Marriage: Historically and Globally, Love Had Nothing to Do With It

How the institution the world calls romantic was built, brick by brick, on land, labor, lineage, and leverage.

Pick up any bridal magazine, watch any romantic comedy, or scroll through a weekend's worth of proposal videos, and you will find the same story retold endlessly: two people "fall in love," and because they are in love, they marry. It feels as natural as gravity. It also happens to be almost entirely a product of the last two hundred years — and even then, only in certain corners of the world. For the overwhelming majority of human history, in the overwhelming majority of cultures, marriage was not a romantic institution. It was an economic one.

That is not a cynical statement. It is simply history. Marriage, as it was practiced from Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, from Han dynasty China to pre-colonial West Africa, functioned as a mechanism for transferring property, consolidating political power, organizing agricultural labor, managing inheritance, forging military alliances, and regulating who owed whom what. The feelings of the people inside the marriage were, at best, a secondary consideration. At worst, they were irrelevant.

"For most of history, marriage was far too important an economic and political institution to be left to the whims of individual attraction."

Historian Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History (2005)

Understanding marriage as an economic construct does not diminish it. It illuminates it. It explains why marriage laws look the way they do, why dowries and bride prices persisted for millennia, why royal families have always been obsessed with who their children wed, and why, even today, research consistently shows that financial compatibility and economic stress are among the leading predictors of divorce. Love may have entered the building, but economics built the building.

Ancient Mesopotamia: Marriage as Bilateral Contract

The earliest written legal codes humanity has produced — including the Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2100 BCE) and the far more famous Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE) — devote significant attention to marriage. Not to its romance. To its terms. Who paid whom. What property transferred at betrothal. What happened to the dowry if the husband died. What the penalties were for adultery, abandonment, or failure to produce heirs.

In ancient Mesopotamia, marriage was a legally binding contract between families — principally between the groom's family and the bride's father. The groom's family delivered a "bride price" (terhatum) to the bride's family, essentially compensating them for the loss of a productive household member. The bride's family then assembled a dowry — goods, silver, land — that would technically remain the bride's property within the marriage but functioned as her family's stake in the new household. These were not gifts. They were capital transfers, documented and enforceable.

The contract specified obligations on both sides. A husband who found his wife "deficient" could return her to her father, recovering his bride price. A wife who was neglectful could be demoted to the status of a slave within the household. A husband who took a second wife without cause owed his first wife financial compensation. Every clause reflects the same underlying assumption: marriage is a business arrangement, and business arrangements require enforceable terms.

Economic Terms Common to Ancient Marriage Contracts

• Bride price (terhatum): Payment from groom's family to bride's family, compensating for her labor and reproductive value.

• Dowry: Property transferred from bride's family to the new household; theoretically the bride's, practically shared.

• Mohar (Hebrew): The equivalent bride payment in ancient Israelite custom, recorded across the Hebrew Bible.

• Dos (Roman): The Roman dowry system, legally distinct from the bride's personal property and extensively regulated.

• Dower rights: A widow's guaranteed claim on a portion of her husband's estate — the medieval legal descendant of the Mesopotamian system.

Ancient Greece and Rome: Property, Citizenship, and Legitimate Heirs

Classical Athens refined the economic logic of marriage with characteristic philosophical precision. A citizen woman (astē) could not own property in her own name, could not enter contracts, and could not participate in public life. She required a male guardian (kyrios) — first her father, then her husband — to act on her behalf legally and economically. Marriage, in this context, was the mechanism by which a woman's guardianship transferred from one male household to another, along with her dowry.

The primary function of an Athenian marriage, beyond labor and property consolidation, was the production of legitimate heirs. Only children born within a recognized marriage between two Athenian citizens could inherit property and claim citizenship rights. This made marriage not merely personal but political: the citizenship rolls, military obligations, and property records of the city-state all depended on the institution functioning as designed.

Rome systematized this further. Roman law distinguished between marriage (iustum matrimonium), concubinage, and other forms of cohabitation, and the distinctions mattered enormously for inheritance. A Roman man's legitimate children — those born of a proper marriage — were his heirs. His children by a concubine generally were not, unless he formally acknowledged and emancipated them. The entire architecture of Roman property law was built on this distinction, which is why Roman jurists wrote about marriage at such extraordinary length.

"The Romans did not marry for love. They married to produce legitimate heirs who could inherit property and continue the family name."

Classical historian Mary Beard

Medieval Europe: Alliance, Feudalism, and the Church's Surprising Role

Medieval European marriage sat at the intersection of feudal economics and ecclesiastical regulation — and the two were frequently in tension. For the nobility, marriage was statecraft. A duke's daughter was a diplomatic asset. A marriage alliance could end a war, transfer a county, or produce an heir who united two rival claims to a throne. Love was not a consideration, and no one pretended otherwise. Henry II of England married Eleanor of Aquitaine not because he was besotted (though he may well have been, at first) but because she brought the Duchy of Aquitaine with her — an enormous territory in southwestern France.

At every level of feudal society, marriage organized the transfer of land. Peasant marriages required the approval of the local lord, because when a serf's daughter married and moved to another manor, she took her labor — and potentially her children's labor — with her. Lords charged fees for granting permission to marry. In some regions, the lord held a legal right to sleep with a new bride on her wedding night (the droit du seigneur), a custom almost certainly more about asserting dominance and economic control than about actual sexual access. The point was who owned whom.

The Catholic Church complicated this picture in an interesting way. From the 12th century onward, the Church declared that a valid marriage required the free consent of both parties — a radical idea for its time. Pope Alexander III ruled that it was the consent of the couple, not the consent of their families, that made a marriage binding. This was, in theory, a protection for individuals against being married against their will. In practice, it took centuries to meaningfully erode family control. But the Church's insistence on consent planted a philosophical seed that would eventually bloom into the modern idea of companionate marriage.

