A Natural History of Love (45 page)

The first marriages were by capture. When a man saw a woman he desired (usually from another tribe), he took her by force. To kidnap a bride, a groom enlisted the aid of a warrior friend, his “best man.” Capture marriage dominated the prehistoric world, and was even legal in England until the thirteenth century. However, marriage by purchase became the preferred tradition, and even when it wasn’t an overt sale of the bride for cash, everyone understood that she was being bartered for land, holdings, political alliance, or social advancement. A girl was a useful pair of hands in the father’s household, but she was invaluable to the groom’s, where she could work equally hard and also bear offspring. The Anglo-Saxon word
wedd
referred to the groom’s pledge to marry, but also to the purchase money or its equivalent in horses, cattle, or other property that the groom paid the bride’s father. So a “wedding” was literally the purchase of a woman for breeding purposes, involving an element of risk. The word derives from a root that meant to gamble or wager. The groom’s family usually told him whom to marry, and they rarely let him see his prospective bride, because if he didn’t like her looks he might balk at the marriage. The father “gave the bride away” to the buyer, who, on his wedding day, lifted her veil to see her face for the first time.

We think of the honeymoon as romantic days of sensual bliss under a tropic sky, but the original honeymoon had a more somber purpose. Right after a groom captured or bought a bride, he disappeared with her for a while, so that her family and friends couldn’t rescue her. By the time they found the couple, the bride would already be pregnant. Our western idea of a love marriage occurred late in human history; and many cultures throughout the world still practice marriage by capture or purchase.
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But let’s consider a more commonplace sight, a marriage in San Francisco, California.

   Carol and Jerry are getting married. He pops the question, she accepts, then they happily tell their families and friends that they’re tying the knot. Jerry gives Carol an engagement ring and she shows it to her girlfriends and wears it proudly on the third finger of her left hand. Her girlfriends give a wedding shower for her. Her parents offer to pay for a lavish church wedding and reception. His parents offer to pay for a lavish honeymoon. Carol begins collecting dainties for her trousseau. She asks her sisters and best girlfriends to be part of the bridal party, and she chooses a favorite niece as flower girl and a nephew as ring bearer. Jerry asks his brother to be best man and his friends to be ushers. The evening before the wedding, the best man and the ushers throw a stag party for him. On the day of the wedding, a minister performs the ceremony at a local church. As the ceremony closes, the bride and groom exchange rings and a kiss.

Then everyone goes to a reception hall for eating, drinking, and dancing. The bride and groom cut the first piece of a huge, three-tiered wedding cake. They dance the first dance. They gratefully accept presents of cash and goods. The best man leads a series of toasts. Later, the bride tosses her bouquet into a crowd of unmarried women; her garter she tosses to a crowd of unmarried men. Then she and the groom climb into a car that has mismatched shoes dangling from the rear bumper, and the words
JUST MARRIED
painted in whitewash on the trunk; and the guests throw rice at them as they drive off to board a flight to Hawaii.

   In later years, paging through a scrapbook of photographs, they may cherish the look on his mother’s face, or smile at the picture of her uncle playing the harmonica, or laugh at the way his brother mugged for the camera. They may marvel at how young and happy everyone seemed. They probably won’t be thinking of the ancient array of rituals they kept alive. Let’s consider, in terms of human culture, what really happened to them. The expression “to tie the knot” dates back to the Romans, when the bride wore a girdle secured by a knot, which the groom then had the fun of untying. The two threads of the couple’s life were also tied together. Rituals of binding and tying have been popular throughout the world. In ancient Carthage, the couple’s thumbs were laced together with a strip of leather. In India, the Hindu groom knotted a ribbon around his bride’s neck, and once he’d tied it, the marriage was legal and binding. People have always been superstitious about knots, which were credited with magic powers. In Egypt, any holy mystery was a “she-knot.” Jews were afraid of the magic power of knots, and thus rabbinic law forbids the tying of knots on the Sabbath. For much of history, rope was the most powerful way to connect things, and it symbolized fate, so it made sense to talk of people “tying the knot” or being “hitched.” Our vocabulary hasn’t caught up with our adhesives, which still seem to us a novelty. Wedding slang may one day include Velcro, superglue, or some other invention.

