The acclamation for free marriage and free love was an important constituent of the process of attempting to construct the institutional emotion and family structure newly modeling the modern western romantic love . Until the late 1910 s , the idea of free marriage and free love was too strongly tied with the ideology of enlightenment , thus only part of the meaning , the freedom to choose a marital partner , was stressed . Moreover , marriage was strongly tied up with the will to devote toward the nation , so choosing a marital partner was on the will to be a good people for the nation rather than on natural feeling of love . Free love started to be described in its genuine meaning from the works of Kim Tongin and his colleagues of the literary magazine " Creation ", though the meaning of it was still unstable and on the way of changing .