Secret Engagements: Where Sense and Sensibility Start to Meet

The first volume of Sense and Sensibility has not one, but two secret engagements!  Even if Marianne and Willoughby's engagement doesn't even really exist, I know I'm not the only one who was secretly loving the romantic scandalousness when it might have happened.  Few things strike the heart of a true romantic person than a good secret engagement; it has star-crossed lovers written all over it.   For the women (and maybe men?) of the time, this dash of quasi-scandalous romantic wonder had to rope them in, yet the whole idea behind a secret engagement is undeniably economical at its core.  If two people share in a secret engagement, it means 1) that they're madly in love, but 2) that they absolutely cannot afford to marry each other at the moment.  The willingness to wait on someone in a time when marriage is so important to your standing in the community is incredibly romantic, but the sense to know that they must wait until one or the other quite literally has enough money to get married is also incredibly prudent.  As such, I would argue that secret engagements (at least when they are real) are the only true juxtaposition of sense and sensibility in the first volume of the novel.  Here, true sense and sensibility means having the sensibility to catch a man and fall madly in love with him and the sense to wait until it's economically fit for your family.  Since Marianne's romance was a bit of a sham and Elinor is far from engaged as well, Austen might be showing us a peek of what both together look like while also pointing out that neither girl is there (yet).