Exclusivity.

Standing beside a man publicly.

Making an arrangement respectable.

Those words are designed to make a monstrous thing sound almost tender, almost reasonable, the kind of practical union that families have arranged for centuries.

But strip the pretty language away and look at the actual transaction, and it was not a marriage being proposed.

It was a hostile takeover, conducted through a human being.

They did not want me as a wife, or a partner, or even as a person at all.