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Welcome to my next installment of the Period Fic Primer, where I talk about stuff that period fic often gets wrong! Today we're going to talk about how people think about marriage. Because about 90% of the time, when I read a period fic with a romance in it, it's pretty obviously modern people with modern ideas about love who just happen to be wearing funny clothing. And, I mean, if that's what floats your boat, go for it! But if you want to write something with characters who feel they might actually come from the time period the story is set in, here are some things to think about.
Stop me if you've read this fic/watched this movie: Our hero and heroine are In Love. But there is a problem! There is a class difference! Their families have other ideas of who they should marry! The hero and heroine don't understand how anyone can stand in the way of True Love! What kind of monsters could want someone to marry without being in love with their new spouse?
That reaction--that assumption that of course being in love is the only and most important reason for marriage--is extremely modern. People have fallen in and out of love throughout human history, it's something most humans do; and falling in love with the wrong people is also fairly common. But the idea that romantic love and marriage are naturally connected is a modern idea which was only starting to come into popularity in the Regency. Instead, up until the late Victorian era, most people (of all social classes) would have agreed more with Max instead:
In most times and places, marriage has had two primary functions:
1) consolidate/amass resources needed to sustain the family, and
2) pass those resources on to the next generation so that the family will continue to prosper.
Why? Well, to answer that, we have to back up a bit. Did you know that, throughout history, most communities were only one bad year away from famine and people starving to death? This is not an abstract thing. It didn't happen most years, but it happened regularly enough that it was never far from peoples' minds. Also, farming up through the late middle ages took huge amounts of backbreaking labor. In a good year, you'd have a surplus, and could sell it to get some extra stuff. In an ordinary year, you'd have enough to survive on. In a bad year, people died. Organizing things so that you and your family and your community--the people you cared about--would have the best chance at survival in a bad year was really important.
Now. Where do the resources come from? From the land. If you want to farm, you need land. If you want to mine, you need land. For pretty much anything, you need land. Making sure that you have access to the land you need--and that your children will have access to it--was a really big deal. For the few things that didn't need land, but rather used the products of the land and turned it into something else--all the trades, basically--there was also a lot of concern for how to balance things so that the people already in the trade can be sure that they and their families will have what they need to continue on in the trade. Access to resources was a huge deal. For most of human history, in most places, that's been one of the most important considerations for marriage. It's all about who has access to resources, and how they are going to pass those resources down to the next generation intact so that their children will have enough to live on.
This looked different at different levels of society and in different cultures, but if you ask yourself "where are they getting resources from" and "how do those resources flow from one generation to the next" and "what effect is a prospective marriage going to have not just on the couple, but on their family and community" and questions like that, a lot of different marriage customs suddenly make a lot more sense. I'm going to be using European examples (mostly English), but these are the questions you need to ask if you're doing any worldbuilding or writing historical fiction. Because these things matter.
On the small farm community level, in England, farming mostly happened as a communal thing. That is, specific families would lease specific fields, but everyone in the village would come together to help and some things would be used in common. (The growing trend in 17th-19th Centuries of rich people enclosing common lands and using them for their own good instead of the common good is one reason poverty in the 19th Century was so dire.) But you needed to control how many kids there were: it was a balance between having enough hands to do the work, and having few enough mouths that you could afford to feed them all. So the eldest son would inherit the lease, he'd have enough to get married, and the younger sons would work for him and the community but not have the ability to get married because they wouldn't be able to feed their kids. If they worked hard, they might be able to take over the lease of another local family that had a tragedy; if they left the village they might have an opportunity somewhere else to find another way to make a living (but that was extremely rare, because people would make sure opportunities went to their own kin first so you'd probably end up doing the same sort of hard work for nothing more than room and board in a different village). To marry, you need resources; you need to be able to feed your children. And, ideally, you want your spouse to be able to contribute to those resources. So the girls would spend years building up a store of household goods, hoping to marry one of the older sons who had a lease and therefore could afford a family; if you didn't snag one of them, you probably didn't marry, and ended up doing the sort of hard-labor-for-nothing-more-than-room-and-board that your younger brothers were doing. It sucked for the younger children, but it made sure that there usually weren't more children than the land could support. It's not about love; it's about who could afford to support a family. (In many places on the continent, they divided the land up equally between all the sons, and that was fairer but ended up with lots of cases where there were simply too many mouths to feed.)
