As someone living happily ever after in the secular West at the beginning of a new millennium, it is hard for me to imagine anything more elemental: First comes love, then comes marriage. Bad news, matrimonial romantics.<\/p>\n
In her delightful book, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage, journalist Susan Squire traces roughly the first 5,000 years of marital behavior, and the real matrimonial axiom is not nearly as catchy: First comes proof of paternity, consolidation of property rights and the occasional ravishment (sorry, Sabine ladies!); then comes marriage.<\/p>\n
Squire’s long history of connubial blisslessness starts in the caves and proposes that the marital relationship didn’t really become complicated until our ancestors had an epiphany: All that humping in the fields? It wasn’t just to pass the time between hunting and gathering.<\/p>\n