When people think of marriage, most conjure up images of the traditional ‘white’ wedding. White dress. White iced wedding cake. Purity and virtue. Innocence and virginity. But did you know that, although marriage is viewed as a declaration of love and commitment today, it most certainly hasn’t always been this way…
Let’s Take A Look Back…
If we look back to the very first examples of marriage, way back in 2350 B.C (about 4,350 years ago), we will see that weddings had very little, if anything at all, to do with love, and everything to do with control. How so? Because, through marriage, a woman ultimately became a man’s property, and, to some extent, arguably still does…
Just think about it… When women marry, they are ‘given away’, typically by their father. Because, God forbid a woman have no man to depend on! How would she ever cope?!
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything.
Although today more women are choosing to keep their family name when they marry, in the past, this wasn’t an option. The process of getting wed meant giving up your own name to take on the name of your partner.
A wife taking her husband’s family name was a sign of the power he held over her/how she was the inferior to his superior…This also granted men ‘exclusive access’ to their wives body, and is where the idea of rape being ‘impossible’ in marriage came from… In fact, shockingly, it wasn’t until the 1970s that rape was deemed to be a criminal offence between married couples. Prior to that, marital rape was inconceivable, as the husband “owned” his wife’s sexuality, it was stated in both religious texts and legal frameworks alike…
Marriage: An Institution Of Control?
The fact that marriage was historically so centred around control- the ability for men to control women/for men to exercise their power and establish dominance over women, should see it come as no surprise then that same sex marriage was illegal until just a little over a decade ago (in the UK at least)…
When marriage was all about a man controlling his wife, the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman was simply nonsensical.
Who controls who?…
Perhaps rather surprisingly, evidence of same sex marriage, albeit not ‘official’, dates back to the pagan civilisations of Greece and Rome (Homosexuality was common in ancient Greece, e.g., Sappho- 570 BC, Nero- 54AD, as two of the most famous examples), and well documented in prose, poetry, music, and through iconic images on pottery).
Although not legal, homosexuality wasn’t particularly ‘frowned upon’, so long as there was a clear distinction between the more ‘passive’ (i.e., ‘subordinate) partner, and the more ‘dominant’ one (which makes sense, considering that marriage was all about control, as this ensures that one person- the dominant one- stays in control, acting as the ‘man’ in the relationship to which they can exercise their control over their submissive partner who adopts the role as ‘woman’)…
Evidently, then, it’s not a ‘man’ problem. It’s not a case of all men being controlling over women simply because they are men; it’s a societal problem.
Brought up in a patriarchal society in which they are told, from as soon as they’re born pretty much, that they should be the ‘head of the house’, it’s inevitable that boys are going to grow up into men with a superiority complex in which they’re of the belief that women are dependent on them, weaker than them, and under their control…
Men are not the problem, the social system of patriarchy is the problem.
Take his name. Take her name. Keep your own name.
Wear a white dress. Wear a black dress. Wear a suit.
Do whatever you want to do, so long as you marry, not to ‘own’ each other, or to exercise dominance/submission, but to better each other.
As all-consuming as love can feel when you’re ‘in’ it, at the end of the day, you’re still you, the only person who has been, and will be, with you forever.
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