Nowadays love is a matter of chance, matrimony a matter of money and divorce a matter of course.

When love became negotiable

There's something bracing about how this observation still stings a century later. Rowland captures something people feel but rarely say out loud: that romance has become untethered from the rituals and expectations that once held it in place. We swipe through options, we settle for "good enough," we're suspicious of grand claims about soulmates. And yes, practical concerns—financial compatibility, career alignment, who can afford the house—have muscled their way into conversations that used to be purely about the heart.

But the sharpest part of this quote is how it assumes instability as the natural end state. When Rowland wrote that divorce had become "a matter of course," she was describing something relatively radical. Today it's ordinary. What's changed isn't whether people can leave—it's that we've normalized the idea that relationships are provisional, renegotiable, dissolvable. This isn't entirely bad. It means fewer people are trapped. But it also means fewer of us approach commitment with the assumption that it will hold.

The real provocation here is whether we've traded something important for this freedom. Not the old constraints, but a certain confidence that love could be bigger than impulse or convenience. That's worth sitting with, whether you're single, coupled, or somewhere in between.