Chapter Six - Love Gets Dressed Up

CHAPTER SIX

Love Gets Dressed Up

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE line, love got a makeover.

Marriage was still a contract.
Sex was still controlled.
Women were still property.

But now… there were poems.
Flowers.
Knights and songs and stories.

The system didn’t change, it just got better PR.

In medieval Europe, a new genre took shape: courtly love.

Noblemen longing for noblewomen.
Songs of aching hearts.
Poems about eyes, hands, lips, and purity.

But here’s the twist:
Courtly love was usually outside of marriage.

These were affairs. Fantasies.
A knight in love with a queen.
A poet obsessed with a woman he couldn’t touch.

It was emotional, idealized, forbidden, and never meant to mess with real-life duties.

Even as the stories bloomed, marriage remained a business deal.

Among royals and nobles, marriages were political alliances.
Among peasants, they were economic survival plans.

A good marriage wasn’t one where people loved each other, it was one where land stayed in the family and children didn’t starve.

The emotional part? That was for ballads, not real life.

Christianity added another layer of pressure.

Marriage became a sacrament. Holy, permanent, and unquestionable.
Sex outside it was sin.
Divorce was nearly impossible.
Virginity was glorified, but only in women.

Love now had to exist inside a box: man and woman, one flesh, under God, until death.

Even if it was loveless.
Even if it was violent.
Even if it was unbearable.

The vow mattered more than the experience.

For centuries, people lived with the gap between what love looked like in stories and what it looked like in real life.

In stories: roses, destiny, and yearning.
In life: duty, silence, and control.

Sometimes the two overlapped.
But mostly, they didn’t.

And still, people kept dreaming.

Because no matter how tightly the system held, there was always something in us that wanted love to be more than survival.