Complex Numbers

Mawwiage...

Posting early today because it'll be a busy and exhausting day of visiting local wineries with friends.

    Can't Buy Me Love: How Romance Wrecked Traditional Marriage  

For the sake of context, this 2013 article from Collectors Weekly came out during the time when same-sex marriage was still being debated in the US; it wouldn't be until 2015 that Obergefell v. Hodges settled the matter once and for all. Hey... stop laughing; I said once and for all.

I mention this only because, at the time, "traditional marriage" was a buzzword, and a dog whistle for "white Christian man marries white Christian woman; together they go on to produce 2.1 children, and the man makes all the decisions in the family." And even that is not what was, historically, "traditional marriage."

In reality, it’s the idea of marrying for love that’s untraditional.

This is not even getting into different cultures' traditions.

For most of recorded human history, marriage was an arrangement designed to maximize financial stability.

Much as I'd like to agree with that, it still seems Eurocentric. But, honestly, I don't know enough about other cultures to know all the nuances involved.

By the Middle Ages, gender inequality was not only enshrined in social customs, but also common law. In most European countries, married women were forced to give up control over any personal wealth and property rights to their husbands. Eventually, the system became known as “coverture” (taken from “couverture,” which literally means “coverage” in French), whereby married couples became a single legal entity in which the husband had all power.

One of the more common arguments against same-sex marriage back then was "What's next, you can marry your dog?" To me, that argument told me everything I needed to know about how the person making it would treat women. It's like the idea of "two willing adults wanting to enter into a mutually beneficial agreement" completely escaped them. Once you get to the "two willing adults" hurdle, it's not even a little bit of a stretch to consider that those adults can be any sex and/or gender.

I'd personally be perfectly content to extend that to more than two (for other people, not for me), but that's a fight for another time.

Under such laws, children were generally viewed as assets, in part because they were expected to work for the family business.

Another change: nowadays, they're liabilities. Or, at the very least, it's an emotional bond more than a business arrangement.

Despite the church’s staunch position on monogamy, in the late Middle Ages, a legal marriage was quite easy to obtain. However, as more couples attempted to elope or marry without consent, the old guard upped its game. To combat the spread of “clandestine” marriages, or those unapproved by parents, state officials began wresting the legal process of marriage from the church.

In my view, that sowed the seed that became part of the same-sex marriage debate, at least in the US. Religious people get married twice in the same ceremony: one sealing their bond in the eyes of their religious group, and one making it official to various government agencies, not least of which is the IRS. Much breath was wasted with people talking past each other, not understanding that one person meant religious union, while the other meant civil union.

As this philosophical support for individual choice spread, more young people wanted some say regarding their future spouses. “Demands for consent from the people actually getting married were thought to be quite radical,” says Abbott. Even more radical was the idea that marriage might be entered into for emotional, rather than financial, reasons.

It's also apparently radical that a marriage be considered a partnership between equals.

In fact, for thousands of years, love was mostly seen as a hindrance to marriage, something that would inevitably cause problems. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” says Coontz. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. The southern French aristocracy believed that true romantic love was only possible in an adulterous relationship, because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event. True love could only exist without it.”

In other words, they knew that love dies, but money is forever.

Anyway, the article goes on for a while, but, as it covers centuries of history, it seems to be a decent summary. It also emphasizes how laws are often slow to catch up to social realities. And yes, there's a nod to the then-current marriage debate.

The laws, if not the attitudes of certain kinds of people, have moved on since then, and we've shifted our focus as a society to trans issues, when we're not contemplating our looming climate apocalypse.

And no, the two have nothing to do with each other. But the shift in attitudes about marriage and the climate problem both seem to have their roots deep in the Industrial Revolution.