If you had a trade--you were a blacksmith, say, or a weaver, or a tanner, or a cooper, or a baker--well, there was a finite amount of work in any given area. You would pass on the trade to one of your sons, and the others you would try to find jobs as apprentices in the hope that they might one day be able to open up their own shop, but realistically most of them wouldn't. And realistically, most of them would never have enough money to get married and support a family unless they were able to open a shop of their own ... or marry the only daughter of someone with such a shop, or the widow of one. And even if you weren't marrying to get the shop, you wanted someone whose family was in the same trade, because even if women were rarely formally apprenticed in a craft, there was a lot less hard division between "men's work" and "women's work" and it was much easier to run a successful shop if both spouses knew how to go about it. So you might fall in love with someone from a farming family ... but (if you had the money and resources to marry) you'd still probably end up marrying someone from the trade you'd been brought up to. Because, again, it's not about love; it's about making sure you have the resources (skills and equipment and contacts, in this case) to build a comfortable life and support a family. And also, about making sure you have connections with the people who are most likely to have the things you need in your daily life.
If you were of the gentry or nobility, well, they were rich enough they weren't going to starve in a bad year, but they had a correspondingly greater desire to keep and maintain that status for their children. So the oldest son inherits the main bulk of the lands; the younger sons get professions like the army and the navy and the church, which may or may not pay them enough to support a family; the daughters get lump sums of money called a dowry. And you want to keep all that lovely money in the family. You want to keep the land intact. You want to keep the power intact. You want to make sure that your children will have the best life possible ... which means they need resources, which means you need to marry appropriately. You might fall in love, but if the person you love isn't an appropriate match, then you're probably not going to marry them because marriage is about collecting resources and keeping them in the family over generations.
In all these cases, according to the society and mores of the day, if you allow your child to marry outside their sphere simply because they've fallen in love--if they marry "beneath" them, or if they marry when they don't have the resources to support a family, or if they marry someone from a different trade/walk of life--you are a bad parent. So they're in love, who cares. Love will not feed your grandchildren. I mean, if you're a decent parent you'll care about making sure their spouse is a good person they can get along with, but as long as the spouse is not actively abusive, marrying someone they don't care for (but who has the resources for marriage) is far more likely to end happily than marrying someone they love who doesn't have the resources. I mean, if you're a farm girl and you marry a younger son of a farming family who doesn't have land of his own, all it takes is one bad year and you and all your kids starve. If you're in a trade and you marry someone from outside the trade, your shop is less likely to suceed. If you have money and land and marry someone who is lower class, you will be socially outcast and likely fall in social status and wealth and being ostracized from your community has negative repercussions for you and your children.
Our bone-deep association with marriage is that it's about love. But prior to the 19th Century, romantic love was a bonus in marriage. If you found someone you were in love with who loved you who was the right social group and had the right resources, that was awesome! But the right social group and the right resources was far more important to have. Think about that. Think about what it means to have "being in love" be an optional add-on, a nice thing if you can get it, rather than the purpose of marriage. And it's not even something that has to be related to marriage at all. Consider the medieval idea of courtly love, where knights would fall deeply, powerfully in love with great ladies, be visibly devoted to them, write them all sorts of love poetry ... and never put any serious thought to marrying them or even sleeping with them because relationships/marrriage and romantic love were in two mostly-separate conceptual boxes. Loving someone from afar was the ideal, not the tragedy.
You'd be surprised how much of the social mores of the pre-20th Century world were based on "we have to keep resources in the family and make sure our resources are passed on to the next generation." Obviously, things directly related to marriage and inheritance, like entailments and marriage settlements and wills were a part of it, but also things like "who talks to whom." You know all those rules about needing to be properly introduced to someone in order to talk to them? And the husband/father needing to call on someone and make their acquaintance before the wife and/or daughters can meet him? That's about making sure your daughters only marry the right people. They can't fall in love with a guy they never talk to, or at least, it's harder to do so. If you only ever talk to the "right" people and you fall in love, your love is going to be one of the "right" people and you can safely marry them. If you only talk to the "right" people, anyone that you don't know (and that none of your friends know) is obviously not the "right" sort of person, and so if you never come into contact with them, the chances of them being able to marry into your circle of family and friends is much reduced. This is one of the reasons why connections were so valuable, too: if you were at the lowest rung of the gentry but had a cousin who was in a far higher level, you would probably get invited to their parties sometimes, and your kids might be able to marry up into that sphere because they had an "in." It's all about keeping all that lovely money in the family not just in this generation but for the generations to come.
