Chelsea Follett
Chelsea Follett

As another Valentine’s Day approaches, much ink has been spilled on the declining marriage rate and on the topic of which people are more or less likely to marry. Statistics showing a long-term decrease in marriage are concerning for many reasons: Fewer marriages may mean fewer people finding love, fewer children being born, and perhaps a lonelier and more fragmented society.
Amid this decline in marriage, it might be tempting to imagine that modern society is hopeless, while our ancestors had it made when it came to romance. Perhaps in the villages of yore, life was simpler, love and marriage came easily, and most of our ancestors lived happily ever after in contented, wedded bliss.
But the truth is that people in the preindustrial past faced few possibilities regarding marriage. The number of potential partners in one’s tiny village was low, and the few available choices might all be one’s cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children.
Peasants “married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects were often incomprehensible to men living only a few miles away,” according to the historian William Manchester. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person could easily imagine. By the 18th century, little had changed. “Most villagers married people from within 10 miles of home,” as the historian Kirstin Olsen noted.
The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as consanguineous pairings (including plenty of first cousins) and couples with substantial age gaps. Even in the 18th century, in England, grooms could legally be as young as 14 and brides as young as 12, although that was rare in practice, thankfully.
Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices, perhaps it is unsurprising that many people seemingly settled for spouses ill-suited to them and that “much of the satirical literature of the 18th century,” in Olsen’s words,  » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/worried-about-declining-marriage-rates-our-ancestors-may-have-had-it-worse