Did men and women in the ancient ages love their spouses?

[Thiscantgoonlikethis]

I’m just struck by the central theme of the Odyssey being a man trying to make it back to his wife. Is this a modern emphasis?
I know Homer did feature Odysseus and Penelope as truly in love with eachother.
But for the every day man, or wolsn who was probably voiceless, did they feel love for eachother? As we understand it.

Only for the wealthy. Who on every continent and in every civilization have been a distinct minority. Hence it being documented.

The overwhelming number of marriages have always been among the poorer classes so no financial or social benefit existed.

You seem to think marriage only applied to the rich?

Even within the poorer classes women were often traded through marriage and seen by their fathers as a asset to be bartered, even if only to ensure alliances with other poor families of similar professions or thinking of how to use grandsons in your chosen profession eg a dad who was a blacksmith might marry off his daughter to an iron merchant to ensure continued mutually beneficial trade.
the poorest of the poor women were always one step away from prostitution (similar to today) so would be effectively bartered for protection/money or to pay off debts

No I don't, what I'm saying is that even amongst the poorest folk, it was (and still is in parts of the world) a way of protecting whatever possessions there were - goods and chattels etc (and of course women were often treated as possessions).
Personally I'm a big believer in Lurve 😊♥️

I thought that too. Also a higher birth rate / lack of birth control. I suspect if your going to have half a dozen children then women especially are going to be more pragmatic than romantic.

I also think ancient humans had much lower expectations compared to modern humans!!

People clearly felt capable of love for others in these times but marriage had very little to do with love.

Throughout most of human history marriage has been primarily about prosperity, protection for women and children, the support of those children and enabling the survival and protection of the bloodline.

Where that has happened to cross over with romantic love or sex it has been a bonus but that was never a primary concern.

The whole tradition of romance in culture is essentially a confidence trick played on young people to sell them on the idea of limiting their sexual and companionship opportunities to one other person. Left to their own devices and without this propaganda very few young people would choose to settle down.

Of course they did. Human nature hasn't changed.

What has changed is our insight into the causes and ways of dealing with emotional and psychological states.

People of the middle ages and before experienced boredom, burnout, elation, confusion, dread, Sundayitis, frustration, irritation, happiness, and all the rest of the feelings and emotional experiences that we do. They just framed it all differently.

Agree up to a point but life in the ancient world was brutally hard, unless you were a member of the aristocracy just staying alive took all your energy and few people lived past the age of about 45. I’m not sure people had time to feel boredom or ennui.

I think I read our brains are the exact same as prehistoric people - so yes, people throughout history felt the exact same as us and had the same thoughts/complex feelings about the world etc

It depended. If you were the daughter of a noble or royalty, you probably had very little say in who you married and love had nothing to do with it. If also you were a woman in the 17th, 18th, 19th century who had been widowed with three young children under the age of 5 it was in your own best interests to get married to someone else as soon as possible (usually to a widower with a couple of kids of his own). Again, security for your kids more important than love.

There is a lot of current experience projection going on here. Marriage for love is a very new invention. Marriage was very different in past eras. Did people love, absolutely of course, but loving your spouse is a fairly modern phenomenon.

I'm going to disagree with a lot of the posters and say often not, there have been plenty of societies in history where they don't much love their children even, for example in ancient Rome, parents legally had the right of patria potestas, to reject or accept a newborn; unwanted infants, disabled children, or extra daughters were routinely "exposed" (left outside to die of the elements or be picked up as slaves). Carthaginians and Incans practiced child sacrifice and it was quite the honour to have your child ritually killed.
Even today there are countries where infant girls are routinely killed.
Then it was far more common for infants to be separated from parents, eg given to wet nurses, and not have a lot to do with them for years.

So if that's how children were treated, you can imagine that fluffy spousal love wasn't much of a thing - most marriages would have been pragmatic, economic, or in the case of the upper classes, political.

Most societies were harsh - the depth of emotional expression we're allowed it a luxury. Think about how animals are still treated in most of the world - pets aren't much of a concept.

Arranged marriage was not just a rich phenomenon. Men married off their daughters to older men in every class to improve their family circumstances.

Well, although I accept that marriage was not usually for love back then, I think it’s completely possible for a husband and wife who have had an arranged marriage to fall in love. I believe that’s not uncommon in parts of the world where arranged marriages still happen.

Many arranged marriages actually work quite well. The parents, if they choose well, select for compatibility, financial opportunity, stability and other values which the average 20 something full to the brim with hormones tends not to consider important.

It wouldn’t work here and I would have hated it but the older I get, the more sense arranged marriage makes to me.

The sources we have access to on medieval life indicate otherwise. There are records of the lives and concerns of ordinary people, contrary to suggestions here.

In particular, the malaise of acedia was well known. It's a word used to name what we now call depression. It encompassed the religious idea of sloth.

The seven deadly sins were names for various malaises experienced by individuals. The means of dealing with them included penance, adhering to strict daily discipline, occasionally pilgrimages.

People dealt with long, dark winter days by gathering together, singing, dancing, storytelling, and drinking. Board games were played, as well as outdoor games, weather permitting, in the fallow season and during times when there wasn't enough work to be done to fill the day, on Holy Days, etc. People of the medieval era were overwhelmingly engaged in agriculture, but had much more time to themselves than wage slaves of the modern era, just because the rhythms of agriculture determined the hours worked.

This doesn’t necessarily mean not loving your children, though. But whereas we have come to define loving a child as feeling a strong bond with them from birth or even earlier, it is not at all uncommon for a child to be not really seen as a full person as a small baby or toddler. And when the highest mortality rate was for under-5s that could make a lot of sense. However, once children were older and considered to have their own minds, they were often doted upon even in civilisations that would seem to us to be quite brutal towards babies.

In ancient Rome, real love was not between a husband and wife that was purely transactional -the only way to create an heir. Only men were deemed capable of true love.

Yes, I think certainly more recently, in the UK and Europe, people were to some extent protecting themselves from pain by keeping some emotional distance from babies and younger children, due to the likelihood of them not surviving to adulthood - this was relatively recent though.

Humans have very plastic brains, and people raised in societies that function very differently to ours, will think and to a large extent feel in a very different way. And given that the large majority of those societies were unimaginably brutal compared to ours, what their relationship to their children looked like would be shocking to us, and often not recognisable as love.

It was the Geogians that begun to romanticise childhood, and that relates directly to how we view it today - and of course Western ways of thinking then spread globally (colonialisation/globalisation).

You're misreading average figures. Low average life expectancy reflects rampant child mortality. Those who survived into adulthood and didnt die in childbed had a good chance of reaching old age.

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2475/growing-old-in-ancient-greece--rome/

Depends if your parents have your best interests at heart and understand your nature. Nobody wants to be Lizzy Bennet forced to marry Mr Collins as her mother would have her do

There's a good vook called 'The Four Loves' by C S Lewis on the different Greek words for love, exploring the concepts.

And of course there is 'If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with.'

They put the kettle on and wait for it to boil; we start with the kettle boiling and wait for it to cool.

Interesting thread, I'm enjoying reading it.

Weren't they in clans and the older women looked after the babies in the group whilst the younger women were looking after the newborns. The older men were killed off when the sons could hunt better than them.