Marriage is customary in every society known to anthropologists, with only one or two exceptions. When a cultural institution is as common as marriage but apparently not absolutely essential to human survival—people can reproduce and have families without marriage—anthropologists ask why. One popular answer today might be that people marry for love. Many of us can recognize the adoration mixed with desire that compelled High Horse, a young Dakotan of North America, to want to marry Good Plume, a “beautiful” Cheyenne girl he had gotten to know:
. . . I want her so much that I cannot eat and I cannot sleep, and if I do not get her, maybe I shall just starve to death.
But mere passion has in much of the world been frowned upon as the basis for as important a social contract as marriage. High Horse’s friend, for example, was alarmed by his friend’s lovesick delirium and determined to cure him.1
We have no certain way of knowing how far back in time humans began to have more or less permanent male-female bonding or customary marriages, but physical anthropologists surmise that such bonds were possibly in place over a million years ago when early humans relied more heavily on hunting. Written records, which exist for only 5,000 years or so of human history, describe marriages—and divorces—in the early kingdoms of West Asia.2 We do know that the fundamental concept of marriage is nearly universal, and in this chapter we will look at it in all its forms, for how one marries, whom one marries, and even how many people a person can be married to simultaneously vary from society to society. Indeed, although each marriage usually involves one pair at a time, most societies have allowed a man to be married to more than one woman at a time, and a few have allowed a woman more than one husband. And we will explore the debate over why humans marry.
Families are unequivocally universal, for all societies have parent-child groups. The form and size of the family, however, can also vary from society to society. Extended families with two or more related parent-child groups are the norm in a majority of societies, whereas others have smaller, independent families. Marriage is not necessarily the basis for family life. One-parent families are increasingly common in our own and other societies today. Although marriage has not disappeared in these places—it is still customary to marry—more individuals are choosing to have children without being married. Yet the majority of people continue to think that marriage and family belong together.