Marriage, and the state and social sanction that went with it, was impossible for a number of kinds of relationships in turn-of-the-century Egypt. Obstacles faced by same-sex and cross-sect couples have been examined, to some extent at least, in the historical literature; inevitably, these studies are colored by present-day debates over the same issues. This paper considers a different set of evidence about extralegal relationships. It presents a close reading of several criminal prosecution dossiers generated by the combined efforts of the Alexandria City Police and the British and French consular courts of the city. These dossiers describe a handful of unusual affective relationships from late nineteenth and early twentieth century Alexandria, involving self-inflicted violence, suicide, cross-dressing, and abduction, which find no ready counterpart in present-day debates. For this reason, they are a particularly fruitful site to examine law's reach into personal life at a particular moment in time. These relationships alarmed neighbors, relatives, or authorities, who sought to use the law to end them. In each case, however, legal institutions proved unable to bring any sanction into effect. The broader aim of the paper is to explore an era of incomplete sovereignty over personal status. The conventional narrative holds that marriage and courtship were tightly regulated by society and by the law at the turn of the twentieth century. Ample evidence supports this conclusion, but these cases reveal a different face of relationship control. On one hand, residents of Alexandria endorsed the authority of the state's formal legal sphere by soliciting its intervention, rather than seeking extrajudicial remedies. On the other hand, the law failed to meet their needs, at least in these cases. The hegemony of the law, asserted by the institutions of justice and acknowledged by the population, met its limits here. Like the other papers in this panel, this evidence is revealing of the conventions that construct normative notions of marriage.