[Phoenix]

I remember reading: The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 by Lawrence Stone and disagreeing violently with his views.

He argued that since life was so uncertain, it really didn't matter who you married, since death would break those ties quickly enough, and that mothers invested no emotional capital in their children, since they were not likely to survive.

There would, of course, be some people for whom that might be true.

Lawrence Stone was born just after the first world war, so would have heard of unfortunate marriages amongst his parents' generation, and seen similar liaisons within his own. But I cannot imagine anyone who was able to make an informed choice not caring that their marriage would be desparately unhappy because they might be dead anyway in a few years, when it's the whole of the rest of their lives.