Historians claim that bourgeois love, where the reason for marriage is the spiritual and intellectual virtues as well as the beauty of the prospective partner, began somewhere in the 18th century in the urban environment. In rural communities, well into the twentieth century, the reasons were economic: not a connection between kindred spirits, but between two farmers. In some of their village tales, Slovene writers from a rural background, such as Jurčič, Stritar and Tavčar, show the conflicts between parents and children that arose because of the transfer of the bourgeois pattern of the right to marry for love to rural youth: these conflicts are more to do with literature and ideas about upbringing than with reality.
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