Roaming bards sang
of love during medieval times and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet acted it out
on stage, but it wasn't until the Victorian era that it became accepted as a
foundation for marriage. "The Victorians were really, really invested in
the idea of love - that marriage should actually be based on love or
companionship," says Jennifer Phegley, author of Courtship and Marriage in
Victorian England.
The growing
importance of the middle class and new money blurred the traditional social
boundaries for marriage. With more social mobility, there was a growing
"distaste" among the middle classes for thinking of marriage as
"a family-arranged event for exchanging a daughter into a family for
gain", Phegley says.
Aspiring
lovebirds needed only look to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert for inspiration
- the couple was upheld as the icon of the loving marriage. Their union may
have been based on bloodlines, but Victoria frequently referred to it as a
"love match". "If you read her letters and her diaries, she's
very effusive about how in love with him she was, and this sort of filtered
down into society," Phegley says.
More than baby-making
Catholic and
Anglican doctrine have historically elevated procreation as one of the primary
reasons for marriage. But in the late 19th Century, a "silent
revolution" began taking place, Dormor says. With more children surviving
and family sizes ballooning, couples started using rudimentary methods of birth
control to limit pregnancies. "It begins the process of decoupling
procreation from marriage, at some level," Dormor says.
"Before,
if you're married, you have a sexual relationship, and you have kids. The idea
that you would do something to stop yourself from having kids within a marriage
doesn't seem to be part of the mental landscape, but in the last few decades
[of the 19th Century] it's quite clear that things are changing."
The Anglican
Church cautiously accepted artificial contraception in the 1930s at a
conference of bishops, but only where there was a "clearly felt moral
obligation to limit or avoid parenthood". Today, the Church of England
does not regard contraception as a sin or going against God's purpose.
For the
Catholic Church "the procreation of children" remains "one of
the essential things that marriage is about", says Father Ashley Beck at
St Mary's University College, London. When a couple is
preparing to marry, the subject of children is often discussed with a priest.
"If they were going to rule out having children, then we wouldn't marry
them," he says.
Civil partnerships
The first
ceremonies under the Civil Partnerships Act took place in Northern Ireland,
Scotland, England and Wales in December 2005. At the time, campaigners said the
law ended inequalities for same-sex couples. Meg Munn, minister for equality,
said: "It accords people in same-sex relationships the same sort of rights
and responsibilities that are available to married couples."
Smart calls
the event a "milestone" that "is marriage by any other name,
essentially".
She adds:
"Legally speaking, there's only a tiny difference.
"The
actual allowing of same-sex couples to enter into a state-recognised, basically
marriage, with all the same obligations, the same safeguards and so on is
really, really significant."
To many
Christians, however, while a civil partnership confers all the legal rights of
marriage, a church wedding is seen as a mystical event, the making of promises
before God in a sacred setting, endowing the relationship with a special
"blessed" quality.
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