Another Book Review (#2)

I read this book a little while ago, and was waiting for the opportune time to write about it. This week seems just about perfect, given everything that's going on with marriage and the Supreme Court. The book is called Marriage, a History and that pretty much sums up what it's about. Here are a few highlights:

• The idea of "marrying for love" wasn't really a thing until about 200 years ago. Before that, marriage was about increasing the workforce of your family: it took more than one person to run a farm or a smithy (and I don't think I've ever gotten to use the word 'smithy' in a sentence before). Traits that you looked for in a spouse included physical strength, dependability, and a large extended family.
• The Roman philosopher Seneca went so far as to say that "nothing is more impure than to love one's wife as if she were a mistress" (17).
• The Spartans were against gay marriage not because they were opposed to homosexuality, but because they believed that no Spartan man would willingly take on the harsh role of a Spartan woman.
• In many pre-Industrial Western societies, the church only bothered with the marriages of the wealthy and influential. Marriages between commoners were seldom church sanctioned, and were instead seen as valid if two people told the community that they were married. Dissolving a marriage was just as easy.
• The "male breadwinner" marriages of the 1950s could not have happened at any other time in history. After World War II, men were given higher wages than women as a way to encourage women to leave the workforce so the men returning from war would be able to find jobs.

The take-home message? There really is no such thing as "traditional marriage." Marriage is, and has always been, what you make of it.