When did marriage begin?

Love and marriage, Frank Sinatra sang, go together like a horse and carriage — and as someone who was married four times, Sinatra was a bit of an expert on the subject. The mode of transportation referenced in the Sammy Cahn–Jimmy Van Heusen tune doesn't make marriage sound like a terribly modern institution. And it isn't. But the monogamous union of two people isn't that old, either, in the sweep of humanity's existence.

Today's buzzy experiments with coupling — polyamory, "throuples," "ethical non-monogamy," "sister wife" polygamy — are new variations on old themes. And even countervailing trends to enforce the "sanctity of marriage" and "trad" spousal roles have historical precedence. Here's a walk back down the aisle of history.

How old is marriage as an institution?

The best available evidence suggests that it's about 4,350 years old. For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared between them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements.

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The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion.

What was it about, then?

Marriage's primary purpose was to bind women to men, and thus guarantee that a man's children were truly his biological heirs. Through marriage, a woman became a man's property. In the betrothal ceremony of ancient Greece, a father would hand over his daughter with these words: "I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring."

Among the ancient Hebrews, men were free to take several wives; married Greek and Roman men were free to satisfy their sexual urges with concubines, prostitutes and even teenage male lovers, while their wives were required to stay home and tend to the household. If wives failed to produce offspring, their husbands could give them back and marry someone else.

When did religion become involved?

As the Christian church became a powerful institution in Europe, the blessings of a priest became increasingly common. By the eighth century, marriage was widely accepted in the church as a sacrament, or a ceremony to bestow God's grace. In 1140, the Benedictine monk Gratian of Bologna wrote an influential canon law textbook, Decretum Gratiani, that "insisted on the consent of bride and groom at the beginning of marriage," excluding "parents from any say," Anders Winroth said in the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. Gratian's ideas were "radical for his time" but "set the tone for the continued development of marriage law in the Western tradition," including "the clearly expressed 'I do' of bride and groom."

The sacramental nature of marriage was written into what is now Roman Catholic canon law at the Council of Trent in 1563. Church blessings actually improved the lot of wives, to some extent. Men were instructed to show greater respect for their wives, and forbidden from divorcing them.

When did the state get involved?

The shift from "common law" marriages — where two people (or their families) simply declared they were married — to legal marriage began in the church, with the calling of "banns," or public announcements before the marriage in the 13th century. "By the end of the Middle Ages, written marriage contracts had become a regular part of the marriage process," said Jessica Levey at American Marriage Ministries.

Marriage licenses arrived in the U.S. in the colonial era — Massachusetts started recording marriages at the local level in 1639 and statewide two years later, according to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. At the time, the husband's dominance was officially recognized under a legal doctrine called "coverture," under which the new bride's identity was absorbed into his. Great Britain introduced non-religion civil marriage in the Marriage Act of 1836. By 1929, all U.S. states had laws on marriage licenses. Marriage became a federal issue with the introduction of the married-couple income tax filing in 1913.

When did love enter the picture?

Later than you might think. For much of human history, couples were brought together for practical reasons, not because they fell in love. In fact, for "thousands of years, love was almost considered a threat to marriage, because this could lead young people into defying their parents' attempts to arrange a good political and economic alliance with other families," Stephanie Coontz, a marriage historian at the Council on Contemporary Families, said to Connecticut Public Radio. "It’s no accident that most of the great love stories in history, romance novels, ended in tragedy." By the 19th century, in the Victorian era, "love match" marriages became the common aspiration.

How did this tradition change?

In 1920, women won the right to vote, transforming marriage into a union of two full citizens, and in the following decade a sexual revolution introduced the idea that marriage should be a vehicle for mutual desire and satisfaction. In the 1960s, "we decided marriage was a right," not a guarded (and segregated) privilege, and "in the 1970s, we began to rearrange marriage laws" accordingly, Coontz said. Between 1974 and 1993, U.S. states finally recognized — and banned — marital rape, an idea inconceivable when the husband "owned" his wife's sexuality.

"Within the past 40 years, marriage has changed more than in the last 5,000," Coontz said. And despite what you may have heard, "we care much more about marriage as a relationship than people did in the past. We're less attached to it as an institution that everybody has to enter, but we actually have higher expectations of marriage as a relationship."