You will notice that I have been assuming that every marriage will produce children. These people didn't have contraceptives, just abortificants, and those abortificants were dangerous. If you weren't infertile, and you got married, you were probably going to have children. And if you didn't have children, it was seen as a great tragedy that (especially for women) lowered your social status. But even in cases of infertility, whatever wealth you had would pass down to the family because chances were you would have a niece or nephew to adopt. If there were any relations living, someone in the family would get it. But the ideal was for the couple to have children, because then both of the families that put resources into the marriage get a share of the wealth through the children who inherit it. It's all about keeping resources in the family.
This changed over the course of the 19th Century, but it changed slowly. Consider Austen's novels. In Sense and Sensibility, of the two couples in love we see, Elinor and Mr. F can't marry until Mr. F has resources under his control (an appointment as a vicar), and Marianne and Willoughby ends in tragedy, and the happy ending for Marianne is marrying the nice-but-boring-and-dependable guy with lots of land (and hence wealth). In Pride and Prejudice, Jane wants to marry for love, Elizabeth wants to marry someone she respects (and ends up with someone she loves AND respects, because she is a virtuous heroine), and Charlotte just wants to be married to someone with good prospects even if he's an idiot. (If you're protesting about Elizabeth wanting to marry for love, you're thinking about an adaptation or fic, because it isn't in the book; she explicitly starts considering him as a desirable marriage partner when she visits Pemberly and sees a) how responsibly it's managed and b) how well he treats his servants and sister, i.e. the people he could abuse with impunity if he wanted to.) In Mansfield Park, the reason Fanny has no money or status and can be abused by Mrs Norris and her cousins is because Fanny's mother married for love and thus Fanny and her siblings are penniless and depending on charity. In Persuasion, Anne and Wentworth fall in love but don't marry because, while he has prospects, he can't afford a wife yet (and might not actually gain the status and wealth needed to support a family), and even after all the angst of their meeting again and thinking he would marry someone else, and they reconcile and are married, Anne still thinks that refusing him when he didn't have enough money to support a family was the right thing to do.
Now, over the 19th Century, three things happened. First, the standard of living rose, mostly in the middle class and upper working classes. Second, all sorts of new opportunities developed. There were new ways of getting the resources necessary to live on besides inheriting them. Third, the novel flourished and there were all sorts of stories about true love conquering all. All of these things fed into each other. You could marry for love without it being an utter disaster, and there was a cultural stuff about marrying for love being okay. But it was a gradual change, and the higher you were in society the longer it took for that change to take hold. The upper classes in England were still marrying for social rank and money well into the mid-20th Century.
To sum up: if you are writing a period fic, or a fantasy set in a low-tech world, chances are that "marrying for love" is something most people think is silly at best, and dangerously foolish at worst. Even people who fall in love and end up marrying for love might agree that they're being stupid to do so!
Also, consider:
1) Who has resources?
2) How are those resources passed from generation to generation?
3) What are the social customs and mores that encourage this to happen in the "right" way?
4) What are the legal rules in place to enforce those customs and rules?
5) How does the family of the couple either benefit or lose from their marriage?
If you take these factors into account, your fic will be a lot more accurate.
Rebloggable on tumblr.
Stop me if you've read this fic/watched this movie: Our hero and heroine are In Love. But there is a problem! There is a class difference! Their families have other ideas of who they should marry! The hero and heroine don't understand how anyone can stand in the way of True Love! What kind of monsters could want someone to marry without being in love with their new spouse?
That reaction--that assumption that of course being in love is the only and most important reason for marriage--is extremely modern. People have fallen in and out of love throughout human history, it's something most humans do; and falling in love with the wrong people is also fairly common. But the idea that romantic love and marriage are naturally connected is a modern idea which was only starting to come into popularity in the Regency. Instead, up until the late Victorian era, most people (of all social classes) would have agreed more with Max instead:
In most times and places, marriage has had two primary functions:
1) consolidate/amass resources needed to sustain the family, and
2) pass those resources on to the next generation so that the family will continue to prosper.
Why? Well, to answer that, we have to back up a bit. Did you know that, throughout history, most communities were only one bad year away from famine and people starving to death? This is not an abstract thing. It didn't happen most years, but it happened regularly enough that it was never far from peoples' minds. Also, farming up through the late middle ages took huge amounts of backbreaking labor. In a good year, you'd have a surplus, and could sell it to get some extra stuff. In an ordinary year, you'd have enough to survive on. In a bad year, people died. Organizing things so that you and your family and your community--the people you cared about--would have the best chance at survival in a bad year was really important.
