It's the long years after that really get to me, rather than the flurry after her marriage.

Besides, I'm a bit dubious about Bujold's point. I can mostly just barely manage to decide that things would work like that on Barrayar, but in the real world? The real world seems better described by Mariotta's remark in The Game of Kings -- "I could stuff a child I could fill a fifteen-year-old as full of moral precepts as a sponge, and I doubt he'd keep them long in the sort of world you've made for him."

P.