must we put a ring on it?

Marriage - What’s Love Got to Do With It?

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Jumping back a casual 4,000 years, marriage was first born out of a necessity for structure. In those early days, humans craved order and understanding, and since Maury Povich wasn’t around yet, they also needed a way to prove who was the father of the children. Heirs were kind of a big deal back in the day. And thus, we created a system to bind people together. In ancient Greece, ceremonies would even include the father giving away his daughter with the words “I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring”. Not quite the sweet daddy-daughter moment you may have imagined, but hey, it was a different time.

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Next, in a classical historical move, the Church saw what was happening and decided it was yet another aspect of the world that they should control. A priest’s blessing became a necessity for a marriage to be legal, and the concept changed from a glorified pregnancy test to a sacrament before the eyes of God. 

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Beyond keeping track of reproduction and proving you were a good little Christian, ancient marriage was also as a type of networking. It could give you access to a whole new family, and with that, increased economic gain and social climbing. As a woman, the person you committed your uterus to was the biggest financial decision you would ever make (or rather, was made for you). You could basically double all your resources just by getting a blessing and selling your daughter off, which is a practical business move by the lowest of standards. Even after the church butted in, marriage existed primarily for practical gain. In Christian texts before the seventeenth century, the word love usually referred to a love for God or for a neighbor, not a spouse. 

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So, to be clear, the idea of choosing a partner on the merit of “love” was simply

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This isn’t to say those early couples couldn’t have had meaningful or even loving relationships (Dude, I don’t know their lives), but that the idea of marriage coming from a place of love wasn’t really found until the Middle Ages. For European Aristocrats in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, adultery was considered the highest form of love. Yes, really. Side hoes were the true main chick! According to the Countess of Champange (which, by the way is the coolest title ever and what I would like to be exclusively called from now on), it was impossible for love to "exert its powers between two people who are married to each other".  Marriage was SUPER important for political power and all that jazz, but most people got their kicks outside of the marital bed.

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However, cheating wasn't the only way people showed that there are more important things than a spouse. In a lot of societies, marriage ranks relatively low on the scale of "how important is this relationship?", overshadowed by birth families. For example, in China, a common saying was "you only have one family, but you can always get another wife". Basically the original "thank u, next".  But narrowing in on the land of sweet lady liberty, things took a different turn.  In the early stages of American history, when we were still trying to ditch the king, marriage was in full swing and so was courting. While power and politics still played a huge role in who you choose, it was at least somewhat a choice, and how you felt about the person was considered an important factor. Feel free to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack for some sick beats and examples of courtship during those days. And as soon as American society decided that you should be in love with the person you were contractually obligated to hang out with, the idea took over in an aggressive fashion. Love poems, novels, classical music, artists of all kind popped up in mass quantities to profess their love and devotion to that special someone.

And once love entered the equation, requests for divorces followed right away. It took a while at first, with divorces only being permitted after proof of fault on one side or the other, but once no-fault divorces became a thing, a whole new world opened up for some. But it wasn't a totally great world. You would still be a discarded divorcee, especially as a female, and you were often considered as much of a failure as your attempt at marriage was. And for those that think this perspective on divorce is outdated, I assure you it is still alive and well today.

(I didn't find out my own grandmother was divorced until after her funeral, and spent the first 16 years of my life thinking my dads parents had been married until his fathers death. Kind of a huge thing to keep from your own kids, but apparently my Nana never wanted her grandkids to "think of her that way". Until the day she died, she considered her divorce to be a failure and an embarrassment. I wish she had been willing to talk about it with me, since her silence kept a huge part of her life secret from me, and prevented me from knowing her fully while she was still alive.  This idealization of marriage and condemnation of divorce by society built a wall between us that I will never be able to climb over.) 

Alright, after a brief emotional intermission, back to your scheduled programming! While perceptions of divorce are starting to change in some circles, there is still an overwhelming majority that considers it to be a failure.  The flip side of this sentiment is that a happy marriage is the only way to find "success" in life. If the game is life, the trump card is a loving marriage. Which in my opinion makes for a pretty shitty game, since there are plenty of other routes to happiness. 

Western cultures obsession with love and marriage has grown rapidly, and has barely slowed down over time. Yes, those expressions may have changed (women are allowed to do things now, and heteronormativity has released some of its clutches on society) but the fixation is ever present.  My questioning therefore continued - what if we spent the same amount of time and energy on other types of love as we did on romantic?

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