Economics of Love and Marriage

Introduction: Love is an emotion that we feel for some fellow human beings. Love is a basic dimension of human experience that is variously conveyed as a sense of tender affection, an intense attraction, the foundation of intimacy and good interpersonal chemistry, willing self-sacrifice on behalf of another, and as an ineffable sense of affinity or connection to nature, other living beings, or even that which is unseen. According to Sri Aurobindo : “There is usually a hope of return, of benefit or advantage of some kind, or of certain pleasures and gratifications, mental, vital or physical that the person loved can give. Remove these things and the love very soon sinks, diminishes or disappears or turns into anger, reproach, indifference or even hatred”. One way of looking at marriage is as a rather odd sort of package deal, an exchange in which the two parties agree to share income, housing, sexual favors, and a collection of productive activities such as cooking meals, cleaning house, washing dishes, and rearing children. Seen from this standpoint, the motivation for marriage is, in part, the existence of economies of scale in production--it is easier to cook one meal for two people than two meals each for one person--and, in part, the advantage of division of labor. A marriage is simply a particular kind of two-person firm. Basic Research Questions: 6.How the knowledge of the economics of love can be put to use by any individual or any industry? Methodology: Research has shown that basic economic principles can be applied to intangible concepts like love & marriage. Various economists have done research on these topics and have tried to explain the concepts of love and marriage using economic analysis. In this paper the methodology applied was as follows: The first approach was to build the basic research questions mentioned above based on which the analysis was to be done. The basic objective of this paper was tried to be summarized by these questions.