Marriages Based On Love Used to Cause Snide Comments

And other odd facts about the institution of matrimony throughout history

In the modern age, we in the West, tend to think of marriage as a state of mutual affection, esteem, and cooperation. At least we hope that is what it will be. We are exhorted by books and movies to go find “the one” and to thereby complete ourselves by pledging eternal love and sexual fidelity to one mate. This state is both mythologized and held up as the very most important relationship that two people can ever have — and yet, this wasn’t always the case. Not by a long shot. Not even in Western Europe.

It was a common belief well into the late 18th century that marriage was too important an undertaking to be tainted with something as fickle and volatile as love. In addition, the union affected so many more people than just the bride and groom, that it could hardly be left up to them to make such an important choice. Marriage was seen as primarily an economic and social arrangement, even amongst poorer people, until really quite recently.

Here are some of the most unusual (by modern Western standards) facts about marriage that you might not know:

• In ancient India, love before marriage was considered to be quite scandalous and even anti-social. Affection was supposed to grow out of marriage, not be the impetus for it.
• In China, too much love between a couple was considered unseemly and deemed a threat to the obligations each person had to their extended families.
• During the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe, adultery was considered the most beautiful form of love.
• Many of the songs and stories popular among medieval peasants in Europe mocked married love. Your wife was essentially your business associate who helped you run the farm, the mill, or your shoe shop and it would be absurd to fall in love with your head employee or to select one based on romantic feelings.
• In contrast with modern Western ideas about the primacy of married coupledom, some societies even today place marriage fairly low in importance on the ladder of interpersonal relationships. Sometimes the relationship between fathers and sons is seen as being much more important. The Na of China consider sibling relationships to be the most meaningful.
• Sexual loyalty has not always been viewed as important and in some cultures even today, it still is not. Read more about that here.
• “Among the Yoruba and many other African societies, husbands and wives do not pool resources in a common household fund. Sometimes a couple doesn’t even share responsibility for their children’s economic welfare. The child is supported by one parent’s lineage rather than by the married couple. If the couple divorces, the child may not even be viewed as biologically related to the parent whose lineage isn’t economically responsible for him.” Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (pp. 26–27). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
• In some cultures, same-sex marriage was common, although it was generally expected that partners would each take a gender role and the unions did not always have a sexual component.
• Female silk producers of the Canton delta who wanted to maintain economic independence without the family dishonor of being unmarried might arrange for a “ghost marriage”. However, finding an unmarried dead man to wed was often quite a challenge, and there would be much competition between the women should one become available. There are other examples of Chinese ghost marriages as well.
• Among the Toda of Southern India, a girl not only married one young man but all his brothers as well. Upon reaching sexual maturity, she would have relations with all of her husbands. Any children were considered to be fathered by whichever husband had given her a toy bow and arrow and promised her the next calf from his herd.
• Egyptian pharaohs often married their sisters or half-sisters in order to keep the royal lineage pure.
• “In England between 1500 and 1700 the median age of first marriage for women was twenty-six, which is higher than the median age of marriage for American women at any point during the twentieth century.” Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (p. 125). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. This was because both partners first had to work and save up in order to be able to support themselves as a married couple. In addition, during some periods of time, the legal age for marriage was 25.
• Most matrilineal cultures had no concept of illegitimacy and even some patrilineal cultures allowed children born out of wedlock to have the same inheritance rights. This was even true in Europe for a very long time.
• There was no word in Japanese for “bastard” until 1868.

The 1950s and 60s normative notion of a single male breadwinner providing for a wife and children is really just a blip in history that is anything but traditional. Paleontologists today believe that such an idea of autonomous nuclear families would have spelled the death of the human race in the Paleolithic age. Aside from the fact that in most foraging societies, it is the gatherers who provide most of the food that the tribe consumes, communal food sharing and child rearing are central to hunter-gatherer bands. One man hunting only for his mate and children makes no sense in the context of actual foraging communities and would be looked upon as aberrant.

In fact, for most of human history, it took the work of at least both parents, and frequently other kin as well as non-kin, to keep children fed and a family alive. It’s been hypothesized that gender roles arose in order to maximize the effectiveness of this, with each person having a job and a contribution to make, although within current foraging societies, there is often quite a bit of flexibility around whether or not those roles are actually adhered to and it can be reasonably assumed that it was the same in the ancient past based on how deeply personal autonomy was valued.

In addition, for a woman, being unmarried, or no longer having a male partner did not bring hardship to her or her children as it often does in the modern West. In cooperative, egalitarian societies, the well-being of the group is considered in the best interests of each person. Food sharing is a fundamental survival mechanism and cooperative child care means that even mothers of several young children can contribute both work and food to the tribe. This idea continued well into more patriarchal times because it took both “men’s work” and “women’s work” to survive. In addition, the legitimacy of children was not always a major concern even in later times (up to a point).

Women were not necessarily impoverished by divorce in the medieval world. Because no one in the Middle Ages ever claimed that the man was the main breadwinner, a divorced wife was entitled to a percentage of the household estate in line with the labor she had contributed to it.

A woman who did not marry the father of her out-of-wedlock child was not necessarily considered damaged goods in peasant communities. A historian who examined the records of Halesowen Manor, in England, between 1270 and 1348 estimates that for every two women who gave birth in marriage, one woman gave birth out of wedlock. Many of these women subsequently married, some of them quite well, suggesting they did not face permanent stigmatization. Even so, richer peasants, with more to lose in inheritance disputes, tended to avoid bearing children out of wedlock.

Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History (pp. 112–113). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Eventually, the church got involved in not only making marriages official and legal but in also regulating different aspects of the relationship. No more could a couple simply move in together and agree that they were married. Children born out of wedlock no longer had any automatic rights of inheritance and tended to be looked down upon. Divorce became almost impossible — although a robust number of reasons for church-sanctified annulment remained (for a fee, of course).

By the middle of the 16th century, the words love and marriage began to be used more often together and although infidelity was still largely tolerated (for men) it was no longer idealized as a preferable kind of love. Families still had a vested interest in who was allowed to marry whom, something that the church often upheld over the wishes of the couple themselves. But more and more, marriage was at least starting to head in the direction of how we think of it today.

Certainly, expanding social bonds by acquiring in-laws has been a key element right from the beginning, although even that is not universal. The Na of China do not consider there to be any link between the families of a couple, but they are the lone exception perhaps because there really is no institution of marriage in that culture.

But what is very clear is that what we think marriage is and means has changed significantly over time, and even today, in other cultures, it does not necessarily have the same properties or expectations. What we might think of as traditional marriage is not the least bit longstanding, or universal. In fact, what is and has constituted marriage is so diverse that scholars have had a difficult time even defining it. The good news is, this means that modern Western people can largely co-create marriage however they wish and define it to please themselves.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2023