Book Review: Marriage: A History: How Love Conquered Marriage

I'm an avid reader so I thought this place would be as good as any to put up a few book reviews. I have to be honest that I haven't been getting much from my wish list over at paperbackswap.com and the public library ahs been closed for renovation. And, well, I'm generally too cheap to actually buy new books unless I really desperately need them for something. Or they're for the kids.

That brings me to why I actually finished the book I just read, Marriage: A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. I ordered the book from my book swapping site a few months ago because the titles was intriguing. It is an interesting book, but it's more of an interesting textbook, than an interesting "real" book, if that makes sense.

It took me a few weeks to wade through, which I never would have done if I'd had other stuff laying around to read. But, it was either this, finish the book for my church study group when the rest of the group is still on chapter 2 or read The Grapes of Wrath again.

The author, Stephanie Coontz, really does give a history of marriage. Back in the good old days people married basically because they needed someone else to help pull the weight. Particularly in medieval times marriage was more of a contractual business relationship than something having to do with love or romance.

And as long as there has been marriage, there has been divorce. Again, it used to be more about the business end of things and if a man (or sometimes a woman) found an arrangement that would be more financially beneficial, they could just say sayonara to their spouse.

Somewhere along the way people came up with the crazy idea that they were supposed to actually LIKE the person they married. As you can imagine, things went from bad to worse at that point. Just kidding. Actually, things weren't exactly better or worse, but just gradually got different until it reached the point that not loving your partner was a legal reason for divorce.

There's a lot of good, meaty stuff in this book and if you have the time to wade through it all, I'd recommend it. It really gave me a new perspective about the meaning of marriage and what "traditional" marriage really is.