Now. Where do the resources come from? From the land. If you want to farm, you need land. If you want to mine, you need land. For pretty much anything, you need land. Making sure that you have access to the land you need--and that your children will have access to it--was a really big deal. For the few things that didn't need land, but rather used the products of the land and turned it into something else--all the trades, basically--there was also a lot of concern for how to balance things so that the people already in the trade can be sure that they and their families will have what they need to continue on in the trade. Access to resources was a huge deal. For most of human history, in most places, that's been one of the most important considerations for marriage. It's all about who has access to resources, and how they are going to pass those resources down to the next generation intact so that their children will have enough to live on.
This looked different at different levels of society and in different cultures, but if you ask yourself "where are they getting resources from" and "how do those resources flow from one generation to the next" and "what effect is a prospective marriage going to have not just on the couple, but on their family and community" and questions like that, a lot of different marriage customs suddenly make a lot more sense. I'm going to be using European examples (mostly English), but these are the questions you need to ask if you're doing any worldbuilding or writing historical fiction. Because these things matter.
On the small farm community level, in England, farming mostly happened as a communal thing. That is, specific families would lease specific fields, but everyone in the village would come together to help and some things would be used in common. (The growing trend in 17th-19th Centuries of rich people enclosing common lands and using them for their own good instead of the common good is one reason poverty in the 19th Century was so dire.) But you needed to control how many kids there were: it was a balance between having enough hands to do the work, and having few enough mouths that you could afford to feed them all. So the eldest son would inherit the lease, he'd have enough to get married, and the younger sons would work for him and the community but not have the ability to get married because they wouldn't be able to feed their kids. If they worked hard, they might be able to take over the lease of another local family that had a tragedy; if they left the village they might have an opportunity somewhere else to find another way to make a living (but that was extremely rare, because people would make sure opportunities went to their own kin first so you'd probably end up doing the same sort of hard work for nothing more than room and board in a different village). To marry, you need resources; you need to be able to feed your children. And, ideally, you want your spouse to be able to contribute to those resources. So the girls would spend years building up a store of household goods, hoping to marry one of the older sons who had a lease and therefore could afford a family; if you didn't snag one of them, you probably didn't marry, and ended up doing the sort of hard-labor-for-nothing-more-than-room-and-board that your younger brothers were doing. It sucked for the younger children, but it made sure that there usually weren't more children than the land could support. It's not about love; it's about who could afford to support a family. (In many places on the continent, they divided the land up equally between all the sons, and that was fairer but ended up with lots of cases where there were simply too many mouths to feed.)
If you had a trade--you were a blacksmith, say, or a weaver, or a tanner, or a cooper, or a baker--well, there was a finite amount of work in any given area. You would pass on the trade to one of your sons, and the others you would try to find jobs as apprentices in the hope that they might one day be able to open up their own shop, but realistically most of them wouldn't. And realistically, most of them would never have enough money to get married and support a family unless they were able to open a shop of their own ... or marry the only daughter of someone with such a shop, or the widow of one. And even if you weren't marrying to get the shop, you wanted someone whose family was in the same trade, because even if women were rarely formally apprenticed in a craft, there was a lot less hard division between "men's work" and "women's work" and it was much easier to run a successful shop if both spouses knew how to go about it. So you might fall in love with someone from a farming family ... but (if you had the money and resources to marry) you'd still probably end up marrying someone from the trade you'd been brought up to. Because, again, it's not about love; it's about making sure you have the resources (skills and equipment and contacts, in this case) to build a comfortable life and support a family. And also, about making sure you have connections with the people who are most likely to have the things you need in your daily life.
If you were of the gentry or nobility, well, they were rich enough they weren't going to starve in a bad year, but they had a correspondingly greater desire to keep and maintain that status for their children. So the oldest son inherits the main bulk of the lands; the younger sons get professions like the army and the navy and the church, which may or may not pay them enough to support a family; the daughters get lump sums of money called a dowry. And you want to keep all that lovely money in the family. You want to keep the land intact. You want to keep the power intact. You want to make sure that your children will have the best life possible ... which means they need resources, which means you need to marry appropriately. You might fall in love, but if the person you love isn't an appropriate match, then you're probably not going to marry them because marriage is about collecting resources and keeping them in the family over generations.
