\nAccording to Yossef Rapoport, in the 15th century, the rate of divorce was higher than it is today in the modern Middle East, which has generally low rates of divorce.[42] In 15th century Egypt, Al-Sakhawi recorded the marital history of 500 women, the largest sample on marriage in the Middle Ages, and found that at least a third of all women in the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria married more than once, with many marrying three or more times. According to Al-Sakhawi, as many as three out of ten marriages in 15th century Cairo ended in divorce.[43]
In the early 20th century, some villages in western Java and the Malay peninsula had divorce rates as high as 70%.[42]
This is pretty interesting if you\u2019re used to a Western perspective where higher divorce rates and lower stigmatization of divorce is seen as a progressively \u201cmodern\u201d thing. I wanna check out the cited sources bc I hope they get into some details about these divorces and if there\u2019s information about social class, stated reasons and which spouse tended to initiate the divorce etc
I suspect that in many societies, “marriage” is/was basically the equivalent of what we would today call “serious dating” or what have you; it was certainly less bureaucratized at basically every point in history than it is today. In light of this, “divorce” might have been more akin to just… breaking up. Divorce as we know it today, the convoluted legal process, may be the exception rather than the rule.
This inspires me to again note that what we know as “dating” was basically what the mid-20th century would know as “going steady”, and what they would have known as “dating” is probably closest to our “hooking up”
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