Falling in Love

Sir George Campbell would have husbands and wives selected for them—perhaps by the Lord Chancellor. Grant Allen counters with a provocative possibility: falling in love may be nature’s own matchmaking science.

In a late-nineteenth-century debate over marriage and human progress, Allen takes aim at the plan to replace young people’s preferences with deliberate, supposedly scientific selection. In the title essay of this collection, he links human attraction to the displays of butterflies and peacocks, arguing that love is not a foolish distraction but an instinct shaped by evolution. Its private, particular preferences, he suggests, may find complementary partners more wisely than any official planner could. Playful and pointed, Allen’s case gives romance a biological purpose—and makes the stakes of choosing a partner larger than the heart alone. Can an emotion dismissed as folly be nature’s most exact matchmaker?

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