Regardless of their composition, families are generally regarded as a cornerstone of society. For many years, particularly when the United States was primarily an agricultural society, extended families—multiple generations living in the same...
Remarriages have become almost as common as first marriages in contemporary America. In fact, in recent years, almost half of all marriages involved at least one spouse who had been married previously (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998). Remarriage rates...
The current low rates of marriage and remarriage and the high incidence of divorce in the United States are the bases of deep concern about the future of marriage and the family. Some have used these data to argue the demise of the family in American...
Marital adjustment has long been a popular topic in studies of the family, probably because the concept is believed to be closely related to the stability of a given marriage. Well-adjusted marriages are expected to last for a long time, while poorly...
The practice of marriage is one of the universal aspects of the human experience. It is an ancient practice, bound by tradition, customs and laws. Through marriage, new families begin and established ones continue into a new generation. In the United...
Marriage is generally understood to be a more or less formal, conventional intimate couple relationship. Typically, marriage is celebrated as the exclusive and permanent union of one man and one woman as husband and wife. Marriage is often presented as...
The discussion of marriage is extensive and varied, including both general statements and detailed regulations. Considered together, the verses exhibit an unresolved tension between mutuality and hierarchy. Marriage is for purposes of love and...
The institution of marriage, which has been defined as ‘the union of man and woman such that the children born from the woman are recognised as legitimate by the parents’ (Notes and Queries on Anthropology 1951:) has constituted a central...
"A person separated from the family will be eaten by wolves." This Central Asian proverb reveals much about the pervasive belief system in this region regarding the importance of families and the need for members to remain interconnected....
Chinese weddings serve to build and reinforce social networks, in addition to joining a man and a woman. As in other communities with a dominant pattern of patrilocal postmarital residence, marriage inducts new members into the family and...
Historically and cross-culturally marriage has taken many different forms. Anthropologists especially devoted much energy to specifying these forms and analysing the economic and social characteristics which generated distinct marriage systems....
Family and marriage are important in the social economy of West Asia. The dominant religion of the area is Islam, and therefore the mores that govern marriage and family life in the region are derived from, and firmly rooted in, Islamic traditions. As...
A bad wife drinks a big share of her bad buttermilk. (Irish) A bad wife is a lifelong death. (Unknown) A bad wife is sixty years of a bad harvest. (Japanese) A bad wife will lead her family to downfall. (Korean) A bad wife wishes her husband’s...
For most of Chinese history, marriage was arranged by parents. This tradition has its roots in the strong belief that marriage is a family affair and should involve households of similar socioeconomic statuses (mengdang hudui or ‘matching...
A good man does not get a good wife; and a leper marries a flowering branch. (Chinese) A maiden marries to please her parents, a widow to please herself. (Chinese) A married man is a caged bird. (Spanish) A young man married is a young man marred....
. Under Roman and canon law, the institution of marriage had a contractual dimension that influenced Merovingian practices. Betrothal became part of Frankish marriage customs, often formalized by written contract between families. Upon betrothal under...
A marriage of two has God as its author. (Spanish) Better a dove on the plate than a wood grouse in the mating place. (Russian) Better a fair pair of heels than a halter. (Russian) By day they fight, to bed at night. (Yiddish) Dream of a funeral and...
While wives in earlier times appear to have regularly addressed their partners as ‘husband’, husbands do not seem to have returned the compliment and used ‘wife’ as a normal term of address. There is a useful passage in The...
The religious and legal union between man and woman. From *Biblical times, monogamy has been the general rule among the *Jews. Jews must marry within their own religious community (see *INTERMARRIAGE) and both marriage and having children are a...
Wives appear to have regularly addressed their marital partners as ‘husband’ in the seventeenth century. Shakespeare has many instances of the word being used vocatively on its own, or in phrases like ‘good husband’,...
(vivāha) is a major sacrament in Hinduism which lasts, according to Manu, for all successive lives, and therefore widows should not remarry. The main duty in marriage is to produce offspring and erotic satisfaction. The consummation of a marriage...
A deaf husband and a blind wife make a happy couple. (French) A good Jack makes a good Jill. (American) A good wife makes for a good husband. (English) A man who’s too good for the world is no good to his wife. (Yiddish) A man without a wife is...
A wife or husband can refer to ‘my spouse’, meaning ‘my married partner’, my wife or husband as the case may be. The word would therefore seem to be a convenient marital term of address, but it has never been commonly used,...
A bad husband is never lost. (Spanish) A good husband is healthy and absent. (Japanese) Call your husband cuckold in jest, and he’ll never suspect you. (Turkish) Don’t stay long when the husband is not at home. (Japanese) The husband is...
Age and wedlock bring a man to his nightcap. (English) Age and wedlock tame man and beast. (English) Wedlock is a padlock. (Chinese) Who weds a sot to get his cot, will lose the cot and keep the sot....
Bsm. is not concerned with the ceremony of marriage, but Bhikkhus, and monks of the M. Bst. Orders may be called in to recite Scriptures at a birth or...
