The history of marriage in the West

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Roman Foundations

Classical Roman marriage was a civil arrangement governed by family law. Two forms coexisted: marriage cum manu, in which the wife passed into the legal power of her husband's family, and marriage sine manu, in which she remained legally attached to her own father's household. By the late Republic, sine manu had become dominant among the elite, giving married women significant independent property rights and the capacity to initiate divorce. Roman marriage was constituted by mutual consent and affectio maritalis (the intention to be married); no ceremony was legally required, though weddings were socially elaborate. The purposes were three: the production of legitimate citizen heirs, the transmission of property across generations, and the formation of political and economic alliances between families. Affection was a welcome bonus, not the institution's reason for existing.

The Early Christian Reframing

Early Christianity inherited Jewish kinship practice and Roman civil forms and added a theological overlay. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, treated marriage as a concession to weakness, preferable to fornication but inferior to celibacy. The Gospels recorded Jesus's prohibition of divorce. Patristic writers—Augustine especially—developed a theology of marriage as a remedy for concupiscence and as a sign of Christ's union with the Church. Three goods of marriage were enumerated: proles (offspring), fides (fidelity), and sacramentum (the indissoluble sign). For the first thousand years, however, the Church had limited practical control over how marriages were contracted. Most marriages in the early medieval West were arranged by families, celebrated with regional customs, and dissolved or set aside more readily than canon law would later permit.

The Twelfth-Century Revolution

The decisive shift came in the twelfth century. The reform papacy, the rise of canon law as a systematic discipline, and the Gratian-Lombard codifications brought marriage firmly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Pope Alexander III's decretals established that marriage was constituted by present consent (verba de praesenti) between the parties themselves, with or without parental approval, with or without ceremony, with or without consummation. This made marriage uniquely the act of the spouses, not of their families—a startling assertion of individual agency in a hierarchical society. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 added requirements: banns of marriage, publicity, kinship investigation. Marriage was now a sacrament, indissoluble, controlled by canon law. John Witte Jr. argues this medieval canon-law architecture is the deep substrate of all subsequent Western marriage doctrine.

Clandestine Marriage and Its Problems

The Church's recognition of marriage by mere present consent produced an unintended consequence: clandestine marriages. A couple could, by exchanging vows alone, contract a binding indissoluble union without family knowledge or priestly blessing. This created chaos. Bigamy proliferated because no public record existed. Disputes filled ecclesiastical courts: did he say "I do" or "I will"? Was there a witness? Heiresses were spirited away by fortune-hunters. By the Reformation period, both reformers and Catholic reformers identified clandestine marriage as a major problem. The Council of Trent in 1563 finally required, for Catholics, that marriages be celebrated before a parish priest and at least two witnesses (the Tametsi decree). Protestant jurisdictions imposed similar publicity requirements. Marriage by private consent ended; marriage as public ceremony became the universal Western norm.

The Reformation and the Godly Household

Luther's 1522 sermon on marriage and his 1525 marriage to the former nun Katharina von Bora were ideological events. By denying that marriage was a sacrament and calling it a "worldly thing," Luther partly returned it to civil jurisdiction while insisting on its theological seriousness as a vocation through which most Christians would serve God. Calvin in Geneva and the English Puritans developed an elaborate theology of the godly household: husband as head, wife as helper, children as souls to be formed, the home as a "little church." Divorce became possible for adultery and abandonment in most Protestant jurisdictions, though it remained rare and stigmatized. Catholic doctrine continued to insist on indissolubility but allowed annulments for defects of consent, impediments, or non-consummation. The two confessional architectures diverged on divorce while converging on the seriousness of conjugal affection.

Affective Individualism

Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 argued for a long transformation from the "open lineage family" of the late medieval and early Tudor period—patriarchal, kin-embedded, low in marital affect—through the "restricted patriarchal nuclear family" of the seventeenth century, to the "closed domesticated nuclear family" of the eighteenth, characterized by personal mate choice, marital affection, and intense parental investment in children. Stone's chronology has been contested—medievalists have shown more affection in earlier marriages than Stone allowed—but the overall direction is well attested. By the eighteenth century, particularly among the rising commercial classes, the expectation that spouses should be chosen for personal compatibility and that the marriage should sustain affection had become a recognizable cultural norm.

