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The difficulties which were faced by couples trying to obtain a separation have sometimes led to a belief that there really was a model "traditional family", made up of a permanent and immutable nucleus, reflecting an equally indissoluble marital union. However, the study of a corpus built from remission letters from the lower Middle Ages gives us a glimpse of more or less permanent and consensual separations, even if social pressure was apparently directed toward demanding reconciliation, in some cases a ritualized one. Here we will more specifically study wives who left their husbands, what their moivations were, how the husband and close kin reacted, and what the consequences were of an eventual return to the family home.