New Orleans has spent more than three centuries telling stories about romance, but the real love stories of the French Quarter are often far more extraordinary than the legends.

New Orleans Love Stories explores the couples whose relationships reveal how race, religion, class, law, family, and social expectations shaped whom people were permitted to love and marry. Along the way, you will encounter marriages that created homes and families, relationships the law refused to recognize, partnerships hidden behind socially acceptable labels, love that endured for decades, and one marriage that reminds us that possession and control should never be mistaken for love.

Beginning near the Old Ursuline Convent, the tour moves through the historic French Quarter while exploring love from colonial Louisiana through the twentieth century. These are not simply stories about famous New Orleanians. They are stories about ordinary parts of relationships that history often overlooks: building a household, protecting a family, caring for a partner through illness, grieving someone society refused to acknowledge, and creating something together that lasts long after both people are gone.

The tour concludes with one of the Quarter’s most touching marriages, preserved through diaries, photographs, a shared passion for New Orleans history, and the remarkable legacy one couple ultimately left to the city.

Romantic, surprising, sometimes funny, and occasionally heartbreaking, New Orleans Love Stories asks you: Who gets to decide what counts as love?