Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

"Traditional" Marriage

When I hear people talking about "traditional" marriage, I want to laugh, because the history of marriage is a lot more complicated than they make it out to be. Marriage wasn't always considered sacred, and it wasn't always between "one man and one woman." On the contrary, the definition of marriage has changed and morphed throughout time.

For most of history, marriage wasn't about love or sacred bonds in the eyes of God — it was a strategic political and economic move. In many cultures, young women (and often girls) were married off to older men to establish ties between families, assure economic stability, and bring peace between rivaling factions. Up until the 12th century, marriages were arranged without requiring the consent of either party. (The 12th century was also when mentions of sacramental marriage began.) But marriage wasn't officially considered sacred until the 16th century, and couples weren't required to be married in the presence of a minister in a church or chapel until the 18th century. Non-religious civil marriages weren't considered legal until the 19th century, and civil unions even later than that.

And forget about love — that wasn't considered a valid motivator for marriage until the Victorian era, when Queen Victoria fell madly in love with her cousin, Prince Albert, and made him King. Before then, in medieval Europe, it was seen as impossible for love to coexist with marriage, as shown by the Countess of Champagne's comment that "love cannot exert its powers between two people who are married to each other." In fact, adulterous relationships were considered the pinnacle of romance, and women were considered the "lustier" sex until the Victorian era!

Going back farther in history, marriage looks even more foreign to our modern eyes than the above descriptions. Here are just a few societies and periods of time where "traditional" marriage was completely different:

In ancient Greece, the only reason to get married was to have children and pass on property through the bloodline. As one man put it, "We keep [courtesans] for pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our body, and wives for the bearing of legitimate children and to keep watch over our house." In other words, love, pleasure, and other strong emotional bonds were reserved for relationships outside of marriage, such as cohabitation with a non-married partner, instead of with one's husband or wife — and believe it or not, they expected man's strongest emotional bonds to come from homosexual partnerships! Homosexuality was "natural," "ubiquitous and entirely ordinary" in their eyes, quite a far cry from the heteronormative establishments of today's world.

Ancient Rome took it one step further: while ancient Greece didn't consider homosexual partnerships to be "marriage," even though they upheld the partnerships to a higher level than marriage, same-sex marriages were quite common in Rome and were present at every level of social class. They were, as one historian put it, "recognized legally and celebrated publically." Several other types of romantic and sexual relationships were legally recognized as either marriage or civil partnership, including unmarried cohabitation without children.

In indigenous cultures across the world, from North and South America to Africa to Asia to Australia, marriage was about sustaining family or securing land for the clan. Men were allowed to take more than one wife if they needed help with the housework, and "two-spirit" individuals could marry people of the same-sex. Two-spirits were often highly revered religious leaders in their communities. Similarly, androgynous people of respected religious status could be found around the globe, from Siberia to Central and southeast Asia. North American two-spirit individuals were given a gender status separate from male or female, a label that could include effeminate males, masculine females, androgynous or intersex individuals, cross-dressers, and transgender people.

In ancient China, marital bonds were considered much less important than familial ones. But much stranger, one of their rituals would marry an unmarried dead relative to another dead unmarried person, called a "ghost marriage," so that the dead wouldn't be lonely in the afterlife. Meanwhile, in ancient Egypt, marriage often ended in rivalry, bloodshed, or incest. Co-wives and their children schemed against each other for the throne; incestual marriages were established to assure royal blood. In the lower classes, marriage was seen as a business contract, while slaves weren't allowed to marry at all.

Even in early Christianity, the view of marriage was much different. Celibacy was prized over marriage, but if people absolutely had to marry, sex was seen as a "necessary evil," only there for procreation and nothing else. Sex was to be avoided at all costs, especially if it involved physical pleasure.

An accurate definition of "traditional" marriage would look a lot different than people try to claim today. Even hunter-gatherer societies had marriage, but it was a way to form alliances between families, and sometimes even involved marrying a child to the spirit of their deceased sibling to "strengthen familial bonds." The majority of marriages throughout human history took place between first and second cousins. Not to mention that polygamy, especially a man taking multiple wives, but sometimes group marriages or a woman taking multiple husbands, was exceedingly common. So much for the whole "one man and one woman" business.

As for the claim that only legitimate marriages should be able to result in procreation, that also doesn't hold, at least looking back at history. Even the early Christian churches didn't expect that every marriage would produce children, and they would not annul marriages if one or the other spouse was infertile. And many civilizations allowed same-sex marriages and unions, where the couples would adopt children or help raise their siblings' kids. So "traditional" marriage? It ain't so traditional.