We have records of engagement rings being given in Anglo-Saxon days, and no doubt they have a much longer history. Circles or rings have always symbolized eternity—one sees them in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, for example. So it’s not surprising that rings were given to show favor between two people, seal agreements, or symbolize something sacred. In Gen. 41: 41–42, we find: “And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of Egypt. And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph’s hand.” Although engagement rings were always popular, it was the medieval Italians who favored a diamond ring, because of their superstition that diamonds were created from the flames of love. The word
diamond
comes from the Greek
adamas
, which means “invisible.” Tempered by heat and pressure, its crystals are the hardest on earth, and the romantic Italians felt that was also true of many-faceted love. Then, too, diamonds looked like the frozen tears of past grief or future joy.

It was the soldiers of ancient Sparta who first staged stag parties. The groom feasted with his male friends on the night before the wedding, pledging his continued loyalty, friendship, or love. The friends probably provided the Spartan version of strippers, porno movies, and women leaping out of cakes. The function of this rite of passage was to say good-bye to the frivolities of bachelorhood,
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while swearing continued allegiance to one’s comrades. It was important for the groom to reassure his friends that they wouldn’t be excluded from his life now that it included a family. Bridal showers were also meant to restate bonds and to prepare the bride with gifts and moral support for the marriage. However, the term “shower” is fairly recent. In the 1890s, a woman held a party for her newly engaged friend at which the bride-to-be stood in the middle of the room while a Japanese paper parasol filled with little gifts was turned upside down over her head, producing a wonderful shower of presents. When word of this hit the fashion pages, it so charmed readers that everyone wanted to have a “shower” of their own.

The idea of the bridal group has many origins, one of which dates back to the Anglo-Saxons. A man planning to capture a woman to be his bride needed help from his bachelor pals, otherwise known as the “bridesmen” or “bride-knights.” The bride-knights made sure she got to the church for the ceremony, and to the groom’s house afterward. The bride had her own “bride’s maids” and a married “bride’s woman” to help her. The wedding usually happened after nightfall, to keep angry family members and rivals in the dark, so they were torchlight ceremonies, and the guests were heavily armed. The flower girl is a medieval addition to the ceremony; originally she carried wheat to symbolize fertility. The ring bearer also appeared in the Middle Ages—perhaps for symmetry—and was a young page.

The white wedding dress, now traditional in the western world, was first worn in 1499 by Anne of Brittany on the occasion of her marriage to Louis XII of France. Prior to this, a woman wore her best dress, often yellow or red. In biblical days, blue, not white, symbolized purity, and both bride and groom wore a blue band around the bottom of their wedding attire, which is where the idea of the bride’s “something blue” comes from. In China and Japan, brides have traditionally begun their wedding day by wearing white—but only because white symbolizes mourning, and, when a bride leaves the family of her birth to join that of her husband, she undergoes a symbolic death.

The bride’s veil, which hides her beauty behind a smokescreen of fabric, is a sign of modesty and submission; in some cultures the veil covers a woman from head to foot. She is her husband’s ransom; he alone gets to lift her veil. Physical beauty is such a valuable commodity for women that many religions specify ways in which new brides are to make themselves
less
beautiful—by hiding their face, hair, or body, or even by cutting off their hair. Depending on the religion, this is so the bride doesn’t accidentally tempt other men, or doesn’t think herself pretty enough to initiate involvements with other men; or doesn’t arouse her husband too much, since sex is meant strictly for procreation.

Brides have always worn or carried flowers, though not bridal bouquets. In the fourteenth century, when it was popular for the bride to toss her garter to the men (reenacting how a lady would toss her ribbon or colors to her knight), things sometimes got out of hand, with drunken guests trying to remove the garter ahead of time. Tossing her bouquet was less worrisome.

