eruli by Prokop.

Although monogamy was the only one of all known forms of the family in
which modern sexlove could develop, this does not imply that it
developed exclusively or even principally as mutual love of man and
wife. The very nature of strict monogamy under man's rule excluded this.
Among all historically active, i. e., ruling, classes matrimony remained
what it had been since the days of the pairing family--a conventional
matter arranged by the parents. And the first historical form of sexlove
as a passion, as an attribute of every human being (at least of the
ruling classes), the specific character of the highest form of the
sexual impulse, this first form, the love of the knights in the middle
ages, was by no means matrimonial love, but quite the contrary. In its
classic form, among the Provencals, it heads with full sails for
adultery and their poets extol the latter. The flower of Provencal love
poetry, the Albas, describe in glowing colors how the knight sleeps with
his adored--the wife of another--while the watchman outside calls him at
the first faint glow of the morning (alba) and enables him to escape
unnoticed. The poems culminate in the parting scene. Likewise the
Frenchmen of the north and also the honest Germans adopted this style of
poetry and the manner of knightly love corresponding to it. Old Wolfram
von Eschenbach has left us three wonderful "day songs" treating this
same questionable subject, and I like them better than his three heroic
epics.

Civil matrimony in our day is of two kinds. In Catholic countries, the
parents provide a fitting spouse for their son as of old, and the
natural consequence is the full development of the contradictions
inherent to monogamy: voluptuous hetaerism on the man's part, voluptuous
adultery of the woman. Probably the Catholic church has abolished
divorce for the simple reason that it had come to the conclusion, there
was as little help for adultery as for death. In Protestant countries,
again, it is the custom to give the bourgeois son more or less liberty
in choosing his mate. Hence a certain degree of love may be at the
bottom of such a marriage and for the sake of propriety this is always
assumed, quite in keeping with Protestant hypocrisy. In this case
hetaerism is carried on less strenuously and adultery on the part of the
woman is not so frequent. But as human beings remain under any form of
marriage what they were before marrying, and as the citizen