Quoting C.S. Lewis about love and marriage:
The general impression left on the medieval mind by its official teachers was that all love – at least all such passionate and exalted devotion as a courtly poet thought worthy of the name – was more or less wicked. This impression, combing with the nature of feudal marriage … produced in the poets a certain wilfulness, a readiness to emphasize rather than to conceal the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, p.?
“the antagonism between their amatory and their religious ideals”. Sound familiar? A proper Christian marriage is boring. Nothing arouses like a forbidden affair. Family life is all work and duty and raising children. The real sizzling sex is found in being bad and following your passions, preferably when young and the consequences can be brushed aside or minimized. A medieval idea? Sounds still alive and well today.
Williams explains how some of the romantics sought to take back passion for the good guys:
…among it’s results was a tendency to contradict the official tendency towards Reason. The poets said, with Wordsworth, that passion itself was “highest reason”; they did not always add “in a soul sublime.” It began to be asserted that “passion” precesely excited and illuminated the intellect, that it delivered from accidia [sloth,bordom], excited to caritas [charity], and even (strangest reversal of all!) that such a passion could exist as or in marriage. The idea of marriage was a way of the soul became a possibility. Passion was no longer to be only morally dubious…
-Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove, p.131