Who invented relationships

For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements. The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about B.

Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans.

But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion. What was it about, then? Marriage's primary purpose was to bind women to men, and thus guarantee that a man's children were truly his biological heirs. Through marriage, a woman became a man's property. In the betrothal ceremony of ancient Greece, a father would hand over his daughter with these words: "I pledge my daughter for the purpose of producing legitimate offspring.

If wives failed to produce offspring, their husbands could give them back and marry someone else. When did religion become involved? As the Roman Catholic Church became a powerful institution in Europe, the blessings of a priest became a necessary step for a marriage to be legally recognized.

By the eighth century, marriage was widely accepted in the Catholic church as a sacrament, or a ceremony to bestow God's grace. At the Council of Trent in , the sacramental nature of marriage was written into canon law. Did this change the nature of marriage? Church blessings did improve the lot of wives.

Men were taught to show greater respect for their wives, and forbidden from divorcing them. Christian doctrine declared that "the twain shall be one flesh," giving husband and wife exclusive access to each other's body. This put new pressure on men to remain sexually faithful. But the church still held that men were the head of families, with their wives deferring to their wishes. That was a change from Wellesley, where we still had limited dating, had to be in by midnight in a very much retain-your-virginity community.

Then off I went to Paris, where there was a latent sensuality, people embracing in gardens and sitting on the side of the Seine. And of course, the very shocking ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre advocating what they called a primary relationship outside of marriage while having contingent relations.

That is, you were free in your love and sexual relationships. Freedom was the password. More than anything, there is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate. For a French person, lack of desire in someone is really seen as a defect.

Do you think someone who goes through life closing themselves off to affection is defective? People still developed crushes on each other, except society forbade any match except the one arranged by the parents for reasons unrelated to love. But unrequited or forbidden love hurts and tends to consume a lot of time, attention, and emotional energy. Music provides some solace for those feelings even today, how many songs are about love that didn't work out?

The troubadours played to that need and glorified the whole star-crossed-lovers theme. These were Romance languages, in the sense of being descended from the Romans. Since the love ballads were sung in Romance languages, the terms got confounded and romance came to mean love. Courtly love , as it existed in the middle ages, is nothing like our concept of love today. I would not point to that as the origin of romantic love at all. Sorry I don't have an answer to the question, but my guess is it goes back to pre-civilization man.

Well, there must have been some awareness of it earlier than the middle ages because the Greeks distinguished between eros and agape. Den Beste at PM on October 11, As an aside, the Greek differentiated between philos , eros , and agape.

As an aside, the Greek differentiated between philos, eros, and agape. Actually, the Greeks differentiated among philia, eros, agape and storge - and this is not really an aside, it is the heart of the matter: in large part, "romantic love" does not make these distinctions. I think there are several different issues at play in the question, and in the answers so far. If what you mean by romantic love is "the feeling you get in your chest I think that where the modern notion of "romantic love" differs from the classical view is the idea that one can and even should find a single mate who is both friend and lover - the object of sexual desire and sacrifical devotion in one.

Fulfillment is achieved in romantic union - knowing and loving and cherishing the object of these desires - not in any one aspect, and not in mere possession, as might have been the case in earlier conceptions. What's the real origin of the concept of romantic love?

Sex, and lack of DNA testing in paternity until recently. I'm kinda serious here. It's existed at least as long as the Song of Solomon. I suspect that this REALLY means that in the middle ages, romantic love was sanctioned by society more than it had been before. If someone is claiming that before that, people didn't FEEL love, they I'd say the burden of proof is on them.