Weren't the Puritans extremists even in their own time?  Why would such a small extreme group be used as illustrative of humanities' past?  Romantic love, as the ideal isn't a new idea at all as it is found in the ancient literature of various early civilizations once writing was common.  Romantic love in practice was of course a different story as the immediacy of practical requirements trumped romantic notions.  Matching the romantic ideal with practice becomes more common as societies become more egalitarian.  With  few ancient exceptions, democratic rule and egalitarianism as the commonly accepted ideal are actually the new ideas--the new social construct--which we are still battling to more fully implement.

As I understand it, this view of Puritans as sexless is fairly undeserved, and I'm a little surprised you'd further this idea. Read Bremer here: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=EzvHvEDPosQC&pg=PA544&lpg=PA544&dq=puritans+and+puritanism+in+europe+america+encyclopedia+sexuality&source=bl&ots=Viv4FXFGLX&sig=E62df-LX9sIEpE4O_YVPGLfi0Ck&hl=en&ei=JSXITsbUAcfO2gWAjJzLDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=puritans%20and%20puritanism%20in%20europe%20america%20encyclopedia%20sexuality&f=false

He cites the excommunication of a man for abstaining from sex with his wife, as well as claiming that puritans preached it was a man's duty to please his wife.  A close reading of Intimate Matters also provides a much more nuanced view.

Meh, the issue is, you're focusing your entire view on "the past" (an amount of time that, for the sake of modernized human beings with what we'd recognize as society, is what, ten, twenty, thirty thousand years old) on one or two groups in a very specific time period.  The Puritans, like someone else said, were considered extremists even in their time.  Let's ignore the fact that our pop culture perception of them as sexless, stern-faced, black clad witch hunters is inaccurate, and just go with the fact that they existed in a very small group in very few places for a very short time.  The whole world in the 1600s wasn't just Puritans.  Most of Europe was Catholic, Lutheran, or Orthodox, and there were many other Protestants, Jews, and Muslims as minorities, and probably plenty of nonreligious folks.  Though we like to cling to this idea of any religion that frowns upon premarital sex as wife-beating, orgasm-shunning, sex-through-a-hole-in-the-sheet barbarians who only ever associated with the opposite gender for the purpose of procreation, that's not how things generally worked out in practice, and that's not how married couples behaved when it came to sex.  People had premarital sex all the time.  People had extramarital sex, again, allllll the time.  People had gay and lesbian sex.  Having sex outside of your partner obviously is evidence that people were having sexual and romantic feelings for each other.  The laws and mandates of the church did very little to prevent all these things.  Today, go hang out around a pack of Catholic or Mormon or Evangelical teenagers.  They have just the same type of pressure to stay pure, to avoid sexual activity, to think of sex as "married people" behavior only for heterosexual couples, in some cases, only to "date for marriage."  I've been to Catholic school, and does this convince people chock-full of hormones and emotions from dating, flirting, and having sex (or finding ways to not "technically" have sex), or from being gay?  NOPE.  It mostly just convinces them to keep it a secret....mostly from the people who can get them in trouble, though, not from their peers who will either think it's cool or just passively judge them.  I know American Muslim people who have relatives and friends in strict Muslim-run countries, that say their female cousins and friends will wear niquabs....over jeans and tank tops, that they take off immediately when out of the jurisdiction of their parents or anyone who could get them in trouble, and go to hang out with boys (often encouraged and chaperoned by by male cousins and brothers their own age, who want just as much to sneak off and see girls).

And that's just Europe.  People all over the world have had countless attitudes towards dating and sex throughout history, and for those who were repressed in regards to it, there was always a way around it.  Powerful men in all parts of the world would have countless concubines, and if a woman was powerful enough, she's have countless male suitors.  In the middle ages/Rennaisance for the royal class, it was often considered desirable for a very young woman to marry a much older man not only because she'd be more fertile, but because he would probably fall asleep right after dinner (or die soon), leaving her to flirt with any number of young, attractive men at court.  Older women were desirable as women "on the side" for married men with young wives, since they "knew what they were doing" and weren't likely interested in idle gossip (or so men assumed).  And if you didn't constantly have religious leaders and the rest of society breathing down your neck like the aristocracy, well, who's going bother doing much but talk about you if you get caught in a compromising position?  Stories of romance and love have always been popular, so the Victorians can hardly be credited with the idea that "hey, we can focus our adult sex and emotional life on somethings besides procreation."

