Know Your Fucking History: Marriage
In this installment of KYFH, we’re going to shed some light on the true history of a pretty controversial subject: holy matrimony. OK, so, about eleventy billion years ago, God said unto Adam and Eve: “Guys! I just invented marriage; you should try it! I mean I haven’t dabbled myself, what with being the non-corporeal genderless omnipotent creator of heaven and earth, who leads you from temptation and delivers you from evil and all that, but seriously, you should try it! Adam, do you? Eve, do you? Great! Sweet! Go have a couple of sons and never ever ever ask me how they, in turn, manage to procreate! Kthxbai!”
LOL JK. No. No not really. Not even a little bit. In an ideal world, the history of marriage would be a wholly uncontroversial topic, because only seriously fucking stupid assholes who drooled on their science textbooks in grade school instead of reading them actually believe the asinine notion that marriage is a historically Christian institution rooted in Focus on the Family-approved morality. Sure, a lot of marriages are like that now. And certainly, many people choose to define their own marriage based on Christian principles. But let’s just give the ol’ boot-in-the-ass to the idea that the definition of marriage has ever been consistent. Not just throughout human history, but even right now, 2013 on this planet Earth, across various cultures and societies.
To attempt to cover all the nuanced ideas of marriage since the dawn of time in all the thousands upon thousands of unique and vibrant cultures that have walked or are walking terra firma would result in a literal encyclopedia of the history of marriage, and nobody buys encyclopedias anymore. So let’s just take a quick jaunt back into the annals of human existence and hack some nuggets of knowledge off the craggy mountain that is the institution of marriage.
The actual institution of marriage predates recorded history, which means we can’t know for sure how it started. But marriage generally functioned, and really kinda sorta still functions, as a means of institutionalizing access to women, moderating competition between men who want rights of sexual access and assurance as to the paternity of their children. If that sounds sorta un-romantic and also potentially marginalizing, that’s because it totally is, dummy! The original concept of marriage is a social construct, just like currency, citizenship, and being a total dickbag. All of these things are ontologically subjective, but epistemologically objective. We can comfortably call someone a dickbag if they have qualities that we have culturally agreed constitute dickbaggery, a process of evaluation that satisfies our social norms, but there is no underlying fact of dickbagness that exists outside of the confluence of signifiers to which the definition of “dickbag” is subject. It’s true, marriage has been given a set of general practices and regulations depending on where and when you are living, but it is still ultimately A Thing That We Made Up.
“BUT SO?!” Perhaps you cry, shaking your traditionalist fists at me and demanding some ethical familial order. “I THINK MARRIAGE SHOULD BE DEFINED THE WAY IT IS IN THE BIBLE!” Woah there, buddy. Rein it in a little, will ya? Let’s talk about the bible for a sec. Mark 10:9 reads “What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” So there goes your divorces right there. Ephesians 5:22 tells us “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church…” so thanks for that, Paul. I’m sure all the married women of Ephesus were stoked to read that letter. Exodus 21:10 says that if a man takes another wife he should be sure to give her equal food, clothing and marital rights. Deuteronomy 25:5 obligates a man to marry his brother’s widow. I could cherry pick all I wanted, but the point is that however you think the Bible defines marriage isn’t actually how it defines marriage, nor would you be super keen on adhering to all the rules for marriage that it suggests.
Early nomadic communities practiced a form of marriage called beena, in which the wife had a tent of her own and was completely independent from her husband. In Ancient Greece, no civil ceremony was required for marriage, just a couple of people who went “yup!” and were thus married. In Europe, marriage was a private non-religious institution in the early Christian era until 110, when Bishop Ignatius of Antioch wrote to Bishop Polycarp (literally: “with many carp”) of Smyrna, suggesting that two people should get the approval of their Bishop “that their marriage may be according to God, and not after their own lust” (“And also no kissing with tongue, and definitely no butt stuff,” Ignatius later wrote, because he was a huge tool).
During the Middle Ages marriages were arranged, sometimes as early as birth, usually to ensure treaties between families and heirs of fiefdoms. The Catholic Church was chill with cousins marrying each other for waaaaaaay longer than you might think, or perhaps exactly as long as you think, and Islam still allows it. Many cultures still require a dowry be paid to the husband’s family, and many Shi’ite communities allow for Nikah Mut’ah, or a fixed-term marriage contract (a marriage with an expiration date). Are you catching my drift here? Marriage has only ever been whatever we say it is.
And that’s just the plug-and-socket kind of marriage. Sometimes, dudes and ladies want to get their bits all mixed up with fellow dudes or ladies, and that’s not unprecedented either. Same-sex unions were celebrated in Ancient Greece and Rome, some regions of China, and throughout ancient European history. We could, and have, debated the ethics of non-standard man-and-woman marriages. Just like we have debated the ethics of interracial marriages, slavery, racial re-segregation in schools, and women’s right to vote. How did those turn out again?
The purported moral grounds on which a defense of traditional marriage stands are absurd at best, and outright divisive and hateful at worst. Social entropy insists upon a deconstruction of conservatism, as has been proven time and time again. But at minimum, anybody who tries to make an argument for adhering to the “true purpose” of marriage deserves a head-butt right to the noggin, because there ain’t no such thing. Ask yourself what you really mean. What you’re really afraid of.
And so, obviously your studious and objective historian knows that the purpose of Know Your Fucking History is to dispel common historical myths, and she does so with both grace and aplomb if she may say so herself. But she’d like to briefly interject with an emotional appeal that perhaps we should stop being raging dickbags and let marriage become whatever the hell two happy consenting humanoids in love want it to be.
Previously in the Know Your Fucking History series: