In the second place, however, custom contradicts the already mentioned need for variety, the eternal uniformity of daily companionship puts love to sleep, damps its ardour, and even gives rise to a sense of latent or open hatred between a married pair. This hatred is observed most frequently in love-matches,[175] precisely because here the ideal is all the more cruelly disturbed by the rude grasp of realities; especially if the intimate life in common enfolds a human, all-too-human, element, and tears away the last ideal veil. With justice the common bedroom of a married couple has been called “the slaughter of love.” A further cause of unhappy marriages is to be found in unfavourable age-relations of the married couple. The most serious is the premature entrance upon marriage. Before the introduction of the Civil Code, the age of nubility in the German Empire was attained, in the male sex, with the completion of the twentieth, in the female sex with the completion of the sixteenth year of life. In Prussia a Minister of Justice could give permission to marry at an even earlier age. According to the Civil Code, men could not marry until they were of full age (twenty-one), and women, as before, not until they were sixteen years of age. Women are able to obtain remission from this restriction, but not men. In special cases, however, a man is enabled to marry before the age of twenty-one years if the Court of Wardship (_cf._ the English Court of Chancery) declares him to be of full age, which the Court has power to do at any time after he is eighteen years of age. Whilst, before the year 1900, on the average, there were not as many as 300 men under twenty years who annually contracted marriage with the permission of the Minister of Justice--already a matter for serious consideration--since the introduction of the new Code, by which the ordinary age of nubility for man is raised by one year, =the number of persons prematurely contracting marriage has exhibited a notable increase=. In the year 1900 there were 1,546, and in the year 1901 actually 1,848 young men married before the age of twenty-one years. These very early marriages were distributed among all professions, and almost all classes of the population.