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Nothing is Boring, hosted by Esteban Gast and Ari Afsar, is here to prove that even the things we think are mundane can actually be FUN and INTERESTING. In this episode, Esteban and Ari explore the history of weddings and marriage.
Transcript provided by YouTube:
00:00
– Esteban.
00:01
– Hey. – Esteban.
00:02
How are you and your fiance.
00:04
– Great, like, are you really asking?
00:06
Usually with these videos
00:07
are like where we deep dive into a topic.
00:09
like learn about it
00:10
and then like share excitedly with the audience.
00:13
– Okay, it’s not all about the videos, you know.
00:16
– Yeah, you’re right.
00:17
Sorry, gosh.
00:18
Well, we’re doing really, really well.
00:20
We’re engaged.
00:21
We’re looking to get married soon.
00:23
And this pandemic sort of causes things about
00:26
like what marriage means.
00:27
You know, what partnership means.
00:29
– Today’s video is about marriage.
00:31
– You said you weren’t asking about the video.
00:34
You said you were just asking how I was,
00:36
like as a friend.
00:37
– I lied, let’s talk history, marriage and wedding.
00:41
This is
00:41
Nothing Is Boring. – Nothing Is Boring.
00:51
– Some evidence suggests that marriages are 4,350 years old.
00:56
Before then families were loosely organized
00:59
with as many as 30 people,
01:01
with many male leaders and many female leaders
01:04
and multiple children within those intersections.
01:08
Then as hunters and gatherers decided to settle down,
01:11
they realized like maybe 30 is too much in a family.
01:14
Hey husband, other husband, other husband, said husband,
01:18
the husband in the corner.
01:20
– Hey wife, wifey, wife sir,wifey boo, other wife
01:23
and wife hi
01:24
– please stop. The first evidence of two people.
01:26
Uniting was in 2350 BC in Mesopotamia.
01:31
Marriage’s primary purpose
01:32
was to buy in women to men to make sure
01:35
that the men knew of their biological heirs.
01:37
Through marriage, a woman became a man’s property.
01:40
– In ancient Greece,
01:42
the father would hand over the daughter and say this;
01:45
I pledge my daughter for the purpose
01:48
of producing legitimate offspring.
01:51
What a dad!
01:52
This was practiced in a lot of countries in the world,
01:55
including of course the US. In American history,
01:58
a married woman actually didn’t have a legal existence
02:01
outside of her husband.
02:03
When a woman got married to her husband,
02:05
she had to give up all of her rights and could not even own
02:07
property. At the same time,
02:09
some single women actually had the right to own property.
02:12
– Now there’s this thing called dowry, which was practiced
02:15
and sometimes it’s still practiced today
02:17
where a parent’s bride,
02:19
the bride of the parents gives money or gifts or property to
02:23
the family and the union of the man and the woman i.e,
02:27
the parents bride gives them money.
02:34
– Oh, that seems kind of cool.
02:35
It’s like the, the parents give the bride some money,
02:38
maybe buy a house, get a dog.
02:40
– Just the bride’s family.
02:42
– Oh yeah that’s that’s weird.
02:43
– A dowry might have also served as a sort of protection for
02:46
the bride against the husband or the husband’s family
02:49
in any case of ill treatment or abuse.
02:52
Essentially providing an incentive for the husband to not
02:55
abuse his wife .
02:56
Gather around little children.
02:59
Let’s read a bedtime story.
03:02
One American legend tells a story of a father setting his 18
03:07
year old daughter onto the side
03:09
of large scales in his warehouse.
03:13
He piled shillings onto the other side of the scale until he
03:18
reached her weight and silver.
03:21
And that my children was her dowry.
03:25
– Remember ancient Greece?
03:27
I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing
03:29
legitimate offspring.
03:31
Yeah. Well, in contemporary Greece,
03:33
the diary was a thing up until 1983.
03:37
It takes people a while to realize that it’s like not the
03:40
best idea, maybe.
03:41
Okay. We’re down here
03:42
because it’s fun fact time.
03:44
The dowry system was never a thing in Bhutan.
03:46
In Bhutan, inheritance goes down through the mother.
