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Why Play the Game?

In 2015 archaeologists from Mississippi State University, excavating near Alepotrypa Cave in Greece, discovered two ancient skeletons locked in an embrace. Genetic testing revealed that one was a man and the other a woman. In the excavated grave, the male skeleton rested behind the female with his arms around her, in the spooning position that sweethearts often assume when cuddling. Archaeologists dated the skeletons to about 3800 BCE.

Had the man and woman loved each other when they were alive? Had they had children together? Had they been joined in something resembling a marriage before being buried together in death? Archaeologists can only guess at the answers. The society to which this couple belonged left no written records, but their embrace in death suggests that they also had a lasting bond in life. We know more about relationships that occurred after humans started writing things down, which first happened around 3300 BCE in the ancient Middle East. By this time, marriage was a common institution. How did it get started and why?

Working Side by Side

When trying to piece together the origins of marriage, anthropologists (scientists who study human societies) examine ideas about the lifestyles of our distant ancestors. Before the development of agriculture in the Middle East about ten thousand years ago, most humans were hunter-gatherers. They traveled from place to place, following herds of game animals and gathering wild roots, nuts, berries, and other plant parts for food. Extended family members lived in small bands, numbering from a few to perhaps one hundred individuals.

But what about marriage?

In the twentieth century, some anthropologists proposed that marriage originated because women in preagricultural societies were physically weak. According to this idea, women needed men to hunt game for meat and to protect them and their children from wild animals and other dangers. In return, women offered sex and offspring to men. Marriages cemented this exchange. Other researchers suggested a different explanation. They said that women in ancient hunter-gatherer societies had valuable skills that men needed, such as knowledge about which plants were safe to eat. To corner this resource, men captured women or coerced them into marriage.

Both these explanations are based on an assumption about hunter-gatherer societies: that they divided labor along gender lines. In other words, men did dangerous tasks such as hunting mammoths. Women did more peaceful work, such as nursing babies and picking berries. But twenty-first-century researchers say this reasoning is faulty because it is based on modern assumptions about the typical gender roles we assign to men and women.

In most parts of the world, hunting and gathering gave way to agriculture thousands of years ago. Some groups in North America, Africa, Asia, and South America retained a hunter-gather lifestyle well into the nineteenth century, and a few groups still live by hunting and gathering. By studying the artwork, clothing, and traditions of these groups, anthropologists can speculate about life in ancient hunter-gatherer societies. Linda Owen, an anthropologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, concludes that the roles of women and men probably overlapped in ancient times. Owen believes that both genders likely gathered food and hunted game, especially small animals such as rabbits and birds. In North America, many Plains Indians lived as hunter-gatherers into the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars say that among these groups, everyone in a band—men, women, and children—took part in buffalo hunts. This research suggests that ancient hunter-gatherers needed one another too much to divide jobs by gender.

The San people of southern Africa still live much like their ancestors did, by hunting and gathering. Anthropologists think that marriages likely fostered cooperation among different hunter-gatherer bands.

Another theory about ancient hunter-gatherers is that unions between two people of different bands linked the two groups together. Anthropologists say that these friendly connections ensured that when bands ran into each other at vital water holes or oyster beds, they shared resources instead of fighting over them.

Many Hands Make Light the Work

Once humans settled down and began to farm the land, social dynamics changed. The intense work of preparing the soil, planting, tending, and harvesting crops, caring for animals, and preserving food to last through the winter required many hands laboring together. A couple could do more than a single person, and having children meant more able bodies to share the work. The talents and assets a potential spouse could bring to the partnership were paramount. A skilled cheese maker could be a worthy wife, and a man with a large plot of land was a valued husband. Marriage took on an added role: building the family workforce.

The rise of agriculture also set the stage for economic inequality. With individual families each working their own land, the fortunes of an entire community no longer rose or fell together. Farming families with access to rich soil and plenty of water for crops harvested the bounty. They stored extra food for lean times. Their children were well fed. They earned money from selling surplus crops. A family whose patch of land was rocky and dry struggled to grow enough to eat. Hard seasons with poor yields meant no extra income and could even mean starvation and death.

The differentiation between haves and have-nots continued as farms, towns, and cities developed around the world. Marriage took on a new job—to help secure wealth within families. Rich families didn’t want to drag down their fortunes by linking up with poor families. So the rich married the rich, and the poor married the poor.

Belgian painter Bernard van Orley made this portrait of Isabella of Austria, who was wed as a teenager in 1514 to King Christian II of Denmark. Her father arranged her marriage to the king to ally the two royal families.

