Traditional Marriage

#TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE

What is "Traditional Marriage?" Some would have you believe it is when a man and woman wed in holy matrimony, when two members of the opposite sex fall madly in love and want to give away the rights of half their possessions to someone they met in Wetherspoons when they were off their face. I too had this perception that marriage is reserved for the holiest of Wetherspoon fréquentées — but then I realized that I had been preprogrammed to think in such a way that I had been taught that traditional marriage was about love and heterosexual love — but it isn't. It so isn't, or at least it never traditionally use to be — so let's visit the tradition of marriage from its creation to the present and then I'll invite you to ask yourselves how traditional your own marriage is and how important do you think tradition is when it comes to marriage...

Firstly, traditional marriage was never about love. It was a transaction between a father and a willing bachelor. Do you know why a father walks his daughter down the isle? It isn't the whimsical sentiment we have today of, "Aww, look at him giving his daughter away." Women didn't have any rights when marriage was first created. Men with daughters sold them to the highest bidder which is why a woman adopts a man's surname. Often women didn't even have a say in the matter. Her father would turn up with his daughter covered in a veil because they didn't want to give the bachelor an opportunity to not find their daughter attractive and back out of the deal — which is why we still say "the groom can't see the bride before the wedding because it's bad luck"... REALLY? That's where a woman's father "GIVING HER AWAY" originated from.

We all know the words "'TIL DEATH DO US PART" — Well, tradition would have you stick to those vows and if you wanted to leave your husband you had to die. In fact, in some societies today, this tradition is still practiced with husbands refusing to divorce their wives and instead having them killed — but hey... tradition is tradition, right?

Once upon a time, people of different races weren't legally allowed to get married and people who had already been married weren't allowed to remarry, so the tradition of marriage is ever changing and it will continue to change. The beautiful idea of marriage we currently have or have had in recent decades isn't the longest running or the most traditional. The idea that marriage is about love is very modern, for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike. Henry VIII surely wasn't getting married for love. If a Heterosexual sinner or non-believer can get married in a church to a woman/man that he/she loves then there should be no reason a homosexual can't equally get married to the person he/she loves, and it will take some longer than others to realize marriage was never simply about a man and a woman or about who a man wants to make babies with and had far more sinister origins, so when you think that you're only for traditional marriage make sure you truly understand what a traditional marriage is and the implications that has for your own marriage, because marriage will continue to change until all those ancient scriptures that tell you what marriage is and isn't will become irrelevant. The gender of your spouse or the venue of your wedding will have no bearing on the strength, validity or "tradition" of your marriage.