Welcome to the era of you-sanctioned marriage

My business partner and I were talking about the huge differences in marriage between our grandparents and parents and ourselves. And that got me thinking about how marriage has transformed over the centuries.

Marriage has a long and storied history long before governments and religions got involved (because these institutions like to control the masses, and thus it only makes sense that they want to dictate the terms of marriage, too). And even early Christianity (before it became so organized and dogmatic) didn’t hold wedding services; you simply verbally indicated your intent to marry each other in front of witnesses, and that was that. This agreement was called a verbum, and it was certainly binding.

So what a long ways we have come, and thank god for it. I have friends who have been married in churches, synagogues, hotels, Vegas chapels, city halls, in their homes and on ski slopes. I have friends who are uber-committed to each other and shun any formal ceremony. I am friends with gay couples who have children together and patiently await our slow-moving society to give them the right to marry (good for you, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and Maine; someday we could all be so just). I have religiously observant married friends, and I have friends who were married in a pagan ceremony.

Needless to say, in 2009, marriage is about what you, the individual and the couple, make of it and want from it. This is probably how it started (although maybe on a more primitive – and maybe pure – basis) and how it should be. Maybe cavemen and cavewomen were much more evolved than history (and stereotypic myth) gives them credit for.