In the olden times they married at the age of twenty, but now at that of twelve or thirteen. For this reason they divorce the more easily because they marry without love, and ignorant of married life and the duties of married people; and if their parents could not persuade them to return to their wives, they hunted them another, and others and others. With equal ease men with children left their wives with no anxiety lest another might take them as wives, or that they themselves might later return to them. Nevertheless, they are very jealous, and do not lightly suffer infidelity on their wives’ part; and now that they see that the Spaniards kill their wives for this reason, they are beginning to maltreat and even to kill them. In cases of divorce, small children stayed with their mothers, while the grown-up went with their father and the girls with their mother.
Even though divorce was so common and familiar a thing, the old people and those of better customs condemned it, and there were many who never had but the single wife; nor did they ever marry one bearing their own name on the father's side, for this was considered a very bad thing. Equally wrong was it held that a man should marry his sister-in-law, the widow of a brother.