03:49
Daughters don’t actually take their father’s last names
03:52
and wives don’t take their husband’s last names.
03:55
Sometimes a perspective groom
03:57
will actually work in a bride’s
03:59
family to prove himself worthy.
04:01
– For a heterosexual couple,
04:03
a sociologist professor at Penn state said that the
04:05
tradition of women taking men’s last name originally came
04:09
from property transfer.
04:11
Essentially women came from being part of the parents’
04:13
family to the husband’s family.
04:16
– Although gender discrimination,
04:17
when it comes to owning property is no longer a thing,
04:20
we still live in this sort of gender notion that a wife
04:24
should take the husband’s last name, right?
04:27
Like that’s still the same,
04:28
even though a lot of things have changed
04:30
that hasn’t changed something to think about it.
04:32
– Research recently showed that 49% of LGBTQIA+ couples go
04:37
the route of changing their last name,
04:39
but things are changing.
04:40
– That’s right.
04:41
Less than half of millennials believe a woman should change
04:44
her last name to the man’s last name, actually 47%.
04:47
Compare that to 59% of people from 35 to 54,
04:51
believe that the woman should change her name to the man’s
04:53
last name and 64% of individuals over the age of 55,
04:58
Believe that the woman should change her name to the man’s
05:00
last name. So there’s some trends changing.
05:01
– When did love happen though?
05:03
Basically later than you think,
05:05
and in many families across the globe,
05:07
it is not the primary impetus for marriage.
05:09
Basically all of you in history,
05:11
people were brought together for logical reasons.
05:14
– Do you know who historians believe created
05:16
the idea of romantic love?
05:18
The French. It’s always the French.
05:22
– My grandfather invented the toaster strudel.
05:27
– Well, my great great grandfather invented
05:30
how you say love.
05:32
There’s French literature in the 12th century
05:35
that tells men that writes romantically for men to woo women
05:39
before their marriage, so they can actually like each other,
05:43
and in the 13th century, Richard de Fournival
05:46
who was the official physician to the King of France,
05:49
wrote a book called advice on love.
05:52
It has a lot of suggestions,
05:54
but one of our favorites was that he loved the power
05:57
of flirtatious glances.
06:03
– Oh hey, I didn’t see you there.
06:05
– Stop it.
06:07
– You stop
06:08
– What, No
06:10
– Yeah
06:11
– The reality is that for so much of our history,
06:13
there’s been these inequities,
06:15
especially between men and women,
06:16
and for a long time,
06:17
marriage is a reflection of those inequities.
06:20
It’s been unequal, pretty much all of history.
06:23
– By the late 1960s,
06:24
state laws forbidding interracial marriage was thrown out.
06:28
Thank God or else I wouldn’t be here. Until the mid 1970s,
06:31
married women needed their husband to obtain a credit card
06:34
and not until 2015,
06:36
same sex marriage was made legal in the USA.
06:39
It is safe to say in the last 50 years,
06:41
marriage has changed more than the last 5,000 years.
06:45
– So what’s the future of marriage? Let me check.
06:49
Just kidding we can’t predict the future
06:50
but here is what we know.
06:52
A recent study of young Americans found that 40% of them
06:55
said that marriage is quote obsolete as a concept.
06:59
Pre-pandemic less couples than ever were getting married,
07:02
and the experts actually predicted a decline in the overall
07:05
rate of marriage.
07:07
– And at the exact same time,
07:08
brides magazine said that because of the pandemic,
07:11
55% of their readers said that the pandemic changed their
07:15
expectations of marriage.
07:16
82% of their readers living through this pandemic said they
07:20
actually wanted to get married more.
07:22
– I mean, throughout human history,
07:24
marriage is this relatively new concept.
07:27
Marriage for love is even more recent.
07:30
Both people enter marriage
07:31
with their own rights in their own agency.
07:33
You’re going to see marriage change a little bit,
07:35
but one thing has remained the same,
07:37
and that is the power of flirtatious glances.
07:45
– Hey you, thanks for watching.
07:49
– Oh my Gosh, seriously thank you for watching.
—
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
***
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