Consolidating Power

The powerful, who were usually rich, married the powerful. In the eighteenth century BCE, a leader named Zimri-Lim conquered the city of Mari in Mesopotamia (which later became Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey). He declared himself king, dumped his wife, and married the daughter of a neighboring ruler. He wed each of his eight daughters to the rulers of nearby cities. In agreeing to the matches, the husbands also agreed to hand over their authority to Zimri-Lim. Each man’s wedding document stated, “He is the husband of Zimri-Lim’s daughter and he obeys Zimri-Lim.” The men agreed to the marriages because they feared Zimri-Lim’s power.

This tradition of marrying daughters to other rulers continued over the centuries. The opinions of the daughters involved held little or no sway. They were rarely more than pawns in a chess game of political power. In 1514, for example, Princess Isabella of Austria, only thirteen years old, was wed to King Christian II of Denmark (then aged thirty-three) to forge an alliance between their two nations. She traveled to Denmark to marry a man she had never met. Isabella wrote to her sister beforehand, “It is hard enough to marry a man . . . whom you do not know or love, and worse still to be required to leave home and kindred [family], and follow a stranger to the ends of the earth, without even being able to speak his language.”

Follow the Money

Most ancient cultures were organized around patriarchal inheritance in which property passed down from father to son (often only to the eldest son). What if a man died without leaving a male heir? What if his widow remarried and transferred her dead husband’s land and money to her new husband? Such a scenario worried the Hebrews of the ancient Middle East. As described in the Bible, their solution was to require the widow and her dead husband’s brother to get married. This practice, called a levirate marriage, kept money and land in the same family.

In some places, the tradition of levirate marriages has continued into modern times. From the woman’s perspective, a levirate marriage is often repressive and difficult. Ram Chander, who lives in the Karnal District of northern India, described the levirate marriage of his grandmother in the twentieth century. She was widowed at eighteen, and custom dictated that she marry her dead husband’s brother, who was only three years old. She raised this child, who was also her husband, and at some point had children with him. The tradition of levirate marriage, which persists in a few cultures in the twenty-first century, perpetuates the view of women as property that can be transferred from man to man within a family.

Property and money weren’t the only things passed down from father to son. Beginning in the Middle Ages in Europe (around 400 to 1500 CE), noblemen, such as dukes and earls—positions that held political power—passed on their privileged status to the eldest son after death. If the nobleman was a king or emperor, his eldest son (or sometimes the eldest daughter if the ruler left no male heirs) became the ruler after his death. Unlike in a democratic government, common people had no say in the transfer of power. For those born into a noble or ruling family, it was critically important to protect their power. They married their children to the children of other powerful and wealthy people. This ensured that power and wealth were passed on to the next generations.

When taken to the extreme, intermarriage for the sake of keeping money and power in the same family sometimes had serious medical consequences. People in the same family carry many of the same genes (structures inside cells that determine a person’s physical traits and that are passed on from parent to child). If two cousins marry and both carry a gene for a particular disease, their children might develop that disease.

From 1516 to 1700, the Hapsburg family ruled Spain. To keep power within the family, cousins often married cousins and uncles often married nieces. Medical historians think that marriages between members of the Hapsburg family led to genetic disorders that passed from one generation to the next. The last in the family line of Hapsburg rulers was Charles II (1661–1700). Historians believe that he inherited disorders that harmed his mental and physical health. He didn’t learn to talk until he was four years old and didn’t walk until he was eight. He didn’t grow properly, was often sick, and was apparently infertile (unable to conceive children). For these reasons, the Spanish people called him El Hechizado—the Hexed.

Between 1763 and 1944, European nobles looking for a marriage partner could consult a reference book called the Almanach de Gotha (below). Originated by a German chaplain in the city of Gotha, the book sorted and ranked all members of European noble families in great detail. Families used the book to determine which matches were acceptable. Specifically, marriage partners were supposed to be of the same rank—that is, a duke was supposed to marry the daughter of a duke, not the daughter of a man of lower rank. If a man did choose a lower-ranked wife, he entered into what was called a left-hand marriage. During the wedding ceremony, he held the bride’s right hand with his left hand instead of the traditional right hand.

In 1998 a British company issued a new edition of the Almanach de Gotha, but critics noted that it was sloppily written. And even though some Europeans still inherit titles of nobility, these titles are mostly symbolic. For instance, the United Kingdom still has a queen, princes, dukes, earls, and other nobles, but they no longer run the country. Instead, citizens of the United Kingdom vote for their leaders. Since it’s no longer necessary to maintain power by marrying into another royal family, European nobles no longer have reason to consult the Almanach de Gotha.

