The Origin Of Marriage

When and under what conditions did the institution of marriage originate? Do we have any anthropological records about the beginnings of the institution? Or has something comparable to marriage existed since far before recorded history?

Pairing seems a natural part of human life. The length of the upbringing of children necessitates a long term involvement by at least one parent and preferibly both for the probable survival of the chiild.

As the world is less hostile these days, the necessity of caring for one’s children is becoming less of an immediate selection pressure. Of course, properly caring for one’s children in a world with such possibilities for disparate wealth is making educating one’s children properly a potential new source of evolutionary pressure. But the effects of this pressure probably will require some time to show through.

Regardless of pressures, the institution itself is weakening. Something like 70% of marriages now end in divorce. True to death is a largely forgotten practice (though one should wonder about the extent to which it was ever true — and how much of its appearance as strong in earlier periods was simply the concealment of infidelities).

Is perhaps the institution of marriage weakening because its meaning is becoming stronger? As the content of marriage has moved from children to the interaction of the couple itself, marriage has come to take on qualities that perhaps necessitate its inability to endure.

And this is a new development. The ideal of romantic love and the emphasis on love as the defining basis for a marriage has been built up in the past few centuries. Of course it has always existed, but the balance of factors has changed — only in the exception was the love between the partners the basis of a marriage. (Or perhaps not: statistics are nearly impossible to create for times from which we only have records produced by exceptional people — and authors in times in which the means of writing were so costly were inherently exceptional amid the lower level of literacy in those times. (And here, like in so many places, is one of those ironies in the belief that the human race is getting worse from some golden age — the truth is that previous ages only seem better because the people of the time expected less: our paupers have a level of material wealth surpassing that of kings three thousand years ago.))