Abstract

Bringing together the arguments developed in the economic literature on love, we claim in the present note that love is good for the internal efficiency of a couple, because it creates an environment in which the partners feel secure enough to invest their material and emotional resources. However, several factors hamper the efficient maintenance of love and, perversely, love itself may constitute a danger to the stability of a marriage due to its «publicness » in the economic sense of the word. The intent in making such a chain of arguments is two-fold. First, we hope to demonstrate that economics can improve the understanding of the emotions – love in this case – by bringing unique insights into the matter. Second, we aim to show how dealing with such a subject as love economists might learn to amend and ameliorate their methodological stance