Politics & Power Quote by Harriet Martineau

Martineau’s line lands like a compliment, then starts to itch. The phrasing borrows Shakespeare’s famous warning that true love never runs smooth, only to flip it into a conditional promise: if any place can beat the universal law of romantic friction, surely it’s America. That “if” does a lot of work. It’s not naive boosterism so much as a cool, observational wager from a visiting English writer watching a young republic advertise itself as a meritocracy of the heart.

The intent is partly comparative. In early- to mid-19th-century Britain, marriage was still tangled in property, class gatekeeping, and the social theater of “suitable matches.” America, by contrast, marketed itself as socially mobile and ideologically allergic to hereditary rank. Martineau teases out the cultural fantasy that a society built on choice, movement, and self-making might also make intimacy simpler: fewer titled families to appease, fewer estates to consolidate, more room for affection to pretend it’s sovereign.

The subtext, though, is sharper. By using “expected,” she flags the gap between national myth and lived reality. America’s romance narrative - love as free contract between individuals - mirrors its political narrative - citizens freely consenting to a new order. That parallel is flattering, but it’s also diagnostic: if love doesn’t “run smooth” even here, the problem isn’t just European aristocracy; it’s the deeper messiness of freedom itself, where choice multiplies conflict, desire outruns stability, and economic pressures simply change costume.

Read today, the line feels eerily contemporary: a country still convinced that the right system can make private happiness frictionless, and still surprised when the heart refuses to behave like a democracy.