The Long Way Back to Ourselves

4.5

Love, Marriage, and the Invention of Togetherness

This episode starts from the reality that marriage, for most of history, was a contract between families over land and inheritance, not a bond built on feeling, with dowries as a widow's only real security. It reports a survey by anthropologists Jankowiak and Fischer finding romantic love in most of over 160 societies studied, though what societies did institutionally with that feeling varied widely. The episode traces anthropologist Jack Goody's argument that Church rules banning marriage among relatives weakened kinship groups and enriched the Church, while giving young people a legal tool against their families. You learn why love became the reason to marry only in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, once wage labor freed people from parental land.