Evolution of happy marriage in western civilization--From Bride Price to Bliss

Title:

Evolution of Happy Marriage--From Bride-Price to Bliss

***Publishing Guidelines***

Permission is granted to publish this article electronically in free-only publications like a website or

e-zine (print requires individual permission) as long as the resource box is included without any modifications. All links must be active. A courtesy copy is requested on publication.

(e-mail byron@caffection.com )

Article URL:

www.caffection.com/articles.html

By:

Byron Edgington

Expert Author & Marriage Enrichment Resource

Article Date:1/24/09

Contact Info:

byron@caffection.com

Author Blog:

www.caffection.blogspot.com

Word Count:

1,780 words

My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher.

Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

Are you married to your best friend? No? Yes? Think it’s a silly question? A lot of people do. But a lot fewer people do than if I’d asked the question in 1999. If I’d been around to ask the question in 1599 I would’ve been carted off to the local, ahem, sanitarium or some such lockup, accused of using the word marriage and friendship in the same sentence. My sentence would have been several years. Back then, in spite of Shakesperean dramaturgy, lovers as marriage partners weren’t common in society. That’s one reason Willie’s most famous play Romeo & Juliet had such an impact; the concept of Juliet, nubile maiden of the Capulet clan hooking up with the young Montague scalawag because she, gasp, loved the fellow instead of the wealthy Paris for his bride-price shocked, shocked everyone. No, the concept of happy marriage, a marriage between friends, even marriage between lovers is a fairly recent thing.

Just a few short years ago married couples still assumed the ‘burden’ of ‘getting hitched’, and donning the ‘ball and chain’. As they stood before the cleric reciting their vows, the day after the hapless groom acquired his pounding hangover-induced headache from his bachelor party, the newlyweds mostly conceded rather than concelebrated. The bachelor party itself was a drunken mourning of the gentleman’s pending delegation to the ranks of the ‘married’ and being put out of commission, his days of blissful female conquest at an end.

But, happily, marriage between best friends is increasingly portrayed as a status to be pursued, an achievement, a privileged condition attained after much careful evaluation of potential mates. We don’t just have FaceBook, MySpace, Orkut and all the other social cyber connective tissue to thank for it, either. Just as there’s been a gradual evolution from sticks and stones to cruise missiles, smoke signals to the internet, the most social of all contracts, marriage, has evolved over time, and just as cruise missiles do, its evolution has accelerated in the recent past. Freud said the person who hurled the first insult instead of a rock was the father of civilization. Old Sigmund was a smart guy, and he had a lot to say about marriage and, of course, sex. What he’d say if asked the question about married friendship would likely be, “what, are you nuts?” But seriously, Dr. Freud would have approved of the trend, and endorsed it, even.

So what would Freud be endorsing? Why is it better to marry now than, say in 1599? How did we get here, to a time when, at least in Western civilization, marriages contain the underlying assumption, and radical concept of love between two parties? Here’s a short but intriguing history of marriage custom in the past 500, 100, and past 30 years. George Santayana said those who cannot remember the past are condemned to forget their anniversary, so let’s get started.

Q: WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE? A: “When they're rich.” (Pam, age 7) The quote was taken from a (true) survey of grade school kids. It’s funny now. In 1599 it was an assumption, and not the least bit funny.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, if a woman found herself ill-suited for marriage and attendant domestic duty, she had two choices: she could suck it up, marry, and likely be miserable; or, she could become a courtesan to a wealthy man. The latter choice was very common, as prostitution was readily accepted as an alternate profession for women at that time. Were this not so, we’d be deprived today of that seasonal favorite tune ‘What child is this?’ a more palatable rendition of yet another tune titled ‘Greensleeves’. The latter song being a tribute to ladies of a certain profession who, in merry olde England were required by law to identify themselves by wearing green, er, sleeves. The lilt was Christianized sometime around 1800, near as we can tell.

But women had limited options for employment even then, so marriage by default was the only game in town. If prostitution was socially acceptable, it was for good reason; women were traded as commodities in every level of society, and I’m hard pressed to decipher the difference between that custom and the world’s oldest profession. Length of the encounter, one supposes. As for females of marriage material, what did their days look like? When women weren’t attending to men, a lot of the time, they were, of course attending kids, meals, laundry or other--read wealthier--women, or generally making themselves available. And that simple condition explained a lot.

