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A UC Berkeley professor explains the thorny history of love, sex and marriage

Two hundred years before swiping and Instagram-ready weddings, the “deadly serious institution” of American marriage had more to do with property, race and religion than love, according to historian David Henkin.

By Lila Thulin

two black-and-white photographs. On the left, captioned — A visual gag about courtship and marriage from around 1900.

February 13, 2026

On the first day of his seminar on the history of love, sex and marriage in the United States, David Henkin introduces UC Berkeley students to a Frank Sinatra song: “Love and marriage / Go together like a horse and carriage / This I tell you, brother / You can’t have one without the other,” Sinatra croons.

Then Henkin asks his students to compare the 1955 tune with a very different text: Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 Supreme Court case that legalized same-sex marriage. Even as Kennedy fundamentally changed what marriage in the U.S. could look like, he voiced a sentiment that might seem to echo the 70-year-old Sinatra song: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.”

For the rest of the semester, students dive into the questions that comparison invites: In an age of dating apps, increasing Gen Z loneliness, same-sex nuptials and Instagram-optimized weddings, how much do love and marriage today resemble past ideas about relationships?

The answer, of course, is complicated.

A group of students sit around a table, talking with a professor. — Students in Henkin’s “Love, Sex and Marriage” seminar this spring.
Sora Nicole Thomas

“They go in with some ideas about things being universal,” said Henkin, a history professor who specializes in 19th-century America. “Things like sexual desire, things like evolutionary impulses to reproduce, things like love, and then quickly they see … those don’t account for what marriage or sex looks like or how love is spoken about.”

Having realized that our current norms surrounding marriage and relationships weren’t inevitable, students dig into the historical forces that influenced them.

In this black-and-white photo, dapper Black man in a hat stands next to a white woman in an elaborate hat and fur muff. — The boxer Jack Johnson with his wife, Etta Duryea, in 1910. Johnson’s series of romantic relationships with white women caused substantial controversy. One thing Henkin’s class studies is how the acceptedness of and perceived threat posed by interracial relationships changed, especially before and after the Civil War.
Elmer Chickering / Library of Congress

The class is “a little bit of love, some sex and a whole lot of marriage,” explained Henkin. He assigns readings on coverture, or the principle that married women were extensions of their husbands and lacked their own legal identities; the ties between race relations and marriage; and same-sex relationships throughout history. One day, students might discuss how concern over polygamous practices in Utah prolonged its path to statehood. On another, they’d analyze today’s multi-billion-dollar wedding industry or how decidedly unsexy economics have factored into marriage.

Sometimes, Henkin asks undergraduates if anything they’ve learned from the course surprises them enough to share with their roommates. One such surprise: “Only very recently, meaning in the last 200 years or so, has marriage been so closely associated with romantic love … Earlier, conjugal romantic love was seen either as a bonus or as irrelevant or even as a problem,” Henkin said. In some societies, he added, it would have been more appropriate to be in love with one’s mistress or one’s neighbor than one’s wife.

Students are also sometimes surprised to learn that attitudes about sex, marriage and relationships have not evolved in a straight line toward an ever more progressive endpoint. Take the second half of the 1800s as an example, when necklines went up and social permissiveness to discuss sex plummeted.

Couples wait to get hitched at the marriage bureau around 1915.

Learning about the history of love, sex and relationships might sound salacious, but it’s not frivolous, Henkin said. “Marriage is a deadly serious institution; people’s lives are transformed in permanent and very serious ways,” he said.

The class isn’t focused solely on centuries past; it also analyzes history that students have lived through. Henkin last taught this seminar in 2015, when same-sex marriage was a freshly minted right. His students would have been in elementary school. At the time, Obergefell, as well as the debate within LGBTQ+ activist circles over whether marriage was a right to fight for or the embrace of a heteronormative ideal, were both recent memories. Now, “my students have grown up in an era of consensus, not only about the normalcy of same-sex marriage, but also the legitimacy of it,” Henkin said.

a black-and-white photograph of two men in tuxedos and boutonnieres cutting a wedding cake — A c. 1957 gay wedding in Philadelphia. In an era of homophobia, these photos were deemed inappropriate by the photo developer and never returned to the photographer.
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives / University of Southern California

Beyond Obergefell, read on to learn about four other turning points that shaped matrimony and relationships, plus the evolution of Valentine’s Day:

Early 1800s: The lustful men, virtuous women stereotype spreads

“In colonial North America, women were more likely to be seen as having sexual desires that paralleled or exceeded those of men,” Henkin said. That shifted in the 1800s. This new paradigm positioned women as “inert and morally virtuous,” Henkin said, while men were perceived as having “more violent, predatory and lustful inclinations.”

Circa 1830s: Promiscuity becomes “low-class”

A lithograph of a hesitant-looking young man and a young woman in a pink dress who watches him with a smile. It's captioned "Popping the question" — A lithograph from 1846 depicts a young man’s proposal jitters.
Sarony & Major / Library of Congress

During the Second Great Awakening, a time of reformist movements and evangelical revivals, sexual restraint became a value tied to middle-class respectability. “Put down the terrible mastery of passion,” urged a 19th-century advice book for young people. This led to much harsher condemnation of sexual activity outside of marriage among a growing middle class and a decline in premarital sex. Whereas about one third of brides in New England were pregnant on their wedding nights at the time of the American Revolution, by the 19th century, sex before marriage was markedly less frequent.