Be Fruitful and Multiply

According to the Bible, Adam and Eve, the official First Couple of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, had a very important job. God ordered them to populate the newly created Earth with their children. In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, God promises Abraham that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all view the production of children as an integral part of marriage. For most of human history, it was also an inevitable part of the union. Before the 1960s, when women first had legal access to birth control, the only sure way for a woman to avoid pregnancy was to avoid sex. But wives were considered the property of their husbands, so refusing sex was not usually an option. Women of the past were often pregnant or nursing babies for the majority of their adult lives. Childbirth was often perilous for both mother and baby. Childbirth was the leading cause of death for women for most of human history and still is in certain parts of the world. Without birth control, women had no choice but to accept the risks.

This stone marks the grave of a wealthy woman from ancient Greece. She is shown (seated) with a female servant. As an upper-class woman, her married life was likely very limited. She would have been confined to the house most of the time. Her primary job was to bear children.

In ancient Greece, the wife’s job as a bearer of babies was declared from the start. During wedding ceremonies, the father of the bride announced, “I give you this woman for the procreation of legitimate children.” The groom responded, “I take her.” After her wedding, an upper-class Greek wife lived in a women-only part of the house, from which she hardly ever emerged. Her husband visited her for sex, in the hopes of conceiving male heirs. At the same time, Greek husbands kept mistresses called hetaerae, who accompanied them in public.

Infertility was a cause of great shame. In many cultures, if a wife failed to produce children, her husband was entitled to divorce her. Empress Josephine of France (1763–1814) is a good example. Even though she and her husband, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, loved each other, he divorced her in 1810 because she had failed to provide him with a male heir—or any children at all. The stigma of infertility was so great in earlier eras that some societies viewed childless women as witches or as possessed by demons. And the stigma and shame didn’t apply only to women. Male impotence—the inability to have sexual intercourse—was also seen as a failure, serious enough to be grounds for divorce. The Catholic Church, which dictated much about family life in Europe for many centuries, recommended the following procedure to confirm impotence: “The man and woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man’s member [penis] is always found useless and as if dead, the couple are well able to be separated.”

In historic eras (and continuing into the twenty-first century in some cultures), sex before marriage was seen as a sin—especially for women. A woman or girl who had premarital sex might be punished, shunned, or even put to death. If she got pregnant, she was disgraced. Her children were called bastards and had no rights to their father’s family name or inheritance. Illegitimate births in some ancient cultures were considered so shameful that women often abandoned or even murdered their babies. The men who impregnated these women were rarely subject to shame or punishment, however. The prohibition against sex before marriage is an example of a double standard—a rule that is enforced with one group and not another.

Adultery—or sex with someone other than one’s spouse—is forbidden by the Ten Commandments, rules for living that, according to biblical accounts, was given to Moses by God in the ancient Middle East. Like rules about premarital sex, the commandments were also a double standard. In the ancient Middle East, for example, the commandment against adultery meant one thing for wives and another for husbands. For the woman, adultery meant having sex with anyone other than her husband. The man was guilty only if he slept with another man’s wife. Then he was thought to have violated that man’s property rights. The punishment for adultery in biblical times was usually death by stoning or fire. The ancient Romans also had different sexual standards for women and men. A man was free to cheat sexually on his spouse. But according to Roman law, if a man found his wife in bed with someone else, he could do whatever he wanted: kill her, beat her, divorce her, or forgive her.

The sexual double standard remains in place in the twenty-first century. In some nations, women are still shunned and punished for having sex outside of marriage. In the United States, girls and women aren’t usually punished for having sex, but they are applauded for remaining virgins until marriage. In a ritual known as a purity ball, some American girls pledge to abstain from sex until marriage and their fathers commit to protecting their virginity. Friends and family praise and respect the virgins. Meanwhile, girls who do have sex before marriage—especially if they have multiple partners—might be called sluts. But few people condemn a boy or man who has many sexual partners. They might even admire him for being a “ladies’ man.”

“Strangliest Inchanted”

The ancient Greeks thought that romantic love was a form of madness. So did the French during the Middle Ages. In ancient India, romantic passion was seen as downright antisocial. Anyone who has been in love knows that it’s wild and unpredictable, intoxicating and thrilling. But being swept off your feet or blinded by love can leave a person feeling unstable and out of control. Because of these feelings, many early cultures viewed passionate love as a threat to the real goals of marriage—building political alliances, protecting family wealth, and having children.

