you have a very anachronistic/Victorian understanding on how past peoples would have viewed premarital sex amongst the lower classes-- which is understandable, because the Victorians really shaped our modern (western) world, but don’t make the mistake of believing that Victorian values were always the norm before the Victorians

A couple of points: I wasn't only speaking of the lower classes. You were the one who made that distinction. The point I made was not class specific, but rather applied to pretty much everyone in the West who was allowed to choose their spouse:

In the West when & where people could choose their own spouses, many people married because that was the only way they were legally & morally allowed to have PIV sexual intercourse & engage in various other sex acts.

More important, I definitely didn't derive my views, nor base my comment, on the norms of the Victorian era. Or solely on the norms of Anglican Anglophone culture in the West, either. You're the one who brought up the Victorians, and it's you who have projected onto me your belief that I agree with your contention that

the Victorians really shaped our modern (western) world.

And you're the one who decided the only reason I could possibly have said what I is coz I have must have made

the mistake of believing that Victorian values were always the norm before the Victorians.

Which makes me LOL, coz honestly I don't see the UK as the center of the universe. Nor do I see the Victorians as the originators of, or sole group in the West that has a claim on, censorious attitudes towards "extramarital" sex generally and punitive views & practices towards female persons who had sex & bore children outside of marriage in particular. You're the one who seems to think Britain is the end-all & be-all, the center of the West - not me. You're the one who seems to think that the Victorian era is the only possible point of historical reference here - not me.

Much of my anachronistic understanding of Western cultural mores & practices comes from the plethora of views & changing laws that existed in continental Europe during the Holy Roman Empire, which pre-dated the Victorian era in Britain by many, many centuries. These views & laws were greatly influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, which had a vast sway over a huge land mass & many cultures - not by the Church of England, which was founded nearly a millennia and a half after the RCC and has always had a much more limited reach over a much smaller part of the Western world.

My anachronistic understanding of Western culture also comes from the views & laws established in the the Americas by the Europeans who colonized these lands & established the cultural milieu & legal framework in the Americas - again long before Victoria became "Queen of Britain and Ireland" in 1837.

Much of the Americas were colonized by the Spanish, Portuguese & French, all of whom were heavily tied to the Roman Catholic Church - along with the Dutch, who were nominally followers of the Dutch Reformed Church, aka Calvinists, but whose religion was really mercantilism and who compared to the Spanish, Portuguese and French Roman Catholics tolerated a great deal of religious diversity and heterodoxy.

https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1363

The other major group who colonized the Americas, North America particularly, was, of course, the British. But again, the Britons who went to the Americas as colonists were not Victorians, as they started arriving in the Americas nearly 220 years before Victoria became queen. Nor can these British colonists be said to have been Anglican in the way that Anglicanism had come to be defined during Victoria's reign. Rather, most of the British colonists of the Americas were members of more radical Protestant sects - separatist Puritans and Nonconformists in New England - and a wide variety of faiths - Catholics, Mennonites, Quakers, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Evangelists, Unitarians, Lutherans and Jews - in the other British colonies.

to claim that marriage was never for love or companionship is flat out wrong. I’m able to pull up sources, if you’re interested.

But I never made such a claim. I said simply that

many people married because that was the only way they were legally & morally allowed to have PIV sexual intercourse & engage in various other sex acts.

And I said many others who

entered into shotgun marriages were fond of and genuinely cared about one another. But they really didn't "marry for love/companionship." They got married to spare the female partner public shame, disgrace and punishment - and to spare the baby the shame of growing up as an "illegitimate child."

I see now I should have added a single world to make it crystal clear that these people did not marry "for love/companionship" alone. I apologize for not making that clearer.

But I think you are the one being naive here to suggest that a majority of poor people in the past married solely for love and/or companionship. Most people historically, married for a number of different reasons all at once - just as people today do.

As for your charge that I have an anachronistic, ill-informed view of the world, I say pot meet kettle. You seem to have missed that the sun set on the British Empire quite a while ago. https://youtu.be/v2c5QHtgFxY https://youtu.be/Z1d4lJTjGKY
https://youtu.be/CBQBUKaRG-Q https://youtu.be/02D2T3wGCYg https://youtu.be/cBojbjoMttI