‘Who to Choose?’ Finding a Suitable Marriage Partner

This chapter explores how young Italians met and chose their marriage partners, drawing primarily on the evidence from diaries and memoirs. One of the key themes of this chapter is how and why men and women remembered courtship, love, and marriage differently. Men tended to describe strong, open, and definite feelings of love in courtship, while women were much more likely to recount doubt, hesitation, ambivalence, or indifference. Reaching adulthood in post-war Italy had very different meanings for men and women, with men typically leaving home for military service and migration while women were more likely to remain with their families until their wedding. Love, marriage, home, and family thus had different meanings in their lives. While arranged marriages were becoming less common in these decades, the strong role played by family in courtship meant that it was often difficult to distinguish an arranged marriage from one that was not. With the rise of mass culture, men and women also began to measure their own experiences against romantic ideals, often to see them falling short. Experience of illness and disability marked many courtships, especially in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when malaria, tuberculosis, and pneumonia were common. In some cases this proved to be a barrier to marriage, although attitudes were beginning to change in the late 1950s. Class was also crucial in determining suitability, although it was family that was the ultimate arbiter.