Marriage, a History: Love Was the Last Reason Anyone Married

Let me start with a question: are you married?

Some will say they married years ago and already have two children; others will say, please, don’t touch that nerve. There are more and more single people in their thirties and forties, and plenty of them are not short of offers — the times have changed. There are more choices, people are more independent, and a life alone can be full and happy: one mouth to feed, no one fighting you for the bathroom or the remote control, and you do as you please.

Not so long ago — among your grandparents, even your parents — the man earned the money, the woman kept the house, and a few healthy, happy children made a cheerful family. That was the standard marriage, and many people sigh that things were better then. Now look around: a son in his mid-thirties who changes girlfriends every year but cannot find a wife; the daughter of the Li family next door, well paid, well educated and no longer young — why can’t she marry?

But is that traditional view of marriage actually right? Who says you must marry and have children once you reach a certain age? Nothing in this world has always been this way.

In fact, ever since marriage appeared, its purpose has changed many times. Don’t be naive enough to think people have always married for love — marrying for love is at most a matter of the last few hundred years. The history of marriage is both strange and entertaining, and that is what Stephanie Coontz tells in Marriage, a History.

For Thousands of Years, Marriage Had Nothing to Do with Love

“Marriage is the grave of love” — but being made to marry someone you do not love is worse; there would be nothing left to live for. We all agree that love is the foundation of marriage, and that a marriage without love is immoral.

Yet look at the record: humanity ran on a different principle for millennia. For most of the past several thousand years, marriage had almost nothing to do with love.

In medieval Europe, the “love” people spoke of was not the love between spouses at all, but love of God, of family, of one’s neighbour. In India, falling in love was once considered a dangerous act — a person blinded by love would make irrational decisions and even challenge the authority of the family. Romeo and Juliet, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai: to people of their time they were rebellious ingrates who disgraced their ancestors.

So what was marriage for? Why did humans invent it in the first place?

The answer: to create kinship. In hunter-gatherer societies, our ancestors moved constantly in search of food. Resources were scarce, and while hunting or gathering they inevitably met strangers from other bands — and a wrong word could turn into a fight. Life was already hard; to kill each other over a mouthful of food was a poor bargain.

The clever solution was to sit down and talk. From “talk and don’t hit” to “talk and don’t hit for a long time” — how do you guarantee it? Each group gives one member, and the two marry. In modern terms, a dynastic match: complete strangers, even enemies, become kin, and the instinct toward kin is to protect and care for them. Peace between the groups was secured. The strategy lasted for millennia, and Wang Zhaojun’s marriage to the Xiongnu ran on the same logic.

If you doubt it, check the word: “wife” comes from Old English wīf, which meant “peace-weaver.”

The More In-Laws, the Bigger the Business

Ask someone happily married what good marriage brings and they can talk for a truckload; ask someone unhappily married and they can fill a train car — friction with the mother-in-law, a difficult mother-in-law-to-be — nearly all of it has to do with the other family. To our ancestors this was not a trouble: the more in-laws, the better.

Marriage spread because it extended the family. More in-laws meant more business partners; two households were more likely to prosper and more likely to endure.

The Bella Coola and Kwakiutl peoples of the Pacific Northwest expressed this to perfection. Two groups wanted to trade but could not find a suitable son or daughter to marry into the other group. What did they do? They had a member of one group “marry” any piece of property belonging to the other — a dog, even someone’s foot. With no suitable person available, the two groups still became in-laws and trading partners through the marriage contract. It sounds barbarous, stranger than the television dramas where a man marries a rooster or weds a dead bride.

By the Middle Ages in the West, marriage still served to keep the peace; it remained a way to conclude peace treaties and military alliances. But now it took on another function: extending political power.

Shakespeare wrote the story of the Roman general Antony and Cleopatra of Egypt. Their marriage had almost nothing to do with true love. The two may have been drawn to each other, but the union was political: Antony needed money to publicise his military campaigns; Cleopatra needed an influential Roman at her side to hold power in Egypt. One had money, the other had talent, each needed what the other had, and so the political marriage happened.

So for people thousands of years ago, love was not the main reason to marry — at best a by-product. In China, certainly: marrying for love has less than a century of history here.

How Love Became a Reason

For thousands of years, marriage was decided by parents, who arranged their children’s matches according to the family’s social and economic interests. Arranged marriage was essential to a family’s success. To say you wanted to choose your own partner, or not marry at all, was to make the old patriarch stamp his feet and rage about unfilial descendants. To pick a partner for love — something fleeting and irrational — you would have to be out of your mind.

What broke the chain was the late eighteenth century: the Enlightenment, and the arrival of wage labour.

The Enlightenment preached liberty and equality and taught that people should govern themselves, and it changed how people saw marriage at its foundation. The French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence arrived like a hurricane, renovating the whole society’s sense of what was proper: to choose freely how you live and with whom you associate is every person’s right — including, of course, the right to choose the other half of your life. After that, young people poured out like pigeons released from a cage: so whom I love and whom I marry is mine to decide.

Almost overnight, for the first time in human history, love became a legitimate reason to marry.

There was also a material condition. People used to live off family wealth or inheritance, and whoever pays the bills sets the rules — your parents fed and housed you, so if a match benefited the family, you had no say. With a market economy and wage labour, young people no longer had to depend on the household: if they chose, they could leave, earn a living, and set up their own home with a lover. Only then did marrying for love have a material base.

The Victorian Era: Marriage Becomes Sacred

In the nineteenth-century West, people tasted the sweetness of marrying for love for the first time. It took time to adjust; people came to see, gradually, that marriage could offer emotional and sexual satisfaction.

