I do have to say that I think it's worth asking if "marriage" meant the same thing then as it does now. It's always been shooting for the same goal, of course, but I think there was more individual and social leniency with failures then. Nowadays if you don't have a soulmate you get divorced. Back then if you found you disliked your husband, you moved into separate bedrooms. You had to keep house together, but provided your husband was a decent man morally, it really might not have been that bad except for the loneliness part, and if you had friends or lived near family, that took care of that. Social roles were pretty well set, and social expectations about most of the things that we fight about now (sex, money, how to raise the kids) were pretty well set, so that it would be easy to avoid fights if both sides want to. A marriage that wasn't excelling at being a partnering of souls could reasonably settle for "comfortable partnership in life" in a way that doesn't have much modern equivalent. The only thing I can think of (and I don't know any of these, but I have heard they exist) are couples who lead pretty separate lives, don't quarrel, but are only staying together for the kids or the mortgage. Some of them seem to report being pretty happy with their lives.
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