Relational Gravity and the Quiet End of State-Sanctioned Love (opens in new tab)

There was a time—not especially noble, but impressively certain—when the state required a vial of your blood before it would permit you to marry. Not your vows. Not your intentions. Not even your character, which would have been ambitious. Your blood. Romance, it seems, once required lab work. Massachusetts, in its calm, unhurried way, stopped asking in 2005. The official explanation was practical to the point of anticlimax: screening for syphilis had become inefficient, redundant, and faintl...