5 Reasons 'Traditional Marriage' Would Shock Your Ancestors

5 People Didn't Marry Young

To get this out of the way at the beginning: Marriage is absolutely a cultural thing, and has looked very different across time and space, just like Doctor Who. (Also like Doctor Who, marriage has usually been controlled by men who thought the women were there just to make the guy look awesome.) I'll be concentrating on what marriage has been like in the Western world, because most of the anti-marriage-equality people come from that background.

That said, this conservative idea that you should meet your future spouse in high school and marry by the time you finish college (at the latest) is crazy. I think people assume that our ancestors all married really young because the most famous historical marriages were all among royalty.

There are a few issues with this. The royal marriage pool was so small that by the time princes and princesses were children, they pretty much knew who their two or three potential mates were. Their royal parents were also almost certainly using them as bargaining chips in treaties or alliances. So their getting married around puberty made sense from a political standpoint, but was as weird as a dog in a tutu to everyone else. Even when they did get hitched that young, couples often didn't live together, and certainly weren't expected to have sex, for many years.

In general, the marriage age in Western Europe has stayed constant. English records from the 1600s show that brides were usually 23-24 years old and grooms 26-27. When colonists in early America started getting married slightly younger, it was considered odd enough that Benjamin Franklin commented on it. But the marriage age in America soon settled back into the normal pattern, and by 1890, most couples were getting married in their mid-to-late-20s again. While there have been extreme circumstances where kids in their late teens started getting married regularly -- like after the Black Death and WWII killed everybody and people were looking to tie down whoever they could get who still had a pulse -- in general, people have always tried to put off this lifelong commitment until they were actually ready.

4 Marriages Were Short

These days, the demographic most likely to get divorced is baby boomers. Many of these couples have been married for well over 30 years. Why is it that our ancestors could stay together for life, but today, people are so determined to file off the ball and chain when their sentence is almost over?

The answer is that couples never stayed in unhappy marriages if they didn't have to. People have been panicking over how divorce is going to ruin society forever, because it has almost always been legal in the Western world. Ancient Greece and Rome both allowed divorce, and the most famous divorcee of all time is certainly Henry VIII, whose first one occurred in 1534. John Milton, the poet most famous for Paradise Lost, also wrote four books on how awesome divorce was in the 1640s. (If you were forced to read those in school, your teacher was going through some personal stuff.) Inevitably, religious figures freaked out and tried to ban them.

In America, the 1870 census revealed such a high number of divorces that the government ordered a report on the subject. By the 1920s, divorce was so common that society was convinced marriage would soon be a thing of the past. And yet here we are almost 100 years later, and people are still fighting for the chance to get hitched.

If you couldn't get a divorce, annulment was often an option. And if even that wasn't possible, all you had to do was wait it out. The high death rate in the past meant that half of all marriages were over in 4-12 years, because somebody was rotting in the ground by that point. Who knows how many of those couples would have wanted out after 30 long years together, listening to the same boring stories over and over again? In a way, divorce has just replaced death. And I think we can all agree that legally ending a marriage is a much better solution than murder. Either way, there is a cake for that:

3 Single-Parent And Blended Families Were Always Normal

All that divorce and dying meant that people found themselves in their 20s and 30s, single, and looking to bone someone new. While sex outside of marriage was always going on, most people wanted to get married again so that their dick supply was on tap, if you will. And since those first marriages had often produced children, this meant that blended families were totally common.

In fact, they may have been the norm. Some historians think that stepparents and stepsiblings were almost more common than original families in the late medieval period. Even third marriages weren't strange, and stepchildren were considered as much a person's kids as their own biological ones. This doesn't mean that all remarriages went swimmingly, of course. The "wicked stepmother" trope goes back to at least Ancient Rome.

But before those parents chose to remarry, or if they never did, children would find themselves being raised by a single parent. This is another supposedly "modern" development that is going to ruin the next generation. And in the gay marriage fight, this has taken on a new angle. Apparently, all kids need to be raised by both a mother and a father, or they will be forever fucked up. According to these arguments, a single parent, and certainly two same-sex parents, can never provide an appropriate home for their offspring like a mother and father.

