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Until fairly recent times in Western society, marriage was regarded as too important a family matter to be entrusted to nubile, inexperienced youths. As sociologist William Goode notes, "Kinfolk or immediate family can disregard the question of who marries whom only if a marriage is not seen as a link between kin lines, only if no property, power, lineage, honor, totemic relationships and the like are believed to flow from the kin lines through the …

…day have the opportunity to leave unhappy marriages, choices that formerly were not legal or economically feasible. Also, with marriage increasingly entered into only for emotional satisfactions rather than for economic, sexual, or status reasons, the expectations for marriage have risen enormously, and the willingness to tolerate unsatisfactory marriages has dropped proportionately. Love may be the new sine qua non for marriage, but it has proved to be somewhat ephemeral in the majority of marriages.