex lives and child rearing.

Despite the 2004 election and antigay marriage referenda on ballots in eleven states, homosexual unions are not the biggest threat to the primacy of marriage. It's people who are constructing meaningful lives outside of marriage and who see marriage as a choice. "Divorce, single parenthood, and cohabitation among heterosexuals have already reshaped the role of marriage in society and its meanings in people's lives," writes Coontz.

She does a good job of explaining how we got to where we are now. The journey is long and sometimes a slog to get through. Coontz stops at interesting points along the way, but she can also get bogged down in detail, especially in the chapters on medieval times. And even though the title and the first chapters hint at a global view of marriage, she narrows her focus to Western Europe and eventually the United States.

Still, this is a valuable historical survey. Although we are in uncharted territory, Coontz recognizes that the solution does not lie in mandating a return to the past. That isn't possible. We need to recognize how we really live today and embrace the freedom that comes with that.