The ideal marriage in earlier eras was one that fostered the growth of a companionable, friendly warmth between well-matched partners after they had tied the knot. When married couples actually appeared to be passionate about each other, family and friends were often dismayed. In the seventeenth century in the North American colony of Virginia, for example, one man noted that a woman he observed “was more fond of her husband perhaps than the Politeness of the day allows.” Another young man was appalled to see that his uncle was “the strangliest inchanted [most strangely enchanted] and infatuated in his first marriage that I think ever any wise man was.”

Even so, history and literature are full of love stories like that of the legendary characters of Odysseus and Penelope in Greek myth. They were so devoted to each other that he refused the love of a goddess. She denied one hundred eager suitors. More often, though, marriage came first and loving companionship followed after—if a couple was lucky. This sequence of events—marriage before love—made many marriages more stable. Instead of focusing on romance, couples put their energy into children, work, and the extended family. If the relationship was practical, friendly, and even businesslike, couples were usually in it for the long haul.

A Private Relationship

The revolutionary idea of a love-based union began to take hold in the eighteenth century. Part of this shift was related to political movements and revolutions. In the West (Europe and North America), democratic ideals were on the rise. Kings were falling out of favor—and out of power—often through war. During the American Revolution (1775–1783), for example, North American colonists wrested power from the British monarch and set up a government in which white men voted for their political leaders. This democratic trend had been taking hold in the home as well. Women were less and less satisfied that a man was the sole ruler of the family. In 1706 British writer Mary Astell asked, “If Absolute Sovereignty [all authority vested in one ruler] be not necessary in a State, how comes it to be so in a Family?” The world was a long way from equality between men and women, but the conversation had begun.

Another force shaking up traditional ideas about marriage was the Romantic movement. It started in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. This school of thought was a reaction against an increasingly mechanized, science-oriented, and commercialized world. Instead of viewing marriage as an economic and political decision, individuals began to see marriage as a private, romantic relationship based on feelings and emotion. The new measure of a marriage’s success was not business deals or treaties but happiness. Couples wanted to make their own decisions, and they were looking for romance and passion. Picking a spouse based on love became the ideal rather than a threat to social order. A woman’s feelings toward her husband mattered, and at least in the West, forced marriage was on the way out.

The movement for women’s rights also accompanied the gradual shift from marriages based on economics to marriages based on love. The first US women’s rights convention, organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. US women won the right to vote in 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. During World War II (1939–1945), US women joined the workforce in large numbers, taking factory jobs that had previously been held by men. In 1960 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the newly developed birth control pill, freeing women from unwanted pregnancies. But many laws still restricted women’s rights, kept women from entering certain professions, and limited their options in schooling, sports, and political activities. During the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, women successfully fought to have these laws changed. Earlier in the century, a woman usually had to get married to attain financial security and social approval. Love didn’t always figure into that equation. But with the women’s movement opening up new social, professional, and financial opportunities, women could choose marriage on their own terms.

This colorized photograph shows women demonstrating for the right to vote in New York City in 1912. US women won that right in 1920. As American women gained more political rights, they gained more authority in their marriages as well.

Till Death Do Us Part

The changes in the institution of marriage over the last two hundred years have been seismic. Perhaps one of the most startling is the increasing number of people, especially in the United States of the twenty-first century, who choose not to get married at all. According to US census data, in 1967, more than 70 percent of adults lived with a spouse. In 2015 the number was barely over 50 percent. The percentage of unmarried adults living together as a couple showed an opposite trend, rising from barely 1 percent to nearly 10 percent during the same time period.

In the twenty-first century, the old reasons for marriage, such as inheritance, alliance building, economic necessity, and child rearing, are less important. In most of the West, women can support themselves without a husband. As the number of divorces has risen, single-parent homes have become more common. Children born out of wedlock are rarely called illegitimate anymore, and they have the same legal rights as any other children. And except for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (William and Kate), few people worry about passing on noble rank to the next generation.

So why do people still get married?

Partly it’s because we like the new-and-improved story of falling in love and living happily ever after. Also, at least in the United States, society and government favor married people over single individuals. The US General Accounting Office lists more than one thousand federal laws that grant benefits to married couples. For example, married couples can pass property to each other without paying taxes on the exchange. In some states, a married person can assign lottery winnings to a spouse without paying gift taxes. The legal spouse of a person who is sick or injured can get critical information from doctors and make key medical decisions without special permission, but for an unmarried partner written permission is needed.

The upshot is that when a couple in the United States faces big decisions or life-or-death situations, a marriage license is a safety net. It helps the couple protect and care for each other. It also says that a community approves of that couple’s love for each other. That can make marriage very appealing.