The family in the modern West is an institution undergoing great changes. Some of these changes were conveniently summarised in a New York Times article from September 2012 titled ‘Till Death, or 20 years, Do Us Part: Marriage Through the Contract Lens’. Here Matt Richtel highlighted the difficulties facing American marriage and presents the Twenty-First century as a crisis period for the conception of modern marriage, going so far as to propose the idea of a time limited marriage: a marriage contract with an expiration date. Using the work of a number of prominent scholars in modern American demographic and family research, Richtel examined the two contrasting elements of, and the two major players in, modern American marriage: the economic realities mediated by lawyers and the romantic ideals mediated by churches. There are many perspectives on marriage and family in this article, and in the modern world. In 2014 equal marriage was legalised for gay couples in the UK and the same was passed in the US and Ireland in 2015. Such legal shifts broke open conversations about the purpose of marriage and family, of sex and of childbearing. For some, marriage is the acknowledgment of love (#LoveWins). For some it is the legal recognition of a relationship; for others, it is a spiritual union, or the only correct way to bear and raise children. For a few it remains a religious institution for un-sinful sex. The ideas of family, marriage and children in the Western world are altering and the law is following, or leading, these changes.

The family shape – most notably the centrality of a legal marriage – and the clashing sides both presented in Matt Richtel's article and encapsulated in the equal marriage debate are strikingly similar to those presented in the literature of the period covered by this book. The form and function of the family has long been seen as one of the most useful and significant lenses through which to view any given culture, and the family can be viewed as an important site of cultural change and evolution. This is as true of the period AD 400-700 in Western Europe as it is for America and Europe in the Twenty-First century; it was a period of considerable cultural and political change where the family was the locus for both changing discourses and apparent behaviours.