The bride price was (and is) a real institution, not just custom. It was very nearly a corporate decision, since it involved transfer of some form of wealth to another group--typically the bride’s family, since it was they who stood to lose her ability to perform work and to produce offspring. The groom’s family typically paid bride price, not to be confused with dowry, a payment to a bride by a husband. Transfer of wealth was the thing; no marriage would have been free of financial considerations, nor are they now of course, with some exceptions.

The so-called pragmatic, or arranged marriage was the customary form, not of joining two enraptured youngsters in marital bliss, but in the rather more prosaic endeavor of uniting two families through the contractual joining of two individuals to work, increase everyone’s wealth and make babies. Marrying for love, attraction, or even mutual self-interest back then would have been absurd, and prohibited. Even now the subtle yet undeniable undercurrent to much familial discord surrounding mate selection has to do with the eventual redistribution of the family jewels, or souvenir Nascar paraphernalia as the case may be.

So what changed, and when? The Protestant Reformation rejected the then prevailing concepts of marriage, along with several other Catholic doctrines. Martin Luther declared marriage to be "a worldly thing . . . that belongs to the realm of government". The Puritans passed an Act of Parliament stating "marriage to be no sacrament". By mid-seventeen hundred marriage was becoming a purely secular concept, no longer performed by a minister or priest, but by a justice of the peace. The Puritans brought this concept of marriage to America where it survives even now.

One big difference between the marriages of late seventeenth century Europe and those to follow was the concept of consent. Prior to about seventeen hundred women were considered chattel, thus unauthorized to give consent, so no marriage could be based on that since, contract law prevailing, consent was required. Oddly, the inability to consent to a contract was a rationale for denying marriage rights to slaves in the U.S. as they, like women being the property of someone else, were similarly incapable of granting consent for a contract. This was the origin, by the way, of the curious custom of ‘jumping the broom’, a practice common at African Americans’ wedding rites even today. In slave days jumping over a broom had the significance of diving into marriage, since that was one of very few rituals to which slaves were entitled.

By the mid-eighteen hundreds moods and customs had changed somewhat. That was the century of much progress in human affairs, after all. The enlightenment, the age of reason, whatever you wish to call it brought with it the recognition that women were not mere objects to be used as part of the decor and to add to it with new little people, but real people themselves, capable of making decisions on their own, and even giving consent to assorted contracts, thus to marry.

That didn’t mean women were then free to hook up with whom they wished, however. The Church stepped in where the family used to hold sway. European marriages still required a religious ceremony until the French Revolution introduced compulsory civil marriage. (!) Eventually, after about 1800, a wedding before a civil official became the only valid form of marriage in most of the Western world. Religious weddings were permitted, but only after a civil ceremony had taken place. As a side note, in light of current heated controversy regarding same-gender marriage, with the opposing side decrying the religious ramifications, their anguished supplications seem ill-founded. Indeed, researching the history of marriage one is compelled to assume that religious marriage ceremonies are something of an afterthought, a vestige of an even more complicated and disrupted past.

Who was the first couple to marry for love? Good question. Sadly, the question cannot be divorced, (pun intended) from the very valid discussion of divorce. The ‘D’ word was prohibited, of course, and still is, by the once all-powerful Catholic church. Various Reformational alterations cancelled the divorce prohibition, then it was reinstated, and once again put back into the law books. In America by the mid nineteenth century divorce was legal, though not widely sought, again because of financial considerations. In contrast to Italy, by way of example, where divorce was legalized in 1970!

So marriage for love and affection became more and more prevalent by 1900, and sometime after World War 2, when a mating frenzy gave any vestige of bride-price, familial wealth transfer or other secular coupling rationales the boot, marrying for love and affection was the way to go.

In closing, one could assign blame for this development to the introduction of television, which technology is responsible for all other forms of depravity in Western civilization, but that would be taking the easy route. It’s likely that the blame for our current state of affairs, the matching up of old and young alike for such an ethereal concept as love, whatever the hell that is, can be laid at the feet of the only possible source of all the conflict, disruption, chaos and imposition the world has ever known: that fallible, inconstant, fragile, unreliable organ known as the human heart.