คำบรรยาย (en)

Marriage was never about love. That idea is less than 200 years old. For most of human history, marriage was a transaction. A father gave his daughter to another family in exchange for land, cattle, political alliances, or the cancellation of debt. The woman was not asked. She was transferred. The word marriage comes from the Latin word for husband, which itself comes from the word for house. A wife was part of the household, listed alongside property. In ancient Rome, a woman legally ceased to exist when she married. Her identity, her name, her inheritance, all transferred to her husband. She became an extension of him. This was not considered cruel. It was considered order. For thousands of years, across every continent, every religion, every culture, marriage was about survival, strategy, and power. Love was considered a dangerous distraction. Some philosophers warned against it. The idea of marrying someone because you love them Romantic love as the foundation of marriage only became mainstream in the West in the 1800s, and even then only slowly. We have had romantic marriage for roughly 200 years. We had transactional marriage for roughly 4,000 years before that, and we are still arguing about how it works.