It is not, perhaps, so much a concern for the preservation of the home that makes people afraid of divorce, as it is for other time-honoured concepts; such, for instance, as the idea that marriage is a sacrament, that it is made in heaven and is therefore indissoluble in this world. Curiously enough, this idea of the essential holiness and consequent indissolubility of the marriage-bond has coexisted in Christian society with the most cold-blooded practice of marrying for convenience, for money, for social prestige, for place and power, for everything that ignores or negates the spiritual element in sexual union. The marriage arranged for social or mercenary reasons by the families of the contracting parties, who might not even meet before the wedding-day, was as sacred as if it had been founded upon an intimate acquaintance and tender passion between them. Thus was utilitarianism invested with a spurious holiness. Small wonder that a mediaeval court of love denied the possibility of romantic attachment between husband and wife. The Church, to be sure, introduced the principle of free consent of the contracting parties; but so long as the subjection of women endured, there could be little more than a perfunctory regard for this principle. There can be no real freedom of consent when the alternative to an unwelcome marriage is the cloister or lifelong celibacy at the mercy of relatives whose wishes and interests one has defied, in a society where to be unmarried is, for a woman, to be nobody. A son, because of the greater independence that his sex gave him, might safely exercise some degree of choice in marrying. A daughter might safely exercise none. As women have become more independent, and their economic opportunities have increased, consent has become more closely related to inclination, and in many places, notably the United States, it is actually dependent upon inclination;[24] but while women remain at an economic disadvantage it is hardly to be expected that the motives behind inclination and consent will always be entirely free from an ignoble self-interest.