Free Committed: A Sceptic Makes Peace With Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

marriages between aristocratic males were once recognized by law); or as a union between two siblings (as in medieval Europe, when valuable property was at stake); or as a union between two children (again in Europe, as orchestrated by inheritance-protecting parents or by power-wielding popes); or as a union between the unborn (ditto); or as a union between two people limited to the same social class (once more in Europe, where medieval peasants were often forbidden by law to marry their betters, in order to keep social divisions clean and orderly).
    Marriage has also been seen at times as a deliberately temporary union. In modern revolutionary Iran, for instance, young couples can ask a mullah for a special marriage permit called a sigheh --a twenty-four-hour pass that permits the couple to be "married," but just for one day. This pass allows a male and female to be safely seen in public together or even, legally, to have sex with each other--essentially creating a Koran-sanctioned, marriage-protected form of provisional romantic expression.
    In China, the definition of marriage once included a sacred union between a living woman and a dead man. Such a merger was called a ghost marriage. A young girl of rank would be married off to a dead man from a good family in order to seal the bonds of unity between two clans. Thankfully, no actual skeleton-to-living-flesh contact was involved (it was more of a conceptual wedding, you could say), but the idea still sounds ghoulish to modern ears. That said, some Chinese women came to see this custom as an ideal social arrangement. During the nineteenth century, a surprising number of women in the Shanghai region worked as merchants in the silk trade, and some of them became terrifically successful businesswomen. Trying to gain ever more economic independence, such women would petition for ghost marriages rather than take on living husbands. There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse. This brought her all the social status of marriage with none of the constraints or inconveniences of actual wifehood.
    Even when marriage has been defined as a union between a man and just one woman, its purposes were not always what we might assume today. In the early years of Western civilization, men and women married each other mostly for the purpose of physical safety. In the time before organized states, in the wild B.C. days of the Fertile Crescent, the fundamental working unit of society was the family. From the family came all your basic social welfare needs--not just companionship and procreation, but also food, housing, education, religious guidance, medical care, and, perhaps most importantly, defense. It was a hazardous world out there in the cradle of civilization. To be alone was to be targeted for death. The more kin you had, the safer you were. People married in order to expand their numbers of relatives. It was not your spouse who was your primary helpmeet, then; it was your entire giant extended family, operating (Hmong-like, you could say) as a single helpmeet entity in the constant combat of survival.
    Those extended families grew into tribes, and those tribes became kingdoms, and those kingdoms emerged as dynasties, and those dynasties fought each other in savage wars of conquest and genocide. The early Hebrews emerged from exactly this system, which is why the Old Testament is such a family-centric, stranger-abhorring, genealogical extravaganza--rife with tales of patriarchs, matriarchs, brothers, sisters, heirs, and other miscellaneous kin. Of course, those Old Testament families were not always healthy or functional (we see brothers murdering brothers, siblings selling each other into slavery, daughters seducing their own fathers, spouses sexually betraying each other), but the driving narrative always concerns the progress and tribulations of the bloodline, and marriage was central to the perpetuation of