Society has a special place in its psyche for true love—we think of true love as unconditional, intimate, and everlasting. Divor

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问题     Society has a special place in its psyche for true love—we think of true love as unconditional, intimate, and everlasting. Divorce, on the other hand, appears to be the antithesis of love. It is temporal, legalistic, and involves lots of headache-inducing paperwork and splitting material goods. So would it surprise you to learn that the development of the western notion of romantic love is what ultimately led to the development of divorce law?
    【F1】The truth is this; not only did the development of romantic love coincide with the development of available divorce, but it was the absolute trigger. This juicy part of societal history has been widely overlooked.
    Let us start from the beginning of this era. From 0 A. D. to the 1600s—that is, 1,600 years—divorce was not available to married couples. The Catholic Church prominently influenced and controlled marriages.【F2】With only a few exceptions, marriage was permanent, regardless of abuse, fault, irreconcilable differences, or anything else short of death. This cement-permanent marriage was not based on ideas of romantic love, but instead, on much more practical matters—reliably keeping land in the family, and keeping status stable.
    【F3】Indeed, romantic love was not encouraged, and even frowned upon, between married couples. Up to the 18th centuryi "it was generally held that passionate sexual love between spouses within marriage was not only independent, but positively sinful. "
    If divorce was unavailable for 1,600 years, how did it(relatively)recently become so widespread? The first factor is that as the Catholic Church became less influential, the importance of family land be-came less drastic. But the more important—and interesting—factor is that western concepts of romantic love began to arise in the 1800s. Enlightenment thinkers, in their salons, and romance novelists in their publications, began pushing married love as a credible idea. After women began reading these books and listening to these ideas, it began occurring to them that they should marry for love rather than convenience—a novel concept at the time.
    【F4】However, once romantic love entered the equation, eternal marriages became psychologically inconsistent. Romantic feelings are emotional. Emotional feelings change over time. Therefore, a marriage built on romantic feelings could not be indissoluble. As one academic put it," because human emotions need not remain eternally constant...divorce became practically possible. " In sum, it is ironic that today, many of the people who advocate against easy divorces do so with the idea that they are defending romantic love, because it was the very emergence of romantic love that triggered the availability of divorce.【F5】Marriages based on other factors—such as religion, land, family obligations—were much more stable than those based on emotional love.
    So the next time you hear someone complaining about the frequency of divorce in America, you can blame it on love.
【F5】

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答案建立在其他因素——比如宗教信仰、土地、家族义务——之上的婚姻要比基于爱情的婚姻要稳固得多。

解析 这是一个简单句。主句主干为Marriages…were much more stable than…。其中basedon other factors为过去分词作后置定语,修饰先行词marriages;such as religion,land,familyobligations为插入语,举例说明factors。翻译时可以采取顺译的策略。
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