Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

enough to realize that this was a tall order. What he asked for instead, then, was that Christians engage in as little marriage as humanly possible. He instructed those who were unmarried never to marry, and asked those who were widowed or divorced to abstain from settling down in the future with another partner. ("Art thou loosed from a wife? Seek not a wife.") In every possible instance, Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves, to contain their carnal yearnings, to live solitary and sexless lives, on earth as it is in heaven.
    "But if they cannot contain," Paul finally conceded, then "let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn."
    Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history. Although it does remind me of the agreement that Felipe and I had recently reached--namely, that it is better to marry than to be deported.

    None of this meant that people stopped getting married, of course. With the exception of the very most devout among them, early Christians rejected the call to celibacy in resounding numbers, continuing to have sex with each other and to get married (often in that order) without any supervision whatsoever from priests. All across the Western world, in the centuries following Christ's death, couples sealed their unions in various improvisational styles (blending together Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Franco-Germanic matrimonial influences) and then registered themselves in village or city documents as being "married." Sometimes these couples failed at their marriages, too, and filed for divorce in the surprisingly permissive early European courts. (Women in Wales in the tenth century, for instance, had more rights to divorce and family assets than women in Puritan America would have seven centuries later.) Often these couples remarried new spouses, and argued later over who had rights to furniture, farmland, or children.
    Matrimony became a purely civil convention in early European history because, by this point in the game, marriage had evolved into an entirely new shape. Now that people lived in cities and villages rather than fighting for survival in the open desert, marriage was no longer needed as a fundamental personal safety strategy or as a tool of tribal clan building. Instead, marriage was now regarded as a highly efficient form of wealth management and social order, requiring some sort of organizing structure from the larger community.
    At a time when banks and laws and governments were still enormously unstable, marriage became the single most important business arrangement most people would ever make in their lives. (Still is, some might argue. Even today, very few people have the power to influence your financial standing--for better or worse--quite so deeply as your spouse.) But marriage in the Middle Ages was certainly the safest and smoothest means of passing wealth, livestock, heirs, or property from one generation to the next. Great wealthy families stabilized their fortunes through marriages much the same way that great multinational corporations today stabilize their fortunes through careful mergers and acquisitions. (Great wealthy families back then essentially were great multinational corporations.) Wealthy European children with titles or inheritance became chattel, to be traded and manipulated like investment stocks. Not just the girls, mind you, but the boys, too. A child of rank could find himself engaged and then unengaged to seven or eight potential wives before he reached the age of puberty and all the families and their lawyers reached a final decision.
    Even among the common classes, economic considerations weighed heavily on both sexes. Landing a good spouse back then was sort of like getting into a good college, or earning tenure, or securing a job at the post office; it insured a certain future stability. Of course people did have their personal affections for each other, and of course tender-hearted parents did try to arrange