This concept was new in the Middle Age, because there was no literary or no social framework of romantic passion in the Christian world before the end of the 11th century. In earlier literature, the term 'love' related exclusively to platonic and Christian love however this new concept of love was just a literary concept that cannot be applied to real life due to what it entails. .
In the Middle Ages a marriage in the aristocracy is more or less a contract between two families. The influence of family alliances, social status, property rights, desire for legitimate offspring and the prospect of companionship were the important aspects which conducted to that contract and made the marriage attractive to the participants. Therefore, the reasons of a marriage in the Middle Age "were routinely based on practical considerations" and "property having comparatively little to do with the feelings of the parties concerned" (Porter, 15). In Addition a lovely and harmonious matrimony was almost impossible because lovers at court were due to political circumstances often separated from each other. According to this lack of love in medieval arranged marriages, one of the romantic main ideas of courtly love is that love exists only outside of a marriage. In consequence of this, adultery is presented as a romantic feature of love although in reality adultery, especially that form of adultery in which a vassal seduced the wife of his lord, was "regarded in medieval law as a form of treason on a level with regicide" (Benton, 27). .
The punishments, accorded in the few known cases, were harsh and in form of castration, banishment and death. In the light of these severe historical realities, the love story of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere is quite a different tale, than the romantic and glorified one that Gaston Paris imagined. It is highly probable that Paris got the wrong intention of Chretien de Troye`s Lancelot story, because Chretien described deliberately a behaviour which would be definitely denounced by his courtly audience.