The Ubiquity of Marriage

The ubiquity of marriage speaks for itself. There has never been a culture or a century that we know of in which marriage was not central to human life…This sounds like a controversial statement, but it is not. As all social history books will tell you, marriage had its origins in “prehistory”—in other words, the human race cannot remember a time in which marriage did not exist. There have been some efforts to make the case that this or that remote culture or small ethnic group has existed without marriage, but none of these efforts are widely regarded as successful.