So far, all the discourses of marriage and the issues that have emerged have focused only on the most practical or most negative aspects: death, divorce, property and control. Where marriage is discussed in a Christian context the dominant discourse is very much one of male domination and female subjugation, particularly concerned with appropriate, and therefore deeply restrictive, sexual relations. Such an examination could easily cause a reader to wonder quite why anyone in the post-Imperial world would want to marry. It is worth noting therefore that there were strong discourses of pleasure, harmony and partnership in certain literary contexts. In published personal letters in which the author was motivated to present only an idealised version of himself and his actions, and in works such as epithalamia, marriage is discussed most commonly in terms of archetypes. Keeping in mind the Christian affiliation of all of the major surviving authors of the period, and the positions that most of them held within the Church, it is striking then to see that they promote an idealisation of marriage that is so emphatically unlike that Christian image of domination or the legal construction where property is at the centre. It is instead a rhetoric of idealisation, where partnership and harmony are desired, that permeates the poetry of the age, in epithalamia and funerary lamentation. A discourse of concordia – mutual respect, mutual desires, happiness and harmony, not overly dissimilar to that described by Suzanne Dixon for the classical Roman world – pervades Late Antique and post-Imperial literature.

The wish for harmony (concordia) is a classic trope in any poetry related to marriage, in particular epithalamia. It tends to be the focus of the final lines of the epithalamium, rounding off the images of the bride preparing for the wedding with good wishes for the future. So, the final lines of Venantius's poem for Sigibert and Brunhild present a classic example of the trope. The exact same wishes are repeated in Sidonius Apollonaris’s epithalamium as he hopes for his recipients to pass their live in eternal concord, and the idea appears in every epithalamia of the period. This is a trope of the genre, and its exclusion would be unthinkable to any welleducated gentleman (and potentially offensive to the recipient).