Hate to burst everyone's bubble (nah, no I don't, it's what I do), but our notion of fidelity and marriage? Very, very recent. And always more of a "goal" than an actuality.
19th-century (i.e., "Victorian") British (and American) newspapers, popular magazines, weeklies, and novels -- and remember, in the 19th-century the novel was what the motion picture is today, a signifier and marker of a society's cultural touchstones -- were full, chock-a-block, overflowing with tales of adultery, divorce, laciviousness, and fallen women. Indeed, divorce courts were so packed, with dockets so full, that newspapers had regular columns simply transcribing the proceedings for the public's enjoyment.
And in our own (American) so-called "Wild West," the "whore with the heart of gold" is as much a part of the legend as Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. Historically, as often as not, that whore was, in fact, a married woman from Back East who'd fled to the frontier to escape abusive husbands. In Western society, moreover, those "whores" could be married to perfectly respectable men and be accepted into society without so much as a how-d'ye-do.
And of course in the classic sources of Western culture -- Rome, Greece, the European tribes (Huns, Visigoths, Vandals [who were, in fact, quite well-behaved people on average, despite our word "vandalism"], and Celts) -- monogamy was known but seldom enforced. It wasn't economically rational, among other things.
Monogamous marriage likewise evolved as a norm in Europe and elsewhere largely as a rational economic choice. European peasantry, as opposed to their Celtic, et al., forebears, were situated in an economic system that didn't provide sufficient resources to maintain multiple wives.
And after the Dark Ages following the Black Plague, during which time the authority and legitimacy of both monarchies and the Church were called into question -- the first real sexual revolution was during the Dark Ages (also the first time women went into the organized economy as labor) -- both the state and the church enforced monogamous marriage as part of the process of reasserting and maintaining their institutional power. Once one had to go to the state and the church to be married, those institutions could define what a marriage was and was not.
It was the mid-to-late Medieval period that the notion of "Christian marriage" came to predominate our cultural understandings. The first historian to seriously investigate this, nearly 50 years ago, was Christopher Nugent Lawrence Brooke, who noted that there is an inescapable paradox at the center of the notion of "Christian marriage":
" 'Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,' is a proposition to which most Christians would say heartily, Amen; but no Church has ever claimed to know, when man had witnessed a ceremony of marriage, whether in every case God had in fact joined the couple. This may seem at first sight mere casuistry, but a little reading in the case-law of the medieval Church...quickly shows that it is not."
Indeed, divorce and marriage have been hand-maidens since first there was marriage.
Is that a cheering thought? Clearly not. But one is tempted -- too easily, I believe -- to write off the myriad of reasons for divorce with sweeping generalizations about "disposable" social attitudes.