This is utter bullshit. It's simply WRONG!!! Please go educate yourself on historical surveys based on baptism on when a pregnancy occurred in the Early Colony: In the vast majority before marriage. Please put your bullshit based on CollegeHumor and your prejudice where it belongs: The garbage bin. And then get out actual historical studies... which sometimes might go counter to your prejudice.  

Actually, the idea that romantic love and marriage ought to go together was already starting to become a widely accepted idea in the 18th century (particularly in the second half, due in large part to JJ Rousseau's influence).

(I won't bother reiterating what other commenters have said about the the Puritans' not being as sexless as is commonly believed. The fact remains, that ideologically speaking, they had a more utilitarian (in the generic, not the philosophic sense, Bentham still being a ways off) view of sex and marriage than that which would emerge in the 18th century.)

What's ironic about all this is that the moralism we (incorrectly) ascribe to the Puritans has been filtered through Victorianism and is, consequently, much more indicative of the moral conflicts characteristic of that era. Which is not to say that Victorian beliefs were simplistic and one-dimenstional in regard to love and sex (or anything, for that matter), either.

I don't know when these stereotypes about colonial America are finally going to be shattered, but it's incredibly frustrating and disappointing to see them perpetuated here. 

There is an abundance of sound, accessible, and engagingly nuanced research on the realities of colonial Puritan life. Richard Godbeer's Sexual Revolution in Early America is relatively recent and comprehensive (and it also has a nice index and bibliography of earlier work), but Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Good Wives and sociologist Kai Erikson's Wayward Puritans are both classics that reflect the complex tapestry of Colonial American societies. Also surprised to see Bremer mentioned in the short biblio above, since his work also contravenes the views presented here. A quick skim through Anne Bradstreet's Puritan poetry will too, though.

Dear Lisa:

I would suggest that you go to source documents, even if the English is hard to read, instead of parroting the filtering by prejudicial historians.

Read Edmund S. Morgan (atheist) - Puritans and Sex - 1942

Read the laws against the actual applications of the laws, especially late into the 17th Century.

"The capital laws of Plymouth Colony from 1636 onward outlawed homosexual intercourse, as did a Connecticut statute of 1650, calling it an "abomination." Yet historian Robert F. Oakes has found that Puritan leaders refused to apply these harsh penalties, "especially for homosexual activity." Over the course of the
seventeenth century, Oakes finds that "the reluctance to punish illicit
sexual activity of all types grew stronger," not weaker."

Read the Puritan sermons. While the Catholic Church was still upholding sexual desire or pleasure as sin: sexual pleasure was very much important for the Puritans.

If Puritans had issues, it was with a misconstrued understanding of the relationship between church and state; which lead to coercing Christian ethics and theology upon a populace against Scriptural counsel. However, in sex, alcohol and the pleasures of this world, they were more liberal within the marital framework and Biblical than their later Evangelical counterparts. There is a celebrated case from 1st Boston Church where a husband was ordered to give "due benevolence" to his wife; in a time when sexual considerations were decidedly one-sided.

What I detest about this era of intellectual dishonesty is what Patrick Moynihan (NY Democratic Senator) said. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts."

http://warnersmith.org/archives/359

This is a paper written by Warner Smith "THE PURITAN VIEW OF MARRIAGE SEX DIVORCE AND FAMILY"

This is an appalling demonstration of a lack of scholarship, and a warning testament to the fact that "Ph.D" after a name means progressively less in a world unconcerned with more than vaguely researched prejudices, and that those initials are attainable without the thoroughgoing commitment to research, discovery of truth, and adherence to logic and classical scholarship which formerly characterized their bearers.

