The late eighteenth century was marked by revolutions in both political and personal life. While the American Revolution challenged patriarchical and tyrannical forms of government, models of democratic union also reshaped family life and personal relationships. The new nation was dedicated to "the pursuit of happiness," and affection was a fundamental component of this social and political vision. In friendship, courtship, marriage, and child rearing, men and women began to privilege emotional standards that stressed a warm egalitarianism. These shifting ideals deeply influenced and affected how early national Americans experienced their most intimate and emotionally fulfilling relationships.
The emerging emphasis on affection was influenced by the "culture of sensibility," which encouraged individuals to relate to the feelings, concerns, and sufferings of others. The culture of sensibility asserted that individuals should develop strong bonds of connection with others that would enable them to greater appreciate both the joys and sorrows of life. Stressing intense, emotional reactions to even the most everyday events of life, sensibility privileged a world of affectionate interaction between individuals who felt an acute sense of affinity. In their various personal and social relationships, individuals increasingly valued expressive, candid communications with one another that would heighten this ideal of shared experience and feeling.
In particular, these shifting emotional standards ushered in significant changes in the experiences and expectations of romantic love, courtship, and marriage. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for parents to influence, and at times actively control, their children's marital choices with larger economic and social goals in mind. But in the post-Revolutionary period, parental interference lessened as couples began to exercise more autonomy and individualism regarding matters of the heart. In the process, the expectations that men and women brought with them into marriage also grew. No longer conceived of in terms of patriarchal authority and wifely submission, marriage became invested with affectionate ideals that stressed egalitarian relationships between loving partners. The emerging ideal of "companionate marriage" celebrated affection, affinity, and mutuality. Men and women came to expect unparalleled happiness and fulfillment in their unions with one another as affectionate bonds of intimacy and friendship became the cornerstones of happy marriages.
Yet throughout the early national period, tensions existed between older models of patriarchal authority and newer ideals of affectionate companionship. While marriage was idealized in terms of partnership and equality, wives were still encouraged to defer to their husbands in order to maintain domestic harmony. And while affectionate bonds between parent and child heightened the emotional experiences of childhood, husbands and fathers still maintained legal and cultural authority over the household unit. Ultimately, the emphasis given to emotional bonds of affection in family life helped to obscure the continued existence of power dynamics that sustained male privilege in economic and political spheres. In essence, women were urged to abandon claims for equality and to settle instead for affection within their personal relationships. Yet these affectionate ideals often proved difficult to sustain, creating tensions between expectation and experience. Further, those women and children who endured abuse or abandonment in the absence of their husbands and fathers' "true" affection were often left with few legal or economic protections.
Despite tensions between emotional ideals and lived experience, individuals continued to idealize affectionate relationships as sources of deep fulfillment and personal happiness. At once an expression of and a conduit for individualism, affection offered men and women the chance to reveal their innermost selves with like-minded individuals who shared deep, expressive bonds of sensibility and affinity. Such highly charged, emotionally fulfilling relationships served as bulwarks against more impersonal, disingenuous encounters that individuals might also experience in their daily lives. Although men and women feared being betrayed by another's duplicity or false affection, many took the risk of being disappointed or deceived in the hopes of actualizing the ideals of affectionate companionship. The emotional stakes were high as relationships increasingly were invested with intense expectations and imaginative ideals.
Affection revolutionized how men and women made sense of themselves and the world around them and reshaped both personal and political life. Throughout the early national period, affectionate ideals for personal relationships were used as models for political and social harmony. As friends and couples freely entered into affectionate unions with one another, they created egalitarian forms of interaction that influenced the nature of political participation in the young Republic. Bonds of affection, rather than authority, became the organizing device for both politics and the family. In many ways, America's sense of itself as a people and a nation rested in this persistent belief in the power of affection.