Love and Marriage
It being Valentine’s Day and all, I thought I would take the opportunity to do a quick walk through on how far we as a society have gone when it comes to linking love and marriage. Today, we take it for granted that the reason you marry is because you love someone, but that wasn’t always the case; far from it, actually.
Our first destination on our journey into the concepts of love and marriage is going to be the Bible. Yeah, back in Biblical times, people didn’t marry loved ones. Women were nearly akin to property and barely a step up from a slave. Kings (including the wise King Salomon) had large numbers of wives. They amounted to nothing more than his fuck toys.
Marriage was a business arrangement between two men, a father and a potential husband. The father would sometimes sell his daughter off to a worthy suitor. Or sometimes he would buy a prominent man to marry his daughter to get her out of this house.
The idea of marrying for love is relatively new. In marriages, each person is generally treated as an equal partner today (in mainstream society). This too is new. It wasn’t long ago (and is still prominent within many religious cultures) that the man was the boss. In fact, it was just a few decades ago that the television show “Who’s The Boss” was considered funny because it was a women who was in charge of the man in the house. But the show wasn’t revolutionary enough to have them actually married.
Today, love and marriage are changing again. People love, marry, fall out of love, divorce, and re-marry. Support for gay marriage is at an all-time high and state after state are beginning to recognize the right for two people of the same gender to love each other and marry.
So when religious believers claim that we are trying to change the definition of marriage, they are right. But they are wrong to think that this definition has never changed or that change is somehow a bad thing. Change is good and when we can change the law to allow for more people to love and be loved, that has to be a good thing.
Happy Valentine’s Day. :-*
Filed under: Coexist, Love, Religion, Valentines Day
