|
To be fair, though we do remember the burning intrigues and the Eloise & Abelard tragedies more clearly, people at the time were actually wildly promiscuous. Most high-ranked churchmen had lovers, many priests slept around, many (I hesitate to type "most") married couples were unfaithful; I might be feeding into country clichés here, but I can only remember one or two French kings not having a respectable amount of lovers (the single ones being sometimes married off so that upcoming illegitimate children could have an official fathers... but that didn't mean the end of the happy couple). Love/sex life at the court was active enough that Louis XV loved keeping up with his nobles' hijinks, and used his spy network to keep up with the numerous trysts (including keeping track of sheets to know if a woman might be pregnant...). The 19th was incredibly puritan and tightened the screws somewhat, but it's also the century of the grandes horizontales, high-class courtesans, and it was still "normal", if not almost mandatory, for bourgeoisie men to visit brothels at least once (not to speak of the, ahem, freer customs in the countryside). If you married young, it might just be because a kid was actually on the way; personal experience here, but that's why my grandparents got married on both sides of the family). What has changed is mostly ease of contact (when you sleep with someone in a random place, you have a good chance to see them again if you want to/you don't have to wait days for an answer with a long-distance relationship), the risks associated with a relationship (whether kids or societal scorn, though the risk was mostly for women) and public discourse around it all: before, state-approved discourse and media, from books to songs, extolled the virtue of pure, sincere love while now, discourse around love and sex is far more "agnostic", for lack of a better word. |
If you haven't already indulged, I do recommend "The Great" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2235759/