This week, I’m thinking about courtship. The project I’m working on at the moment (I’m not quite ready to talk about it, but watch this space) doesn’t have the common sort of courtship, but for this week’s post, I’m happy to see anything you want to share in the comments. Courtship before marriage. Courtship after marriage. Charming, funny, serious, inept–whatever you like.

Here’s a bit from my secret project.

The first candidate disqualified himself within ten minutes of being shown into the little parlour off the entrance hall that Arial was using for these interviews.

The hint of condescension in his manner grated from the first. He won no points with his answer to her question about what he wanted from this marriage—her money to put into the businesses his father had mismanaged, so that he could sell them as going concerns and live a life of leisure like a gentleman should.

He topped his dismal performance by announcing that he would need to renegotiate some terms of her proposed marriage settlement, because woman were not clever enough to keep control over their own money, and was astounded and not a little annoyed when Arial thanked him for his time and told him she did not think they would suit.

The second was courteous and charming. His father, an earl, had shot himself after losing everything in a speculation, and he sought marriage to an heiress as a way of relieving his older brother of responsibility of providing for him and his three younger sisters. “Buck can bring the estates back to solvency if he has only himself to worry about,” he explained.

That wasn’t quite what Arial was hoping for when she asked what he wanted from marrying her, but at least his answer was not entirely self-serving. She continued the interview. He would do, she thought. He had no complaint about the financial arrangements she was insisting upon. His comment on her continuing to manage her business and investment interests was that he couldn’t understand why she wanted to, but he had no intention of interfering with her life.

That was slightly disconcerting—surely a husband and wife should interfere at least a little with one another’s life? She had hoped for someone who would be in some sense, at least, a partner; perhaps a friend.

Which brought her to the vexed question of children. Or, to be more precise (though only in her own mind) to the consummation of the marriage.