Coverture and the Long Erasure of the Wife

Throughout much of Western legal history, marriage legally subsumed the wife. English common law's doctrine of coverture, articulated by Blackstone in the 1760s, held that "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage." She could not own property in her own name, sue or be sued independently, or contract without her husband's permission. Continental civil law analogues varied but the general pattern held. The Married Women's Property Acts—UK 1870 and 1882, US state by state from the 1840s through the 1890s—slowly dismantled coverture. Women gained the right to own property, retain wages, sue independently, and, by the early twentieth century, vote. Marriage's transition from a hierarchical incorporation into a partnership of legal equals took roughly a century of legal reform.

Civil Marriage and the Secular Turn

The French Revolution's 1792 decree making civil marriage the only legally valid form, with religious ceremony optional and subsequent, was the first systematic separation of marriage from religious establishment in the West. Other jurisdictions followed unevenly. Civil registration of marriage became standard across Western states by the late nineteenth century. The shift made possible interfaith marriage, religiously unaffiliated marriage, and—much later—same-sex marriage. It also reframed marriage as a contract between citizens and the state rather than between souls and God. Religious traditions continued to celebrate marriage sacramentally or covenantally, but the legal substance now flowed from the civil register.

The Contraceptive and Sexual Revolutions

The twentieth century delivered the first effective separation of sex from reproduction in human history. Reliable diaphragms in the early twentieth century, condoms mass-marketed by mid-century, the oral contraceptive in 1960, and legalized abortion in most Western jurisdictions by the 1970s decoupled sexual activity from the biological consequence that had historically made marriage urgent. Premarital sex became normative within a generation. Cohabitation rose. The age at first marriage rose with it. Marriage was no longer the gateway to sexual life; it became one possible context for an already-active sexual life. This shift, more than any legal change, transformed what marriage was for.

No-Fault Divorce and the Exit Option

California's 1969 no-fault divorce law, signed by Ronald Reagan, made divorce available on the request of either spouse without proof of fault. Within fifteen years nearly every US state and most Western jurisdictions had adopted similar regimes. The change was practical: pre-no-fault divorce required theatrical proofs of adultery or cruelty and the wealthy worked around the law while the poor were trapped. The unintended consequence was deeper. Marriage now bound only as long as both parties chose to be bound. The exit option, formerly costly, was cheap. Divorce rates spiked through the 1970s, peaked around 1980, and then partially declined—not because marriages got happier but because fewer people married, and those who did married later and more selectively.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Completion of the Redefinition

Between Hawaii's 1993 Baehr v. Lewin decision and the 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the United States, the West redefined marriage as a gender-neutral partnership of two adult equals. The Netherlands legalized in 2001, Canada in 2005, Spain in 2005, the United Kingdom in 2013, Ireland by referendum in 2015, Australia in 2017. The redefinition was contested theologically and politically, but legally it completed a long trajectory: marriage had been progressively stripped of its lineage function (by contraception), its property function (by women's economic independence), its indissolubility (by no-fault divorce), and finally its gender complementarity. What remains, in the dominant Western legal frame, is a chosen partnership of two adults for mutual support, with whatever further content the partners give it.

Deinstitutionalization and the Current Stress

Andrew Cherlin's diagnosis of "deinstitutionalized marriage" captures the present state. The legal, religious, economic, and kin-enforced rails that historically carried marriages through their difficult years have been substantially removed, while cultural expectations on what marriage should deliver—simultaneous best friend, lover, co-parent, intellectual peer, therapeutic mirror—have intensified. The combination is unstable. Marriage rates have fallen sharply, especially among the working class. Cohabitation has risen as a partial substitute. The educated upper-middle class continues to marry, marries later, and divorces less than other classes, making marriage paradoxically a marker of class privilege rather than a universal life-stage. Fertility has fallen below replacement across most Western societies. The collective question is whether new institutional forms will crystallize to support the relational lives people are trying to live, or whether the West is mid-transition into a relational ecology not yet visible. Either way, the institution's two-thousand-year history offers more options than the current moment remembers.

Citations

1. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin, 2006. 2. Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 3. Witte, John Jr. From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition. 2nd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012. 4. Cherlin, Andrew J. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Knopf, 2009. 5. Brundage, James A. Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 6. Treggiari, Susan. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. 7. Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. 8. Hartog, Hendrik. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 9. Phillips, Roderick. Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 10. Luhmann, Niklas. Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy. Translated by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 11. Fisher, Helen. Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Rev. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. 12. de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Translated by Montgomery Belgion. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

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