This chapter will aim to give a brief introduction of the History of Marriage to provide with the knowledge, of what Marriage meant in other times, to be able to analyze the present situation of marriage in the following chapters.
In primitive Societies, sex, reproduction, protection, cooperation, survival and economics were the motivating forces that induced our first ancestors to unite themselves in its multiple forms. The main forms were Matriarchy and Patriarchy, with most sociologists accepting today that it was the former the original form of organization. From this primitive forms, marriage evolved until it adopted monogamy, from which modern marriage comes. Modern in this context means between 2 and 3 thousand years BC.
Marriage has been the angular stone over which traditional Western Societies were built and its main purposes were the procreation of children, the continuity of the family and its patrimony (in the upper classes) and the definition of the roles, men and women played. The man had to work and produce the income to sustain his family; the woman bore the children, raised and educated them and was in charge of the domestic economy of the family.
The strongest cultural and historical force on the Western world was Christianity, based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and which through the Roman Catholic Church, was built on the organizational and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. With the rise of the profound religious influence in Europe in medieval times, women lost all the respect and rights they had gained under the Roman Empire. At least women from the Aristocracy and upper classes. They became absolute subordinates to men. There was no space for an equality in marriage or shared values or reasons to marry for men and women where religion stated that woman was a man's property. This subordination that many women writers have referred to from the earliest centuries has carried on unchanged, with little steps forward and back, for centuries until the Industrial Revolution.
" St Paul enjoyed self-enforcement and discretion upon women; he based the subordination of woman to man upon both the Old and the New Testaments 'For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man ... And in another place: 'For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church..." (de Beauvoir, S., (1950) The Second Sex. P. 129)
There was no linkage whatsoever between romantic love and marriage. In fact Romantic Love was discovered or acknowledged, many centuries later. Usually marriages were agreed between the parents or families of the man and woman involved. We have to understand that our societies were much, much smaller than the one we live in today and the number of people of the opposite sex and the adequate social, religious and economic background was very limited. This does not mean there were not cases in which the couple involved were not in love or did not fall in love, but that was not the norm nor was it even meant to be or even necessary.
In fact it is probable, by all indications, that romantic love was the creation of the Troubadors in the Medieval Courts in southern France, between the 11th and the 13th centuries. The Ladies of the Court were the objects of love of the chevaliers and noblemen, but it was romantic love, pure, idealistic love with no sexual implications (at least apparently) whatsoever, and men accepted that their wives were the objects of admiration and LOVE of other men. But no man made his wife his object of love, that would have been considered ridiculous and a totally unacceptable behavior.
During the eleventh century, this new concept of romantic love first emerged, this is the courtly love and it is the closest concept in history of romantic love as we regard it today. Marrying for love was and still is, regarded as the condition under which marriage could become equal. The old fantasy and present common reality of marrying for love would mean an equality for which to settle a contract between man and woman. Far from it, the ideal of courtly love involved passion and love between a chevalier and his Lady. There is evidence to support that this type of love was only part of the poets and troubadors fantasies and that it was far from matching the society’s reality; As we can find in most of the literature and tales of the time, ie. Tristan and Isolde, the stories mostly ended in shame, guilt or despair. These stories were written not to encourage romantic love, quite the opposite; they were written to spread moral values in society, and to show the awful consequences of marrying simply for love or marrying and loving someone else. Then again, with the unsuccessful courtly love in real life, we saw marriage failing to provide a fair estate for both women and men. Despite the strong influence of literature at the time, passion, love and marriage were still regarded as incompatible. Particularly because of the situation of women, in a time were they were still their father or husband's property, women's role in society was meaningless unless they found the right man to assure them a good place in Society.
From the Renaissance (from the 14th to the 17th century), during the Elizabethan era, there was an evolution in love relationships. Church power decreased with Protestantism however, the antisexualism and antifeminism in the Western cultures was still untouchable. Once again, only in literature, like that of Shakespeare’s plays, love was an important precondition to marriage. Though the Puritan Culture remained, and despite their efforts to make sex and love become acceptable in marriage, they failed. Despite the cultural, political and later on scientific advances of the time, women's situation remained the same, or even worse. Women, had no right to own a land, nor to inherit anything from her family or husband. In case of the husband's death, all his goods and land would go to their children. Of course divorce was not allowed, however, if the husband did not want his wife any longer, or wished to marry someone else, he could ask for an annulment, which, was nothing but a relief to women who after being repudiated by their husbands, had little if no place in Society after such a shameful event, entering the Church as nuns one of the very few options available, the other one being unfortunately, to become prostitutes or beggars. If they had any children, they would only be raised by the father, who had power of life and death over them.
Romanticism, a movement that began as a style of literature and art in the 19th century,encouraged freedom of form and emphasized imagination and emotion. Yes, emotion and amongst emotions, love was the most significant one. It is important to note that the name they adopted comes from Romance, which means, stories of heroic deeds, love, adventures and love affairs.Romantic love continues its evolution and its definition.
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