1. INTRODUCTION: ON INSPIRING AND WISE RESEARCHERS

John Eekelaar is a much-admired researcher who has inspired many other researchers. One of them is me, Wendy Schrama. I first came in contact with his work 25 years ago, when I was writing my PhD. This opened new ideas, and showed me that boundaries are there to be crossed. I would love to be a big thinker, like John, who can bring together knowledge, data and expertise to reflect critically on overarching policy aims. With his very broad expertise, he contributes to reflection on, and the reduction of, current pressing problems in society. I still am very much inspired by his work. During the last two decades, Dutch legal research on family law and family policy has made more use of sociolegal data, and there is a clear trend towards interdisciplinary research on family law and policy issues; but, as this contribution will show, there is still much work to be carried out. It is not only John’s work which stimulates others to cross boundaries, but he is, on top of this, a very kind and amiable man, which makes him all the more loveable.

Love is also what this contribution is about: the role love has, and should have, in family law, departing from the aims of family law. This is a topic John Eekelaar has written about extensively. We will start with a short investigation of what have been identified in Anglo-American and Dutch literature as the aims of family law, and more specifically, law dealing with intimate relationships (hereafter ‘relationship law’). What do we want from relationship law? This is necessary for the next step: an attempt to test whether current Dutch law serves these aims. We will limit this chapter to marriage, registered partnership and de facto unions. The same exercise could, and should, be done for informal religious marriages.

Dutch family law is regularly faced with religious marriages. As pointed out by John Eekelaar, the law confronts power structures created by the cultural or religious norms of minority groups, and this ‘raises one of the most difficult issues for modern societies: Can concurrent, possibly conflicting, systems operate alongside each other?’.