Marriage, A History summary

For some people, the many benefits of marriage come with a serious drawback: in-laws. For our ancient ancestors, however, new in-laws were worth celebrating.

In fact, the goal of growing the family through in-laws essentially gave rise to the institution of marriage. After all, more in-laws mean more people to trade with, and so groups with family ties were more likely to prosper economically and thus more likely to survive.

For thousands of years, parents arranged marriages based on their family's social and economic interest. Strategic marriage was so crucial for a family's success that the very notion of letting the children decide whom (not to mention if!) they wanted to marry was simply unthinkable, especially if that choice was based on something as fleeting and irrational as love.

It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that major economic and cultural changes, most notably the Enlightenment and the emergence of wage labor, freed the individual from the dictates of their family.

After a long history of arranged relationships, love-based marriage was uncharted territory for nineteenth-century Western societies. Consequently, it was some time before people began expecting from marriage what we now assume it should provide: emotional and sexual fulfillment.

For millennia, marriage had been a rational – not an emotional – undertaking. But, during the Victorian era (1837-1901), more and more people started expecting romantic love and personal fulfillment from matrimony.

When conservatives talk about the “good ol’ days” of marriage, they’re likely referring to the 1950s and ’60s.

Indeed, the 1950s and early ’60s were a special period in the history of marriage (at least in the Western world): never before in the twentieth century had so many people married so young.

Soon after the marriage frenzy reached its peak, it took a rapid downward turn. Throughout the 1970s, the number of marriages fell: people began marrying later in life, out-of-wedlock births increased and divorce rates rose steadily. During this decade, every second marriage in the US ended in divorce.

But why?

Take a second to think about all the young married couples you know: it should be more than obvious that they differ significantly from the couples of previous generations!

Today, the division between male-as-breadwinner and female-as-homemaker is no longer the cultural norm. It’s much more common for both partners to be earners.