Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

emotionally satisfying unions for their children, but marriages during the Middle Ages were more often than not openly opportunistic. As just one example: A great wave of matrimonial fever swept across medieval Europe right after the Black Death had killed off seventy-five million people. For the survivors, there were suddenly unprecedented avenues for social advancement through marriage. After all, there were thousands of brand-new widows and widowers floating around Europe with a considerable amount of valuable property waiting to be redistributed, and perhaps no more living heirs. What followed, then, was a kind of matrimonial gold rush, a land grab of the highest order. Court records from this era are suspiciously filled with cases of twenty-year-old men marrying elderly women. They weren't idiots, these guys. They saw their window--or widow--of opportunity, and they leapt.
    Reflecting this general lack of sentimentality toward matrimony, it's not surprising that European Christians married privately, in their own homes, in their everyday clothing. The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as "traditional" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century--not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the aisle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of style since. Before that, though, your average European wedding day wasn't all that much different from any other day of the week. Couples exchanged vows in impromptu ceremonies that generally lasted only a few moments. Witnesses became important on wedding days only so that later there would be no argument in the courts as to whether or not this couple had really consented to marriage--a vital question when money, land, or children were at stake. The reason the courts were involved at all was only in the interest of upholding a certain degree of social order. As the historian Nancy Cott has put it, "marriage prescribed duties and dispensed privileges," distributing clear roles and responsibilities among the citizenry.
    For the most part, this is still true in modern Western society. Even today, pretty much the only things the law cares about when it comes to your marriage are your money, your property, and your offspring. Granted, your priest, your rabbi, your neighbors, or your parents may have other ideas about marriage, but in the eyes of modern secular law, the only reason marriage matters is that two people have come together and produced something in their union (children, assets, businesses, debts), and these things all need to be managed so that civil society can proceed in a methodical fashion and governments will not be stuck with the messy business of raising abandoned babies or supporting bankrupted ex-spouses.
    When I began divorce proceedings in 2002, for instance, the judge had no interest whatsoever in myself or my then-husband as emotional or moral beings. She didn't care about our sentimental grievances or our shattered hearts or any holy vows that may or may not have been broken. She certainly didn't care about our mortal souls. What she cared about was the deed to our house and who was going to hold it. She cared about our taxes. She cared about the six months remaining on our car's lease, and who would be obligated to make the monthly payments. She cared about who had the rights to my future book royalties. If we'd had any children together (which we did not have, mercifully), the judge would've cared very much about who was obligated to provide for their schooling and medical care and housing and babysitting. Thus--through the power invested in her by the State of New York--she kept our little corner of civil society tidy and organized. In so doing, that judge in the year 2002 was hearkening back to a medieval understanding of marriage: namely, that this is a civil/secular affair, not a religious/moral one. Her rulings would not have been out of place in a tenth-century European courtroom.
    To me,