Love Quote by Mary Astell

Mary Astell calls marrying for love a heroic action that makes a mighty noise because it is both rare and regarded as extravagant. The irony bites. In late 17th- and early 18th-century England, marriage was largely a contract of property, rank, and lineage. Families engineered matches to preserve estates and cement alliances; affection was a bonus at best. Within that economy of interest, choosing a spouse for love alone appeared not noble but reckless, a breach of prudence that shocked polite society. Astell names it heroic to underline the real courage required to defy custom, yet she also exposes how public opinion sensationalizes and pathologizes such defiance.

The line comes from a writer who probed marriage as a site of power. In Some Reflections upon Marriage, Astell warned women that without education, independent judgment, and legal protections, they risked exchanging a father’s authority for a husband’s, with love doing little to mitigate tyranny. The fashionable rhetoric of passion, she suggests, often masks the same old calculations or lures women into bonds that strip them of freedom once the ardor cools. Calling love-marriage extravagant points to the economic and social costs a woman would pay for following her heart in a world that denies her property, income, and civic standing.

Yet the compliment to love’s heroism is not empty. Courage matters: the willingness to resist pressure, to value mutual respect and virtue over dowry and status, aligns with Astell’s insistence that women are rational agents. Still, love alone is not enough. The more radical hinge of her argument is that a just marriage must be grounded in reason, equality, and consent, or else the union, however romantic at first, will reproduce domination. The noise surrounding love-matches betrays a society uneasily aware that real choice threatens its arrangements. Astell’s aphorism cuts through sentimentalism to demand both prudence and liberty.