If you go back to reconsider, as I sincerely hope you do, you would find that your hypothesis is unsupported, which in the true spirit of the scientific method would cause you to reconsider and perhaps readjust. Others have given you a starting point, but allow me to add a few more quotes on the Puritan idea of love:

The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves...dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at the table, walks with her when he travels...She lies in his bosom, and his heart trusts in her, which forceth all to confess that the stream of his affection, like a mighty current, runs with full tide and strength.
-Thomas Hooker

[W]oman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be loved.

-Matthew Henry (Incidentally this throws a bit of a wrench into feminist conceptions of relations between the sexes in other arenas as well)

The point of the above being that I hope you one day live up to the degree you apparently have.

Let me change a bit the cards, The one on the right can become " Help me make it through the winter of solitude and desolation baby!" The one on the left can become " Will you be my vessel of love and procreation baby? "
I don't think the puritans are as they often described in the media, as bigots who did not know how to enjoy love. This accusation is so often thrown at Christians.
Actually it is the other way around. Society nowadays is not more romantic, it is merely more sexualized. And no, masturbation, and all those forms of "sex" as they are called have nothing to do with real love. Now people break apart very often, and a new boyfriend/girlfriend, really isn't something that stirs the emotions that much.
Abortion, psychological damage, depression, rejection, divorce and porno. We simply don't have the right to ridicule the puritans. And it is not true that they were as cruel as described. That was the Catholic Church the puritans escaped from.
The puritans formed the basis of America as a free and the world's strongest nation. Certainly not the generation of today, which is the generation of degeneration.

Actually, this article is quite wrong; althoguh the Puritans emphasized that sex should only be in marriage, they also claimed that sex was very important within marriage, not just for reproductive but also for love. A man was excommunicated for refusing to have sex with his wife.

I don't care if this author does have a PhD. She did not do her homework. There are so many original source documents, including Puritan Sermons that totally expose this article as tripe. It was the Anglican and catholic view that marriage was only to produce babies, not the puritans. They did believe that sex should be limited to the realm of marriage, but sex was viewed as part of the joy of life, and an important part of the bonding between husband and wife. There are numerous 17th century sermons that are still easy to find on the subject. Just because you have a PhD does not mean you are an automatic expert, I suggest that if you want to know what Puritans believed, the best source is Puritan pastors, not academics who rely on speculation especially when there are so many still easily accessed.

Read this and then tell me the godly a.k.a. the Puritans did not believe in love and warmth in marriage...

To My Dear and Loving Husband
--Anne Bradstreet, 1612 - 1672

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let’s so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.

Pertaining to Puritans:
http://frcna.org/messenger/item/7100-
https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-recorded-instances-of-pre-marital-sex-or-out-of-wedlock-pregnancy-in-Puritan-Massachusetts

I'm thinking of developing a relationship with a Puritan, Quaker type woman. I'm searching her data base to find out about her libido to start with. I want to move on to talk about receiving oral stimulation and if not, then I don't want to have to pressure her to accommodate me, therefore, end the relationship. Yes, I'm searching for the right woman, hoping I can be the right man, I'm a Christian.

The Puritans are very strict, I can't masturbate or be a dick-sucker (I'm male), and I think that's good enough for me, but extramarital sex isn't simply a law against it, it can be done if 1. the wife commits adultery, 2. the wife is dead, and 3. the wife deserts the husband, in which case the husband can remarry. Restricting sex to heterosexuality of sexual intercourse between a man and his married wife is the biggest restriction. It's almost as strict as the Amish and without any pleasures or worldly pleasures. There are even restrictions against the secular entertainments (drama, dancing, gambling, card playing and tavern games), secularisation in any spiritual tradition is obviously a sin, but I think similarities of all rules with connection to a simple rule are silly (thus trivial) and unnecessary. The gambling rule only needs to be against gambling, anything similar to that isn't necessary. We only need simple rules but Puritanism makes a complex set of rules instead of the bare necessities. Living this life is obviously a mixture, and morally pure. We're not called saints for nothing! I like it and intend to buy Puritan clothing and a Puritan hat (I already have a brown cape and a Puritan collar). So God bless!