The thing is, in the old days you would count yourself lucky if you managed to reach adulthood with both of your parents still alive and kicking. Even up to 1900, a quarter of children would lose a parent before they turned 15. And in the 1950s, those halcyon days of supposedly perfect families? Between divorce, death, and sex outside of marriage, 22 percent of kids were still being raised by a single parent. If being raised by one gender ruins children, our ancestors were screwed.

2 Procreation Wasn't Everything

One of the last-ditch arguments by people who are anti-gay-marriage is that marriage is somehow only for the purpose of having children. Since it takes an egg and a sperm to make a baby, this leads them to the conclusion that the only acceptable type of marriage is between a man and a woman.

People much smarter than me have pointed out how ridiculous this is. What about couples where one partner is infertile? Or couples where the woman has gone through menopause? Are those marriages also totally invalid? But I'm here to tell you that even if every marriage ever was between totally fertile men and women, it wouldn't make a difference. Happily married couples have been trying to keep babies from happening since the dawn of time.

In the Middle Ages, some couples took this to the extreme. Catholic men and women could enter "Josephite marriages" where they lived together as husband and wife, but never got it on. But for those who actually did want to have sex, birth control has existed in one form or another FOREVER.

In the saddest, most extreme cases, it involved "accidentally" killing a baby after it had been born. As terrible as it is to think about, we've been doing it regularly since the freaking Paleolithic period. But then we came up with birth control and that was a lot nicer. Condoms have existed since 3000 BCE. Today we have IUDs, but those have been around for millennia as well, except back then they included rocks and paper. If eating a certain plant had even a tiny chance of keeping you from getting pregnant, women figured it out a long time ago.

In the 19th century, American women as a whole apparently decided they wanted fewer kids. By 1860, the average family had 2-3 fewer children than it did in 1800. Unless everyone just started having less sex (you try that and see how it goes), family planning was becoming as important as what hat to wear to your state's secession party. And abortion was considered a completely legitimate option by everyone in that period. Until the first time you felt the fetus move inside you, it wasn't considered to be alive. Around 1840, the number of abortions among women on all levels of society skyrocketed.

So unless you and everyone in your family tree are basically the Duggars, you might want to lay off claiming procreation has always been the goal of marriage.

1 Gay Marriage Has Always Existed

In 2013, Justice Alito, one of the nine people who will decide in June if the Constitution protects same-sex marriage, said that gay marriage was, "newer than cell phones and the Internet." If you know this isn't true, congrats, you are smarter than a member of the Supreme Court.

Being gay is not some new fad. Gay people have always been around, which means they have always formed relationships. And, to different legal standards, many of these relationships were what we would consider marriages.

Gay marriage was not uncommon in Ancient Rome; even the Emperor Nero publicly married at least two men. During the Ming Dynasty in China, it was not uncommon for older men to marry young men and bring them into their families as official sons-in-law. While Christianity officially frowned on men marrying each other, they also came up with a way around this taboo. Both the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic church allowed "brother-making" in which two totally straight single guys had an official ceremony telling everyone what good friends they were and how they were going to live together and pray together but totally not do any guy-on-guy stuff.

Single women living together has always been more acceptable than men cohabiting (because women don't have sex drives, right?), but that doesn't mean that all female "roommates" tried to hide their bean-flicking activities from their neighbors. Many of them were open about their relationships, and both the women involved and their friends considered the couples married, whether they had gone through a ceremony or not. In the late 1800s, these relationships were called Boston Marriages. In at least one case, Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant were considered a "common household" under the law for tax purposes. In Spain in 1901, Elisa Sanchez Loriga pretended to be a man in order to marry Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Despite needing to use deception, after they were found out, the marriage was still allowed to stand.

If you want to admit you don't like the idea of same-sex marriage because it makes you think of sex that makes you feel icky, feel free to say it. I'm sure everyone would feel better knowing how much you fixate on their bedroom antics. But it's time to stop pretending that "traditional marriage" exists. Gay marriage is now legal in 18 countries, including Luxembourg, Uruguay, and South Africa. So come on, Supreme Court. Do the right thing. Make America as progressive in civil rights as South Africa.

Kathy wrote a very funny book called FUNERALS TO DIE FOR and you can buy it here. Or follow her on Facebook, tumblr, and twitter.

For more from Kathy, check out 6 Ways The Decision To Not Have Kids Messes With Your Head and 7 Insane Parenting Tips Real People Thought Were A Good Idea.

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