The Myth of Traditional Marriage

So, I was reading in my sociology book today, and was struck by a passage that talked about love and marriage. Apparently, the two were, and remain in many areas around the world, separate from each other for most of history. Romance only began to be coupled with marriage in modern times, and the whole experience of falling in love emerged during the Middle Ages with aristocrats' extramarital love affairs. While they had romances with others, the relationships they had with their spouses were cold and distant.

I found this amusing because it reminded me of Conservatives "First comes love, then comes marriage..." idealistic view of relationships. They like to delude themselves into thinking that God has ordained one man and woman to fall in love and marry when really it hasn't been that way for most of our history. They don't realize that our perspectives on marriage are the results of centuries of social evolution, and that our perception of them will keep changing. God has not etched on a stone tablet how relationships are supposed to look, and we have not only recently deviated from some social norm. On the contrary, what Conservatives consider to be God's will for marriage is a recent development that the world hasn't seen before.

On a side note, it amuses me how Christians call one man-one woman "traditional marriage" when one can clearly see that polygamy is more traditional, at least in the Bible in any case.