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

though, the most striking feature of these early European marriages (and divorces, I should add) was their looseness . People got married for economic and personal reasons, but they also separated for economic and personal reasons--and fairly easily, compared to what would soon come. Civil society back then seemed to understand that, while human hearts make many promises, human minds can change. And business deals can change, too. In medieval Germany, the courts even went so far as to create two different kinds of legal marriage: Muntehe , a heavily binding permanent life contract, and Friedelehe , which basically translates as "marriage-lite"--a more casual living arrangement between two consenting adults which took no account whatsoever of dowry requirements or inheritance law, and which could be dissolved by either party at any time.
    By the thirteenth century, though, all that looseness was about to change because the church got involved in the business of matrimony again--or rather, for the first time. The utopian dreams of early Christianity were long over. Church fathers were no longer monkish scholars intent on re-creating heaven on earth, but were now mighty political figures very much invested in controlling their growing empire. One of the biggest administrative challenges the church now faced was managing the European royalty, whose marriages and divorces often made and broke political alliances in ways that were not always agreeable to various popes.
    In the year 1215, then, the church took control of matrimony forever, laying down rigid new edicts about what would henceforth constitute legitimate marriage. Before 1215, a spoken vow between two consenting adults had always been considered contract enough in the eyes of the law, but the church now insisted that this was unacceptable. The new dogma declared: "We absolutely prohibit clandestine marriages." (Translation: We absolutely prohibit any marriage that takes place behind our backs. ) Any prince or aristocrat who now dared to marry against the wishes of the church could suddenly find himself excommunicated, and those restrictions trickled down to the common classes as well. Just to further tighten controls, Pope Innocent III now forbade divorce under any circumstances--except in cases of church-sanctioned annulments, which were often used as tools of empire building or empire busting.
    Marriage, once a secular institution monitored by families and civil courts, now became a stringently religious affair, monitored by celibate priests. Moreover, the church's strict new prohibitions against divorce turned marriage into a life sentence--something it had never really been before, not even in ancient Hebrew society. And divorce remained illegal in Europe until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII brought back the custom in grand style. But for about two centuries there--and for much longer in countries that remained Catholic after the Protestant Reformation--unhappy couples no longer had any legal escape from their marriages should things go wrong.
    In the end, it must be said that these limitations made life far more difficult for women than for men. At least men were allowed to look for love or sex outside their marriages, but ladies had no such socially condoned outlet. Women of rank were especially locked into their nuptial vows, expected to make do with whatever and whoever had been foisted upon them. (Peasants could both select and abandon their spouses with a little more freedom, but in the upper classes--with so much wealth at stake--there was simply no room for any give.) Girls from important families could find themselves shipped off in midadolescence to countries where they might not even speak the language, left there forever to wither in the domain of some random husband. One such English teenager, describing the plans for her upcoming arranged marriage, wrote mournfully about making "daily preparations for my journey to Hell."
    To further enforce