Wedding rings are very ancient indeed, and historians aren’t sure when the first one was worn, but it was probably made of iron. The main thing was that the ring be of plain, strong metal, so that it didn’t break, which would have seemed a disastrous omen. Naturally, there are romantic interpretations of the band—that it symbolizes harmony, unending love, and so on—but it originally served as a notice and reminder that a woman was bound to her husband (who didn’t have to wear a ring). The Romans felt that a small artery—the
vena amoris
, or “vein of love”—ran from the third finger to the heart, and that wearing a ring on that finger joined the couple’s hearts and destiny. Paintings from Elizabethan days show the wedding ring worn on the thumb, which presumably was the fashion of the time, although it doesn’t sound very comfortable. In traditional Jewish weddings, the ring is worn on the first finger of the left hand. But why wear a symbolic token on the hand at all, why not around the neck, as some African women do, or around the ankle? Why not wear a symbolic girdle or hat? For that matter, why give a woman’s “hand in marriage”? Our hands, with which we build cities, diaper babies, till fields, caress loved ones, throw spears, discover the mysterious workings of our body—our hands teach us about our limits, they connect us to the world. They are bridges between / and
Thou
, living and nonliving, friend and foe. Much of our slang uses the hand as a symbol for the whole person: “give me a hand,” “one hand washes the other,” “handout,” “factory hand,” “I heard it firsthand,” “she’ll have a hand in that decision,” for example. We take a child’s hand to instruct and protect it; we take a loved one’s hand for comfort or romance. Our hands link us to other lives, and to discoveries; they lead us out of ourselves on the pilgrimage of experience we call life. A ring symbolizes how that outward journey has been limited. A married woman is tethered to her husband. For so light an object, a ring weighs heavily on her life. But, in love marriages, the sheer weight of the commitment is one of the keenest paradoxes, because love makes one both heavy and happy—too heavy to go anywhere one pleases anymore, but happy to be so confined.

Fertility symbols have always accompanied weddings. In some cultures, a bride wore shafts of wheat, phallic symbols, or even ears of corn, attached to her belt. The ancient Romans baked a special wheat or barley cake, which they broke over the bride’s head as a symbol of her fertility. Wheat crumbs were also thrown at the bride and groom, and scrambled for by guests. These simple cakes evolved into the elaborately styled wedding cake during the reign of England’s King Charles II, whose French chefs decided to take the traditional cake, turn it into an edible palace, and ice it with white sugar. It became the custom for English newlyweds to pile small cakes one upon the other as high as they could, and then try to kiss across the tower without knocking it down. If they did, it meant a lifetime of prosperity. To ensure their good fortune, a tactful baker would weld the tiers together with icing. From that heap of spiced cake and sugar-glue we get the stately, many-tiered wedding cake of today.

The best man’s toast originated with the French, who placed a piece of bread in the bottom of a glass, then drank down “to the toast.” Here’s an especially lovely Old English toast to the bride:

Love, be true to her; Life, be dear to her;
Health, stay close to her; Joy, draw near to her;
Fortune, find what you can do for her,
Search your treasure-house through for her,
Follow her footsteps the wide world over,
And keep her husband always her lover!

Tying shoes to the car bumper seems an odd custom, but it reflects the symbolic power that shoes had for ancient cultures. The Assyrians and Hebrews used a sandal as a pledge of good faith when they sealed a business deal. Tossing one’s shoe onto a piece of land meant that you were claiming it (“Upon Edom I cast my shoe”—Psalms 108:9). The Egyptians exchanged sandals when they exchanged property or authority, and so a father would give the groom his daughter’s sandal to show that she was now in the groom’s care. The world she walked would be his. This was also the custom in Anglo-Saxon marriages, and the groom tapped the bride lightly on the head with the shoe to impress upon her his authority. In later days, people began throwing shoes at the couple, and finally, in the automobile age, tying shoes to the car.

However, people have always thrown
something
at the bride and groom, usually grain or fruit. The Greek groom used to take his new bride to his hearth and shower her with dates, figs, nuts, and small coins. In Slavic countries, the bride and groom were showered with corn and hops. In India, flower petals are sprinkled over the bride and groom. From Sanskrit, Greek, and many other sources come reports of similar pelting customs. Why has the symbolic stoning, or raining down upon, or attack with fragrant missiles been such an important feature of the wedding ceremony? Does it hark back to the time when marriage was by capture, and spears or stones were being hurled at the groom? Is it a symbolic baptism in fertile, seedlike emblems? Is it a long-distance form of touching by a crowd of well-wishers who can’t all embrace the couple at once? Is it meant to bribe or repel devils and ward off the evil eye? Does it remind all present that the bride is “arable land”? Is it an instinctive, now-merely-ceremonial way to drive the young out of the nest at puberty, a behavior we so often see in its life-and-death form among other animals?