I agree with this but it seems you still admit that there is some minimum level of compatibility required in order for someone to be “content”, even back then.
I’d also note that in real life, many married people did NOT choose to be content with a spouse of an arranged marriage, but simply neglected their spouses and contented themselves with extramarital lovers instead. And in the case of royalty and such, adultery was essentially Standard Operating Procedure, even the Church turned a blind eye to it.
ETA: Although when it came to that level of society, marriage was seen as a “matter of state” more than a personal matter, I assume people of lower classes had somewhat more freedom to choose a mate they had some compatibility with, although I agree there were still practical limits of “who happens to be in the same village, or at least close enough geographically to be a practical marriage candidate”.
When you say many married people didn’t choose to be faithful, I trust you mean the men. There was hardly a fate worse than for a woman to have been caught in adultery, particularly a noble woman upon whose fidelity the surety of a royal lineage depended. They were very closely watched and lived under societal rules meant to guarantee that their offspring were all legally legitimate. As for the peasant women, they certainly hoped that no man lacking morals and belonging to a caste higher than theirs took a fancy to their looks. The “look don’t touch” rules that protected upper class women did not protect them. It was up to them to keep themselves under close watch, lest they become the victims of criminals in no fear of facing justice.
Women also did not often have the luxury of choosing a husband they liked personally, since it was so much more important to choose a husband who wouldn’t let them or their children starve. It is funny how your priorities and what makes you content depends on how much worse things could be if your life were worse than it is. A poor woman’s wish list would not include “he makes me laugh” but would include “he is a good provider,” “he stays sober” and “he doesn’t beat me.”
That is neither here nor there. I only mean to say that the pendulum has swung to an extreme in the other direction, to the point that too many people marry based entirely on mutual enjoyment and the ability to amuse each other on dates without any thought about more practical areas of compatibility such as shared faith or even shared views on how to earn, spend, and save money. If you like the person who is mature enough to be faithful to the duties of marriage, that is probably a better choice than the the person you’re wildly attracted to who is unfortunately, as C.S. Lewis put it in *The Screwtape Letters *, a heathen, a fool, or a wanton:
*Now comes the joke. The Enemy described a married couple as “one flesh”. He did not lay “a happily married couple” or “a couple who married because they were in love”, but you can make the humans ignore that. You can also make them forget that the man they call Paul did not confine it to married couples. Mere copulation, for him, makes “one flesh”. You can thus get the humans to accept as rhetorical eulogies of “being in love” what were in fact plain descriptions of the real significance of sexual intercourse. The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. From the true statement that this transcendental relation was intended to produce, and, if obediently entered into, too often will produce, affection and the family, humans can be made to infer the false belief that the blend of affection, fear, and desire which they call “being in love” is the only thing that makes marriage either happy or holy. The error is easy to produce because “being in love” does very often, in Western Europe, precede marriages which are made in obedience to the Enemy’s designs, that is, with the intention of fidelity, fertility and good will; just as religious emotion very often, but not always, attends conversion. **In other words, the humans are to be encouraged to regard as the basis for marriage a highly-coloured and distorted version of something the Enemy really promises as its result. **Two advantages follow. In the first place, humans who have not the gift of continence can be deterred from seeking marriage as a solution because they do not find themselves “in love”, and, thanks to us, the idea of marrying with any other motive seems to them low and cynical. Yes, they think that. They regard the intention of loyalty to a partnership for mutual help, for the preservation of chastity, and for the transmission of life, as something lower than a storm of emotion. (Don’t neglect to make your man think the marriage-service very offensive.) In the second place any sexual infatuation whatever, so long as it intends marriage, will be regarded as “love”, and “love” will be held to excuse a man from all the guilt, and to protect him from all the consequences, if marrying a heathen, a fool, or a wanton. *
Letter 18, The Screwtape Letters
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