In all these cases, according to the society and mores of the day, if you allow your child to marry outside their sphere simply because they've fallen in love--if they marry "beneath" them, or if they marry when they don't have the resources to support a family, or if they marry someone from a different trade/walk of life--you are a bad parent. So they're in love, who cares. Love will not feed your grandchildren. I mean, if you're a decent parent you'll care about making sure their spouse is a good person they can get along with, but as long as the spouse is not actively abusive, marrying someone they don't care for (but who has the resources for marriage) is far more likely to end happily than marrying someone they love who doesn't have the resources. I mean, if you're a farm girl and you marry a younger son of a farming family who doesn't have land of his own, all it takes is one bad year and you and all your kids starve. If you're in a trade and you marry someone from outside the trade, your shop is less likely to suceed. If you have money and land and marry someone who is lower class, you will be socially outcast and likely fall in social status and wealth and being ostracized from your community has negative repercussions for you and your children.
Our bone-deep association with marriage is that it's about love. But prior to the 19th Century, romantic love was a bonus in marriage. If you found someone you were in love with who loved you who was the right social group and had the right resources, that was awesome! But the right social group and the right resources was far more important to have. Think about that. Think about what it means to have "being in love" be an optional add-on, a nice thing if you can get it, rather than the purpose of marriage. And it's not even something that has to be related to marriage at all. Consider the medieval idea of courtly love, where knights would fall deeply, powerfully in love with great ladies, be visibly devoted to them, write them all sorts of love poetry ... and never put any serious thought to marrying them or even sleeping with them because relationships/marrriage and romantic love were in two mostly-separate conceptual boxes. Loving someone from afar was the ideal, not the tragedy.
You'd be surprised how much of the social mores of the pre-20th Century world were based on "we have to keep resources in the family and make sure our resources are passed on to the next generation." Obviously, things directly related to marriage and inheritance, like entailments and marriage settlements and wills were a part of it, but also things like "who talks to whom." You know all those rules about needing to be properly introduced to someone in order to talk to them? And the husband/father needing to call on someone and make their acquaintance before the wife and/or daughters can meet him? That's about making sure your daughters only marry the right people. They can't fall in love with a guy they never talk to, or at least, it's harder to do so. If you only ever talk to the "right" people and you fall in love, your love is going to be one of the "right" people and you can safely marry them. If you only talk to the "right" people, anyone that you don't know (and that none of your friends know) is obviously not the "right" sort of person, and so if you never come into contact with them, the chances of them being able to marry into your circle of family and friends is much reduced. This is one of the reasons why connections were so valuable, too: if you were at the lowest rung of the gentry but had a cousin who was in a far higher level, you would probably get invited to their parties sometimes, and your kids might be able to marry up into that sphere because they had an "in." It's all about keeping all that lovely money in the family not just in this generation but for the generations to come.
You will notice that I have been assuming that every marriage will produce children. These people didn't have contraceptives, just abortificants, and those abortificants were dangerous. If you weren't infertile, and you got married, you were probably going to have children. And if you didn't have children, it was seen as a great tragedy that (especially for women) lowered your social status. But even in cases of infertility, whatever wealth you had would pass down to the family because chances were you would have a niece or nephew to adopt. If there were any relations living, someone in the family would get it. But the ideal was for the couple to have children, because then both of the families that put resources into the marriage get a share of the wealth through the children who inherit it. It's all about keeping resources in the family.
This changed over the course of the 19th Century, but it changed slowly. Consider Austen's novels. In Sense and Sensibility, of the two couples in love we see, Elinor and Mr. F can't marry until Mr. F has resources under his control (an appointment as a vicar), and Marianne and Willoughby ends in tragedy, and the happy ending for Marianne is marrying the nice-but-boring-and-dependable guy with lots of land (and hence wealth). In Pride and Prejudice, Jane wants to marry for love, Elizabeth wants to marry someone she respects (and ends up with someone she loves AND respects, because she is a virtuous heroine), and Charlotte just wants to be married to someone with good prospects even if he's an idiot. (If you're protesting about Elizabeth wanting to marry for love, you're thinking about an adaptation or fic, because it isn't in the book; she explicitly starts considering him as a desirable marriage partner when she visits Pemberly and sees a) how responsibly it's managed and b) how well he treats his servants and sister, i.e. the people he could abuse with impunity if he wanted to.) In Mansfield Park, the reason Fanny has no money or status and can be abused by Mrs Norris and her cousins is because Fanny's mother married for love and thus Fanny and her siblings are penniless and depending on charity. In Persuasion, Anne and Wentworth fall in love but don't marry because, while he has prospects, he can't afford a wife yet (and might not actually gain the status and wealth needed to support a family), and even after all the angst of their meeting again and thinking he would marry someone else, and they reconcile and are married, Anne still thinks that refusing him when he didn't have enough money to support a family was the right thing to do.
