For households in the pre-modern Middle East, the prolonged absence or disappearance of spouses, especially men, was a relatively common experience. A number of factors—from trade and ‘the search for knowledge’ to marital disputes—could leave families without fathers, husbands, or any clue as to their whereabouts. This paper uses ninth-century Syriac law books and patriarchal letters, as well as Islamic legal sources, to investigate how East Syrian ecclesiastical elites in ‘Abb?sid Iraq formulated the legal problem of ‘the disappeared husband,’ and thereby sought to define the parameters of social experience of Christian households, especially their female members. First, the paper addresses the Christian theological conceptions of marriage that informed the ecclesiasts’ legislation. Averse to granting the prerogative to divorce to any community members, East Syrian churchmen argued that only with sure knowledge of a spouse’s death—not mere disappearance—could a marital bond be considered dissolved. By articulating this teaching as a communal law in response to the particular social phenomenon of the disappeared husband, these ecclesiasts sought to instantiate lay marital practices—in this case perseverance in widowhood and the denial of divorce—that accorded with their own lettered tradition. After theological teachings, a second major factor informing the ecclesiasts’ strictures was a particular understanding of world geography as fundamentally knowable and traversable. In a time of increasing missionary activity and trade by East Syrians in the caliphate and further east, ecclesiastical elites conceived of lay people as living and moving in a geographical space over which the church had observatory and regulatory power. An absent husband could thus never have truly disappeared; the catholic Church of the East would always be able to find him (or news of his death). With sure knowledge of a man’s whereabouts always close at hand, divorce need not enter into consideration. Finally, the paper considers how East Syrian women might have navigated the social difficulties of being trapped in marriages to disappeared husbands. Focusing especially on the possibilities offered by emerging Islamic legal traditions and judicial institutions, the paper examines early Muslim juridical opinions on the options available to abandoned wives to dissolve marriages; the possibility for non-Muslim women to take advantage of these positions in Muslim courts; and the strategy of conversion by non-Muslim women to enact the dissolution of unwanted marriages.