"Are we here talking about 'of course I'll marry you darling' or do you mean 'I swear your eyes are more beautiful than the moon'. Those are very different."

"I think if a woman is sleeping with a man she's not married to, there's usually going to be some sort of reason for it? Like, in the wizard schools it's practically a requirement, if you tried not to you'd end up failing all your classes. If a woman were just doing it for fun, she'd just touch herself, obviously, it's a lot nicer than lying with a man. Maybe we could try to figure out what the reasons are that women are deciding to lie with men anyways?"

"...I did not know that about the wizard schools. That seems like something we should perhaps change."

"There is a schooling committee, and I suspect its result will be that we will not have any official schools after the convention reviews their recommendations. Dear, you reviewed reports from Augustana in earlier days?"

"Similar situations of women being largely compelled to use sex as bribes were common among the urban poor. Less so among the merchant classes and villagers."

"I think distinguishing between different grades of promises is silly, if we're relying on men to have shame about breaking them. My sister was married - had a wedding, with witnesses, when she was seventeen. And when her husband left her? My parents laughed in her face, for keeping a child before she'd lived with him for enough years to guess that he might stay. Promises without teeth are for foolish little girls, and where I come from, there is no other kind. Little wonder no one waits for them."

"If we're tracking down any men to make them pay up to support their families that would be the kind to start with."

"Yes, that seems wholly appropriate. A man should not be able to abandon his wife so simply, that is lawless and dishonest. If the community they reside in cannot prevent him, then the law must."

"Alright, so, looking at the original proposal, can anyone think of a justified reason for a man to divorce his wife that wouldn't be covered under both of them wanting it, or no children and no pregnancy, or a priest hearing them out and approving it? At least for the kind of marriage that's... more than just moving in together, I'm not sure if we can make laws for the case where that's all they did."

"Well. His wife could be an evil sorcerer."

"Many, if we're including the nobility. But the norm there is already to sign a very thorough contract covering all eventualities beforehand. Any standard divorce law should apply only to situations in which no such detailed contract exists. If a couple desires something else, they can hire a lawyer beforehand."

"Probably most priests would say it's okay to leave your wife if she's an Evil sorcerer? Unless she ensorcelled the priests. But if she can ensorcel all the priests I don't know if there's anything else that could stop her, and probably she'd ensorcel him if she tried? Do you have another idea I'm not thinking of?"

"As the Count-Regent says, I think the nobility would object to the divorce rights being applied to them, and where they seek divorce, would want their liege, or the Queen, to be the judge of difficult cases, rather than a priest. But I think Avenger Ferrer is correct and the remedy there is, first, to arrest the enchanter and try her, or him, for their crimes, and then use other methods. I think we can trust the committee on rights and the judiciary to consider ensorcelling minds to coerce them to behave as if married illegal."

"In seriousness, I think 'my wife is an evil sorcerer' is the sort of thing that you want to be able to take into account after abandonment has occurred, not something you want to have on a list of valid reasons. Just pointing at - someone will have a good reason to run at some point. You want to have a step before any penalties where you check if that's what happened."

"That makes sense to me."

"It seems better, to me, to oblige a man to care for his divorced wife and their children than to simply forbid him to divorce her. It comes out to much the same thing in many cases, but I should not like to forbid him to remarry if he can support both his old family and a new one."

"He should have to tell the prospective new one that he bailed last time so if she doesn't like his explanation she can turn him away."

"Agreed."

(Llei has been feeling so uncomfortable.)

"I think that is better, if we can properly enforce it. I am not confident in the capacity of the state and the clerks of the nobility, at present, to track all former marriages or abandoned children and enforce payments. Especially if any men flee their village or town of origin."

Come to think of it that's a problem with his earlier suggestion about flogging or gifts, especially if he'd elaborated to the multiple points in the child's childhood version. Hmm.

"I don't think we should enforce it retroactively. Just - going forward. It sounds like most marriages aren't recorded anywhere, so is it possible to - introduce an office where contracts can be kept on file, or something? Or give that job to an organized church?"

"The little boy who used to be a lantern archon has been teaching all of us at the temple of Erastil to read where we don't know it already, could be useful for that. I think in our right form we do weddings only we're starting from not much."

"That the scribes and bureaucrats who work for the state and the nobility have not been purged as thoroughly as the nobility were, is partly a matter of having less authority, but mostly a matter of them being equally difficult to replace, man for man, and far too numerous. I didn't have enough to start, and even if I had, I have had to dismiss quite a number of them as too Asmodean - maybe Mephistophelean - to be trusted with any responsibility. I am not just concerned with tracking past matters, but with future ones as well; it will be a good half-dozen years at least to replace and reform our staffs, and maybe a dozen years or more, before they're up to the challenge."

Sigh. "Well, if we can't record promises, I don't see how we can hold people to them." It seems sort of implausible that a country with Cheliax's literacy rates doesn't have enough people qualified to record which people have signed a standard marriage agreement, but on the other hand it sure doesn't have enough orphanage workers, either. Actually -

"However much work it is, though, it seems worth asking whether it ultimately pays for itself in less need to run state-funded orphanages. Raising a child seems much more than ten times as much work as recording who's meant to be responsible for one."

"Surely a woman petitioning for support after abandonment can bring witnesses to the marriage or agreement, instead of having it necessarily be recorded in a central register, if this is too difficult."

"Just to record marriages, I think we can manage. In villages where few men would consider leaving this seems enough. I worry that the kind of man who thinks little of abandoning his wife will also think little of abandoning his other responsibilities and fleeing to the next barony or the nearest town, or turn adventurer or bandit, and if he must pay if he remains, he may do so even more than he would have before. Tracking that seems very hard. Though you are right that so is running orphanages to a remotely humane standard."