Now, over the 19th Century, three things happened. First, the standard of living rose, mostly in the middle class and upper working classes. Second, all sorts of new opportunities developed. There were new ways of getting the resources necessary to live on besides inheriting them. Third, the novel flourished and there were all sorts of stories about true love conquering all. All of these things fed into each other. You could marry for love without it being an utter disaster, and there was a cultural stuff about marrying for love being okay. But it was a gradual change, and the higher you were in society the longer it took for that change to take hold. The upper classes in England were still marrying for social rank and money well into the mid-20th Century.
To sum up: if you are writing a period fic, or a fantasy set in a low-tech world, chances are that "marrying for love" is something most people think is silly at best, and dangerously foolish at worst. Even people who fall in love and end up marrying for love might agree that they're being stupid to do so!
Also, consider:
1) Who has resources?
2) How are those resources passed from generation to generation?
3) What are the social customs and mores that encourage this to happen in the "right" way?
4) What are the legal rules in place to enforce those customs and rules?
5) How does the family of the couple either benefit or lose from their marriage?
If you take these factors into account, your fic will be a lot more accurate.
Rebloggable on tumblr.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-27 05:28 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 04:53 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 06:10 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 09:52 am (UTC)From: (Anonymous)no subject
Date: 2020-08-28 03:35 pm (UTC)From:You have to remember that marriage is about consolidating resources and then passing them on to the next generation. Making ABSOLUTELY sure that everyone knew which parents a child belonged to was really, really important ... and the more sleeping around there is, the less able people are to trace what kid was fathered by what man. This is partly why it was gendered. A man could sleep with a sex worker at any time (if he could afford it) with no scandal, or keep a mistress at any time (if he could afford it) with no scandal. But if a woman slept with a man she wasn't married to, and it became known, in most times and places that would be a huge scandal and she would lose huge amounts of social status and her husband could cast her off and her family probably wouldn't take her back and she'd be penniless and might not have any choices between "starving" and "becoming a sex worker". There were exceptions and the exact details varied along with the degree of censure she faced, but that was the general understanding.
You and I come from a culture in which we are daily surrounded by stories, songs, poems, and art telling us that being "in love" is more important than anything else, that it's the highest goal, that it excuses most bad behavior. But that's a modern phenomena. Prior to the 19th Century, the percentage of art and song and story that talked about love was a lot smaller, and it was treated more like just a thing that happens sometimes (or even as a tragedy) than a good thing or a necessary thing. Believe it or not, they tended to talk more about sexual desire than romantic love. And, again, it wasn't seen as this be-all, end-all. If you happened to be in love with your spouse or someone who was appropriate for you to marry, that's great. If not, oh, well, but that's not really an excuse for bad behavior in and of itself.
There were times and places that had a lot more affairs than others; a good example is 18th Century nobility/most wealthy families. That set did a LOT of partying, and did a LOT of things that the Victorians found Shocking And Horrifying. (They gambled! They swore! They slept around! They did every vice imaginable!) The way it worked was, you got married, had a few kids to be heirs, and then you started going to house parties where everyone bedroom hopped and worked really hard at not noticing if people were in different bedrooms than they ought to have been. As long as there were no children produced, everything was fine. And a husband could, of course, have a mistress whenever he wanted, if he could afford to financially support both a wife and a mistress; women were on a MUCH shorter string. But if you'd asked those partying rich people whether they were doing it because they didn't love their spouse, they wouldn't really understand the question. They were doing it because ... they liked parties and debauchery.
I mean, think about today's super-rich people jetting off to a villa in the Bahamas, or whatnot. They can and do marry for love if they want to. Doesn't stop them from screwing around on one another in the process of partying (and mostly not after doing polyamory negotiations).
Also, it's not like nobody married for love in previous eras. If you fell in love with someone who was appropriate for you to marry (right class, right social set, right amount of money) and they fell in love with you, then sure, you might marry them. It just was a far less important factor than the other ones.
Hope this helps!
no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 07:36 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2020-09-20 08:49 pm (UTC)From: