Free The Marriage Book by Lisa Grunwald, Stephen Adler Page B

what was said to be a joke circulating at the White House: “He would have been all right if he’d just kept his heart in his pants.”
    Carter had married Rosalynn Smith, from his hometown of Plains, Georgia, in 1946.
    I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, “I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.”
    I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do—and I have done it—and God forgives me for it. But that doesn’t mean that I condemn someone who not only looks on a woman with lust but who leaves his wife and shacks up with somebody out of wedlock.
    Christ says, Don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who’s loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness.

D
    DEVOTION
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    THE DUNMOW OATH, 1510
    Starting in the twelfth century, and intermittently since then, the custom in a British town called Dunmow was to bestow a “flitch” (a side) or sometimes a “gammon” (a hind leg) of bacon on married couples who convinced the town’s prior that they had been married a year and a day without arguments, infidelities, or—waking or sleeping—regrets. The practice had many iterations, but the lines below comprise the oath that, as early as 1510, the winning couples swore while kneeling on pointed stones.
    Some writers have suggested that this custom was the origin of the phrase “bringing home the bacon.”
You shall swear by the Custom of our Confession
That you never made any Nuptial Transgression
Since you were married to your wife
By household brawles, or contentious strife
Or otherwise in bed or board
Offended each other in deed or word
Or since the Parish Clerk said Amen
Wished yourselves unmarried ag[ai]n
Or in a twelvemonth and a day
Repented not in thought any way
But continued true and in desire
As when you joined hands in the Holy Quire
If to these conditions without all fear
Of your own Accord you will freely swear
A Gammon of Bacon you shall receive
And beare it Hence with Love and Good Leave
For this is our Custom in Dunmow well known
Though the Sport be ours, the Bacon’s your own.
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    CATHERINE OF ARAGON
    LETTER TO HENRY VIII, 1536
    The first wife of Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) was highly educated, devout, and at one point even a successful regent in Henry’s absence. She also bore him six children, including two sons. Only their daughter Mary survived childhood, and Henry’s two great desires—for a male heir and for the divorce that would allow him to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn—led to his break with the Catholic Church. Catherine was banished from court and remained in exile until her death (probably from cancer). But she considered herself the rightful queen and stayed devoted until the end.
    My most dear lord, king and husband,
    The hour of my death now drawing on, the tender love I owe you forceth me, my case being such, to commend myself to you, and to put you in remembrance with a few words of the health and safeguard of your soul which you ought to prefer before all worldly matters, and before the care and pampering of your body, for the which you have cast me into many calamities and yourself into many troubles. For my part, I pardon you everything, and I wish to devoutly pray God that He will pardon you also. For the rest, I commend unto you our daughter Mary, beseeching you to be a good father unto her, as I have heretofore desired. I entreat you also, on behalf of my maids, to give them marriage portions, which is not much, they being but three. For all my other servants I solicit the wages due them, and