Introduction
Control Freaks

In 2011 Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge and second in line to inherit the throne of the United Kingdom (also called Britain), married Catherine (Kate) Middleton in London’s Westminster Abbey. Thousands attended the elaborate ceremony. Nearly one billion people watched it live on television and on YouTube. Members of the wedding party traveled in horse-drawn carriages, cheered on by crowds of well-wishers. The bride’s lacy white dress had a long train, and her delicate veil was held in place with a sparkling tiara. The groom wore the scarlet uniform of the Irish Guards, one of the military units he belongs to, and a cap with the motto of the regiment: Quis Separabit? which means “Who shall separate us?”

The world celebrated along with Britain’s Prince William and Catherine Middleton when they married in 2011.

At the altar, William and Kate held hands and exchanged rings, and the Archbishop of Canterbury united them in marriage. Kate became a princess and, as the wife of the royal heir, the likely future queen. The world reveled in the lavish spectacle of this royal love story. It was a fairy tale come to life.

Forget the Fairy Tale

Love and marriage are all around us. Pop singers croon about romance. Magazines offer advice on finding love and making it last. News outlets and websites track the latest gossip on celebrity marriages (and divorces). Millions of viewers tune in to The Bachelor, a TV show that is supposed to end with a marriage proposal. Marriage is one of the oldest institutions on the planet. It is the basis for family life in nearly every human society. And marriage is all about love, right?

Wrong!

For centuries, getting married wasn’t a private decision between two people. Families, neighbors, religious leaders, warlords, and other rulers all had their fingers in the pie. The government in France in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, declared that marriage was “a public act transmitting family property, sanctioned [approved] by the state, and tied to the public good.” That doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?

By all accounts, Prince William and his wife are genuinely in love, but because he is in line to become king, his decision to marry her wasn’t entirely his own. According to the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, Prince William had to obtain permission to marry from the ruling monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, his grandmother. The original goal of the Royal Marriages Act was to ensure that all royal marriages benefited Britain politically or economically.

The Building Block of Society

Marriage is the legally recognized union of two people as a single unit. This unit is the core building block of almost every society on the planet. Throughout history and across cultures, political, economic, and social systems have all been cemented through marriage.

Politically, royal marriages in Britain and elsewhere were meant to seal alliances between different families, tribes, kingdoms, or countries. For example, a monarch might send a princess to marry a neighboring ruler to strengthen the relationship between the two kingdoms. A conquering warlord might marry the daughter of a ruler he had just overthrown to confirm his victory.

Economically, families used marriage to protect their money and property. Typically, a son (sometimes only the eldest son) inherited his father’s wealth, thus ensuring that all the assets accumulated by the men of the family stayed within the family. Any women who married into a wealthy family were expected to produce male children to guarantee the survival of the male line and therefore the protection of the family’s wealth.

Socially, marriage gave a green light to sexual relations and provided a family structure for raising children. A child conceived within the confines of marriage was viewed as “legitimate,” or legal. According to both religious and civil (nonreligious) law, that child was an official member of the family. A child conceived outside of marriage—in an adulterous or premarital relationship—was viewed as “illegitimate” and was not legally part of the family. An illegitimate son of a king could not ascend to the throne on the death of his father. An illegitimate son could not inherit his father’s wealth.

In most cultures in earlier eras, women had no legal rights and could not own property. Their financial security and social status came first from their fathers and then—after marriage—from their husbands. Young women who didn’t marry were often pushed to the edges of society. Neighbors viewed them with suspicion and scorn. Some unmarried women lived with their elderly parents. Others joined religious orders. Still others became prostitutes.

This photograph from 1869 shows a Chinese bride (right) in her wedding clothes, accompanied by a servant. Throughout the centuries, marriage has cemented social, political, and economic bonds.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Throughout most of human history, love and marriage rarely went together. Men chose brides who could advance their political, economic, and social standing. Usually women did not choose their husbands at all. Fathers arranged their marriages. For thousands of years and across many cultures, daughters were considered the property of their fathers. Marriage was an act that legally transferred property (a daughter) from father to husband. Whether a woman loved or even liked the man her father had picked didn’t matter. If her father demanded it, a daughter was powerless to refuse the union. Around the world, many modern marriage traditions reflect this history of property transaction. In many nations, a man asks the father of his beloved for permission to marry her. In the United States and elsewhere, we talk about the father “giving away the bride” at a wedding ceremony.

Walking Marriage

For the Mosuo people of Yunnan Province in southwestern China, siblings—not married couples—form the foundation of a family. Brothers and sisters live together with their mother and their maternal aunts and uncles (their mother’s brothers and sisters), even as adults, and even after they have married their spouses. The spouses live in different homes with their own brothers, sisters, mothers, and maternal aunts and uncles. When a married couple has children, the children are considered members of the mother’s household.

Thirty-four-year-old Nazhu Zhuoma and her husband, Zhaba Songding, have a typical Mosuo marriage. They live in a village called Luoshui, and their relationship, like all marital unions in their village, is called a walking marriage. Every evening Zhaba walks from his mother’s house, where he lives with his siblings, to his wife’s house, where he spends the night. In the morning, he reverses the trip to spend the day at his mother’s house.

In Mosuo families, women make most of the big decisions, such as what to do with a family business or whether to have a child. For instance, Nazhu runs a lakeside hotel and manages her family’s finances. Zhaba is an involved father to their two children, but he has no legal claim to them. They take their last name from their mother. Nor is Nazhu bound to be faithful to her husband. Mosuo women may choose to have more than one sexual partner. Since family lineage is traced through the maternal line, no one keeps track of who fathered which children.

Modern weddings can be simple or elaborate, low cost or wildly expensive. Some couples spend more than $500 on the cake alone.

Earlier societies—and still many modern ones—were strictly divided by class, race, and religion. To maintain these divisions, institutions of church and state forbade certain marriages. Catholics could not wed non-Catholics. Blacks could not marry whites. Had Prince William and Catherine Middleton lived when the Royal Marriages Act was passed, the ruling British monarch would likely have forbidden their union. Kate is a commoner—her family does not belong to the British nobility. In earlier eras, a prince’s marriage to a commoner would have offered Britain no political alliances or economic benefits.

But marriage has changed over the centuries, and the biggest change involves love. When it comes to finding a marriage partner, twenty-first-century couples want to feel butterflies in their stomachs. They want soul mates and romance. That’s not to say that all marriages of the past were loveless life sentences. If a couple was lucky, love and marriage coincided. The difference between history and modern times is that in the past, being in love wasn’t a reason to get married.

The addition of love to the marriage contract began about 250 years ago. Around then, especially in Europe and North America, society was changing. Commoners began to push against monarchies in favor of democratically elected governments. They didn’t want kings, nobles, and church leaders making all the decisions about politics and family life. With the rise of democratic governments, old rules about marriage began falling away. And women began to push for equal rights with men. Although it took several centuries for women to win those rights, the movement for women’s equality brought many changes to the institution of marriage. Couples began to marry for love, and women had more freedom to choose their own partners.

The fairy-tale wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011 was a bridge between the institution of marriage as it had existed for most of human history and the quirky, evolving institution we know in the West in the twenty-first century. For the fascinating details that got us from then to now, set aside the tuxedo, the diamond ring, and the cake smooshing and take a walk down the aisle into the unexpected history of marriage.