The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution. By Claire Langhamer. Oxford University Press, 320 pages; $29.95 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“LOVE and marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage.” So crooned Frank Sinatra in his 1956 hit song. In “The English in Love” Claire Langhamer examines attitudes to marriage from 1920 to the 1970s. Broadly speaking, she finds that couples changed in the 1950s. Never before were so many of them marrying, never so young and never with such hopes of mutual bliss.

Ms Langhamer’s emphasis is on “ordinary” people—lonely hearts, women’s magazine correspondents and, among others, the volunteers who joined the Mass Observation project. This was a wonderfully nosy exercise in social documentation, under headings as various as “beards, armpits, eyebrows”, “anti-semitism” and “the aspidistra cult”. Love, sex and marriage were central to it.

The growing idea that marriage was all about feeling alarmed many. The Bishop of Sheffield thought that the institution would buckle under the load of emotional and sexual expectation. The Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce of the early 1950s feared “an undue emphasis on the overriding importance of a satisfactory sex relationship”. They were not wrong. By 1959 the Archbishop of Canterbury was thundering against the “tide of adultery” sweeping the land. Ms Langhamer convincingly argues that the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s and the subsequent decline in marriage were less a reaction to the so-called stability of the 1950s than a product of the decade’s instability.

She sees the 1920s and 1930s as a time of pragmatism, of slow courtships and modest expectations. The question was less whether a couple were in love than whether she could housekeep and he could earn. Ms Langhamer concedes that the trends she traces are winding and unsteady—that caution was urged in the 1960s, just as emotional intimacy was sought in the 1920s. Still, she finds that after the devastation of the first world war, steadiness was valued above all. The woman who, in 1930, wished simply to meet someone “clean, and if not good-looking, at least pleasant”, with £5 a week, was not untypical.

A social scientist, Ms Langhamer writes in the language of her discipline. This means that her rich and intimate material does sometimes chafe against the deliberately non-subjectivity of her field. Her decision to exclude “cultural interventions”—as in novels, among other things—also seems a pity. George Orwell, for example, sits plumb within her territory, especially his 1936 novel “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”.

There are other surprising gaps, such as the “surplus women” panic after the 1921 census. For a nation mourning its dead, the statistics were shocking: women outnumbered men by nearly 2m. This is something Virginia Nicholson explored in her moving 2007 book “Singled Out”, about the profound impact of the war on attitudes to marriage and spinsterhood during the interwar period and beyond.

That said, “The English in Love” is full of interesting observations. Sex was the unruly passenger in Sinatra’s carriage, at once spiritualised and demonised by the agony aunts whom people increasingly ignored. The catalyst for change was the second world war, when in the face of death, love was prized above all—and with it, sex. Every trend has its origins: while the 1950s may have raised questions about the stability of marriage, its foundations were rocked a decade before.