Students in Phi Theta Kappa, the international honor society of community colleges, took up the age-old question of love, sex and marriage at Skyline on Nov. 30.

Although the 10 members of the audience had hoped to participate in the regional discussion with other community colleges, a live feed of the satellite seminar could not be obtained.

Instead, they settled for a videotape of the Nov. 9 event and wished they could have interacted with Stephanie Coontz, professor of history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. and national co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families. She presented her research of popular culture and its portrayal of marriage, family and traditional values before opening the floor for questions from the studio and satellite audience

Coontz maintains that popular culture’s promotion of love in marriage is a recently developed expectation since the early 1900s. She retraced a span of 5,000 years in which the notion of marriage was a pooling together of wealth, a distribution of labor, a surety between allied families, anything but a union between two people in love.

Love in marriage would have been a strange concept in the past. It would have been “inconceivable to choose one’s spouse based on love” according to Coontz.

Although she conceded Cleopatra and Marc Antony may have fallen in love as in the movie, their alliance was many-layered in power and nationalism between Rome and Egypt. The union also ended tragically. Coontz’s responses were often punctuated with cynicism about popularly-held beliefs.

Arran Phipps, a physics major and active member of Phi Theta Kappa, said he was surprised to learn that marriage was a business arrangement and would have liked the discussion to focus on the current trends in marriage.

“Popular culture is controlled by the media,” Phipps said. “They’re sending mixed signals. Popular culture is the degradation of society.”

A female caller from Texas asked how modern values changed from the traditional norms. Speaking in broader terms, Coontz asked, “What does traditional marriage mean?”

As early as 900 A.D., Christianity allowed divorce and marriage was a loosely-held, word-of-mouth bond. The Catholic Church accepted a person’s statement that he was married. Between the 13th and 18th centuries, the role of husband and wife changed. Advice books were full of admonishments for women to obey their husbands. In marriage, “husband and wife were one, and the one was the husband,” Coontz said.

She illustrated the idealized role of woman in a triptych of the Virgin Mary in the top panel, women saints in the middle and the married woman at the bottom in hell.

If Lori Slicton, anthropology teacher and adviser of Phi Theta Kappa, had her druthers, she would have liked a live-feed to interact with Coontz. Why hadn’t Coontz discussed the Vietnam War and the counter-culture opposing the traditionally-held conventions of the day, Slicton mused.

“The popularly-held belief was that everyone was a hippie,” Slicton said. “That was not so. It was a small percentage, from 5 to 15 percent, who were part of the counter-culture, but it doesn’t take a lot to change culture.”

Slicton also said in the 1960s, the pill completely separated reproductive sex from the love and marriage quotient. Coontz did not cover this in her presentation.