Late 1800s: Reliable contraception becomes available

When thinking about contraception, people often point to Margaret Sanger founding the first U.S. birth control clinic in 1916 or the FDA approving the Pill in 1960. But game-changing contraception was available earlier than that, Henkin said, thanks in part to medical discoveries about conception and technological advances in manufacturing rubber in the mid-19th century. Americans could learn about “womb veils” or vaginal sponges from advertisements and then purchase them from drugstores or mail-order catalogs.

A rise in contraceptive advertising and sales helped fuel the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that banned mailing “articles of immoral use,” including contraception or information about it. The new law, however, failed to stop the use of contraception. One analysis found that American women born in 1850 gave birth to an average of five children in their lives, while women born in 1875 delivered only 3.3.

1920s: LGBTQ+ culture comes out in the open – for a moment

On the left, a newspaper clipping reading: HAMILTON LODGE BALL IS SCENE OF SPLENDOR Rockland Palace Is Rendezvous For the Frail and Freakish Gang “This is my first time to attend this affair.” When friends and acquaintances met Friday evening, February 14, at the annual masquerade ball of Hamilton Lodge, No. 710, Inc., Grand United Order of Oddfellows, staged this year at Rockland Palace, 155th street and Eighth avenue, the foregoing statement was usually made by at least one of the sightseers. So often was it heard that it became a standing joke. Whether it was one’s first or twelfth time to have been present at Hamilton Lodge’s widely‑advertised and long established spectacular event, the opinion was voiced by all that it was the most extraordinary masquerade of its kind ever witnessed in New York. It is doubtful if a similar show could be pulled off anywhere in the United States. Rockland was packed to suffocation with participants and spectators. Hundreds of white couples looking for a thrill elbowed, pushed and shoved with colored onlookers and got an eyeful. It was difficult to distinguish sexes. Scores of males of pronounced effeminate traits gracefully disported themselves in beautiful evening gowns. They might have been mistaken anywhere for fascinating shebas. Many Types Present Some more wigs. Others resembled the mesmerizing maiden of bobbed hair type. Not a few looked like delicate, painted dolls. White “girls” appeared to be in the majority. It is reported a number came from as far distant as Chicago. Many of the costumes worn were gorgeous, while in several instances the masqueraders walked and danced about displaying shapely limbs, wearing just enough to be within the law. There were also females rigged up in masculine attire. They, too, were often mistaken for real sheiks. On the ballroom floor it was difficult to tell who was who. On the right, a sketch of a group of revelers, mostly men but with one woman, gathered around a table and holding up drinks as one man dances atop the table. The text reads "Night no. 10 in Fairy-Land": Our Tireless Picket Tracks the Restless Androgyne to CHILDS on Fifth Avenue on to LOUIS' on 49th Street. — Left, a 1930 article in the *New York Age* about a drag ball at Hamilton Lodge that drew curious crowds. Right, this drawing from the magazine *Broadway Brevities* in 1924 shows that “fairies” – slang for gay men – were understood to be part of the city’s social scene.
New York Age / JD Doyle Archives and Broadway Brevities / Collection of Leonard Finger

During Prohibition, when all nightlife was underground, gay male culture flourished. In a time when voyeuristic “slumming” was a leisure activity for well-to-do white Manhattanites, thousands of spectators took in drag balls, which were written about in newspapers. But after the 21st Amendment made alcohol legal again and local authorities returned to regulating drinking spots, LGBTQ+ nightlife retreated into the shadows. It’s another example, Henkin said, of social progress not always moving in a linear fashion; queer culture was more accepted in the Roaring ‘20s than 30 years later, when the Lavender Scare purged LGBTQ+ people from the federal government.

Henkin also pointed out that many Americans in the early 20th century viewed sexual identity differently than we might now. Instead of labels focused on the gender someone was attracted to, descriptions of sexuality related to the role someone played in a relationship, regardless of their partner’s gender. That perspective shifted decisively during the interwar period toward the now-dominant view that someone’s sexual preference for a particular gender is part of their fundamental identity.

The evolution of Valentine’s Day

A watercolor-looking card that says, in gold, "to My Valentine" and features a cherub writing on a piece of pink paper, "Pray, sweetheart, send me just a line, To say you'll be my Valentine" — A Valentine’s Day card from 1890.
Library of Congress

Just like social norms, our love-focused holidays have changed over time. Valentine’s Day goes back to the Romans, but it only became a popular American holiday in the 1840s. Henkin explained that initially, it was practically a popularity contest for young adults and children focused on receiving and accumulating as many Valentine’s greetings as possible. That’s starkly different from today, when the holiday is associated with red roses and celebrations of monogamous forever love.

“The music stops, and by Valentine’s Day you have to have that one person in your life who’s going to buy you flowers and chocolate and take you to dinner, etc.,” Henkin said. “Having two people would be farcical on Valentine’s Day. Having zero would be tragic.”

Sinatra sang one song about Valentine’s Day; he sang many, many more about the vicissitudes of love. For him, it was a rich subject to explore — just as it is now for students in History 103D.