For thousands of years, marriage had been the result of rational calculation — whether it benefited the family’s finances and status — not an emotional commitment. By the Victorian era, from the 1830s to the early twentieth century, more and more people hoped to find love and personal fulfilment in marriage.

Marriage was then seen as the main source of happiness and intimacy. Suddenly people found deep meaning in it, almost religious in intensity: husbands and wives wrote to each other of their feelings. The American writer Annie Fields wrote a line — “You are my church, you are my Bible.” Marriage had become a sacred thing.

Emotional satisfaction was one matter; sexual satisfaction another. To seek a satisfying sex life then was mostly futile. The cause was cultural: society required women to be chaste and to show no desire, producing a general sexual repression of women; men, meanwhile, were thought to be bursting with energy, and the norms demanded they suppress the impulse.

Sex within marriage was tightly regulated — once a month was said to be enough. The result was the opposite of the intention: desire did not fall, and brothels flourished.

Everyone has appetites; married or not, at a certain age people long for sexual intimacy. But society suppressed women’s desire at every turn, and many women suffered severe sexual frustration. People called it “hysteria” — plainly a lonely illness caused by a lack of sex, cured by satisfaction. So doctors massaged the female pubic area by hand until the patient reached orgasm.

Demand for this “therapy” grew so fast that doctors could not keep up, their hands cramping from the work, and someone invented a mechanical massager so women could “treat” themselves at home. That massager is the ancestor of the vibrator — the sex toy began as a medical device.

The 1950s: The Marriage Mistaken for “Traditional”

The male-breadwinner marriage we described at the start actually appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the West this was an exceptional period for marriage: the share of young people marrying peaked. After the Second World War, young people in love wanted to marry as soon as possible. In 1959, half of American women aged nineteen were already wives; the same year, 70% of women under twenty-five were married.

Marriage was so universal that people who did not date or marry were looked down on everywhere. A 1957 survey found that 80% of Americans considered the unmarried sick, neurotic, even immoral.

Post-war marriage had clear gender roles: the husband earned, the wife kept the home. Yet this was rare before the 1950s — for centuries husbands, wives and children had worked together to support the household. With wage labour came the idea that a man should find a paying job and a wife should keep house and raise children, but reality did not follow: a man usually did not earn enough to support the whole family, and the wife had to work too; and men who kept house and raised children hid it, unwilling to admit they did women’s work, afraid it made them less of a man.

Only in the 1950s did the economic boom drive wages up enough that one income could support a family. Then a married woman who went out to work became, in most eyes, an oddity.

At that point people believed they had finally found the ideal family form. Unfortunately, that was not so.

The 1970s: Love Built It, Love Broke It

After the peak of the marriage boom came a sharp reversal. Through the 1970s, Western marriage rates fell, people married later, out-of-wedlock births rose, and divorce rates climbed steadily. In that decade, half of American marriages ended in divorce.

Why? The same cause that made it unmade it — the marriage built on love collapsed for the very reason at its core: no love, no marriage.

A marriage built on love is more satisfying and more fragile. Marry for love, and when love goes, the marriage has no reason to continue. Compared with marriages once driven by economics and politics, love seems to spoil more easily, less able to withstand time.

But people in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries already married for love — why did it work then and not later? Because before the 1970s, neither marriage nor divorce was free: divorce was limited by money and by culture, and women depended on men.

In the 1970s everything changed. More and more women entered higher education, earned degrees, joined the workforce, and their incomes rose. Economic independence gave women the choice: to file for divorce, to support themselves, to stop fearing the street.

A new generation’s values changed too: no longer trusting traditional gender roles, unwilling to marry as early as their parents, wanting to express themselves while young. More women put careers first, fought for advancement at work, and did not want to marry and have children early; many travelled while young — the world is wide, and marriage seemed to hold less appeal.

Marriage Today

Look at the young married friends around you, then think of the 1950s family, and the difference must be enormous. The male-breadwinner marriage is no longer the default; more often two people earn and support the household together, and sometimes the wife earns while the husband stays home.

Women today are more career-minded, unwilling to give up work to be housewives, sometimes earning more than their husbands. Data from 2001 showed that 30% of working women earned more than their partners.

Other forms of partnership also challenge marriage’s legal authority. In France and Canada, any two people can form a legally recognised relationship — to raise children together, or simply to share resources. The two can be lovers, siblings, even close friends. Many of the benefits spouses enjoy are available in those relationships too.

By now, have you lost confidence in marriage, decided it is optional? Don’t give up yet. Even with more choices, marriage remains a stable foundation. Destroyed by love and rebuilt on love, marriage today can give people satisfaction of a kind never known before. Many studies show married people are generally happier and healthier than unmarried ones. People are social animals; everyone wants a companion. Marriage also acts as a shelter against economic crisis and psychological trouble — married people cope better with financial setbacks and depression.

So marriage has been through several great transformations and stands firm, and will be here for a long time yet. One forecast holds that in the United States, nine out of ten people will eventually marry.

Conclusion

Marriage evolves with society: from the peace treaty of hunter-gatherer times to the emotional satisfaction of later centuries. Marriage today is fuller, and more fragile.

There is no formula, no recipe for a perfect marriage, but psychologists and sociologists have identified a few essential things — above all mutual respect, and treating your partner as a friend. Married or not, both deserve your attention.

Further reading: The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work shows how to put these things into practice in daily life; Things I Wish I’d Known Before We Got Married does the homework in advance; if relationships themselves interest you, start with this reading list on intimacy.