Hearts, Romance and Brides in Cages

Monday is Valentine’s Day, which isn't that great because who wants to go out to a fancy dinner on a Monday and have one eye on the clock?

For romantic couples Valentine’s Day is the epitome of holidays. It’s the day of declaration, a day for vowing love forevermore. For old marrieds, like Troy and me, it’s a day for celebration that we made it to another Valentine’s Day.

For a lot of us Valentine’s Day means the Day After Valentine’s Day Sale where they have all that great chocolate 50-percent off.

Many a man has chosen Valentine’s Day as the day to ask the love of his life to marry him. How romantic. This is quite different from the approach used by the people of the Trobriand Islands near Papua, New Guinea. There, a woman simply goes up to the man of her choice and bites him on the arm. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t like the biter. She made her choice and he has to marry her.

The ancient Babylonians did it quite differently. There were no old maids because each year all marriageable females were auctioned off. Men bid highly for the most beautiful maidens and that money was used as dowries to go with the less attractive women to entice men to take them. Under this custom there were few unattached females.

I like the custom in ancient Greece and I am going to adopt it. There, women stayed young by counting their age from the date on which they were married rather from the date of their birth. They felt marriage was the true beginning of life and everything that went before was merely preparation. This year I am 46.

Here are some more interesting tidbits:

In many countries in bygone years, courting rituals were strictly enforced to keep the bride’s virtue intact before the actual marriage. And in some parts of the world the methods were extreme. In the Solomon Islands a bride-to-be was kept in a cage, closely guarded, and not released until the time of the wedding. The girl’s parents would keep an unusually sharp eye on their future son-in-law, who had to account for his whereabouts at all times.

In Wales future grooms had to develop artistic skill if they wished to be allowed to visit their brides-to-be. To keep the grooms’ hands busy until the wedding, they had to make wooden spoons with very elaborate and delicate designs for the girls’ parents.

In contrast, nineteenth-century Scottish law required brides to certify their productivity by being pregnant on their wedding day. The law was enforced.

Standards of beauty have changed over the ages as well. Nowadays Americans consider a thin, shapely woman sexy and desirable. But it wasn’t always so. In the late nineteenth century the great American beauty was Lillian Russell, and many a young man sighed over her photographs. This famous singer and actress, at the peak of her career, topped the scales at 186 pounds. The “fat is beautiful” viewpoint still prevails, not in America but in part of Nigeria. Here, when young girls reach puberty, they enter fattening houses, where they spend their time eating almost constantly. When they emerge months later, they appear as "mountains of flesh" and are only then considered truly fit for marriage.

Unusual methods of ending marital bliss have also been recorded. Back in the 1870s, in the city of Corinne, Utah, divorce was made so simple that any man could obtain one instantly. By merely slipping a $2.50 gold coin into a machine and turning a crank, he received divorce papers already signed by the local judge. But only men qualified for obtaining a divorce in this manner. The machine was extremely popular—for a while. Utah statutes failed to back up these slot machine divorces, and they were later declared illegal. As a result many men found they had unwittingly become bigamists.

And on that happy note, I bid you all a Happy Valentine’s Day.