Today in misguided nostalgia

-For the good old days before abortion was legal. There's a welcome cameo from Katha Pollitt in the comments. She says it all better than I could have.

-For arranged marriage: Love matches cease to be lust matches after X weeks of dating, or X years of marriage, at which point it's all just companionate anyway. So why all the fuss about chemistry? Why not just marry whomever? Why not an especially vibrant basil plant? (Goes the argument.)

If Pollitt intervened here as well, I missed it, so WWPD you shall have: While physical attraction may not matter to quite the same extent further into a relationship, there is probably a bare minimum that needs to be met for intimacy (as in sex, but also as in sitting across from someone at the breakfast table) to be appealing/tolerable rather than revolting/oppressive. Even if looks change with time, which they will, there will at least always be the memory of the person one once found so attractive, or so one sometimes hears from the old-and-happily-married. Marriages between Styles-demographic sorts (well-educated, mid-20s-and-older) are apparently quite stable, so divorce-rate panic seems misplaced. Clearly the fact that infatuation tends to wane does not doom the relationships that begin in that manner. It could well be, quite the contrary, and that marriages that began as a hook-up or fling are more stable than those that formed by the calm, rational decision of all parties tangentially/financially involved. But because love-marriage societies also tend to allow those who are unhappy the freedom to divorce (as commenters do point out), looking at which marriages "last" won't be of much use.