The Medieval Dowry Economy in Numbers

• In 15th-century Florence, elite families spent 15–20% of total household wealth on a daughter's dowry — a staggering economic commitment.

• The Monte delle Doti (Dowry Fund), established in Florence in 1425, functioned as a government savings bond: fathers invested at a daughter's birth, and the state returned the sum — with interest — at her marriage. The state used the capital in the interim to finance wars.

• Failure to pay an agreed dowry was grounds for the groom's family to dissolve the marriage and demand restitution through the courts.

• Convents served partly as economic relief valves: daughters for whom no sufficient dowry could be assembled were placed in religious orders, which required a smaller "spiritual dowry" than a secular marriage.

IV

China and Japan: Family Networks and the Marriage Market

In imperial China, marriage was inseparable from the clan system and the Confucian moral framework that undergirded it. The family — not the individual — was the primary social and economic unit, and marriage was the mechanism by which families formed alliances, consolidated landholdings, and managed the succession of ritual and property responsibilities. A Chinese man's duty to his ancestors required him to produce sons who would continue the sacrificial rites that maintained family continuity across generations. Marriage was, in this sense, an obligation to the dead as much as to the living.

Marriages were arranged by parents and negotiated through professional matchmakers (méirén), whose role was partly social, partly commercial. They assessed the economic compatibility of families, verified the absence of shared surnames (which would constitute a forbidden consanguineous union under Confucian law), and negotiated the terms of the betrothal gifts and bride price. The Four Pillars of the prospective couple — their birth year, month, day, and hour, used for astrological compatibility — were consulted, but the astrological reading was as much a ritual legitimation of a decision already made on economic grounds as a genuine determinant.

Japan developed parallel institutions. The samurai class practiced strategic marriage with the same deliberateness as European nobility; alliances between daimyō were cemented through the exchange of daughters. Among commoners, the economic logic was equally present if less dramatic: a farming family's survival could depend on marrying a son or daughter into a family with complementary resources — more land, a different trade skill, access to irrigation.

V

Africa: Bride Wealth and the Misunderstood Transaction

Few marriage customs have been more systematically misunderstood by Western observers than African bride wealth — the practice, widespread across sub-Saharan Africa, of the groom's family transferring cattle, goats, goods, or increasingly cash to the bride's family before or at marriage. Colonial-era Europeans dismissed this as "buying a wife," projecting their own assumptions about property onto a complex social institution.

Bride wealth (lobola in southern Africa, bridewealth in anthropological literature) functions very differently from that characterization. It is not a purchase price but a social bond — a tangible acknowledgment that the groom's family is receiving a woman of value, and that they owe the bride's family ongoing obligation. If the marriage fails through the husband's fault, the bride wealth may be returned. It creates a stake in the marriage's success for both families. It establishes the legitimacy of the children of the union as members of the husband's lineage.

The economic dimensions are real and significant — cattle represent concentrated wealth in pastoral societies, and a family's ability to assemble bride wealth for multiple sons depends on the productive capacity of their herd. But the transaction is simultaneously economic, social, and spiritual. It is economic in the Western sense only if one strips away all the social meaning, which colonial administrators consistently did in order to justify regulating or prohibiting the practice.

India: Dowry, Caste, and a Crisis That Never Ended

If any single culture offers the most unbroken, most documented, and most consequential case study of marriage as economic transaction, it is India. The practice of dowry — the transfer of cash, gold, land, and goods from the bride's family to the groom's household — stretches back more than three thousand years in the subcontinent's recorded history, appears in ancient Sanskrit texts including the Manusmriti and the Arthashastra, and continues, in robust and often violent form, into the present day. India is not a historical example. It is a live one.

In ancient India, the institution was called stridhan — "woman's wealth" — and was framed, at least in elite Brahminical texts, as gifts given to a daughter at marriage that would remain her personal property within the new household. The framing was protective in theory. In practice, as scholars of South Asian history have documented extensively, stridhan functioned as a transfer of family wealth to the groom's household, and the bride's claim over it was as enforceable as her social power — which was, in most contexts, limited.

The logic of dowry in India is inseparable from the logic of caste. The Hindu caste system — and its functional equivalents in Muslim and Sikh communities — divided society into endogamous groups: one married within one's jati (subcaste), and marriage outside it was not merely unusual but ritually polluting. This endogamy created closed marriage markets within each caste group, which meant that the supply of eligible grooms for a given family's daughters was sharply constrained. In a constrained market, the price of access to a desirable groom rises. Dowry is, among other things, the economic result of that market structure.

"Dowry is not a gift. It is a price. And when the price is not paid in full, the consequences fall entirely on the woman."

Feminist scholar Veena Talwar Oldenburg, Dowry Murder (2002)

The colonial period — particularly British rule from the mid-18th century through 1947 — dramatically worsened the dowry system in ways that are often overlooked. Colonial land tenure reforms concentrated property ownership in male hands, severing women from the land rights many had customarily held. The cash economy the British introduced made dowry negotiations more explicitly transactional. And the colonial privileging of upper-caste customs as "authentic" Indian tradition amplified Brahminical dowry norms across communities that had previously practiced bride price instead. The British, in other words, inadvertently industrialized the dowry economy while simultaneously offering no legal protections to the women caught inside it.

Independent India banned dowry in 1961 with the Dowry Prohibition Act. The law has been almost entirely ineffective. The practice simply went underground, renamed "gifts" and conducted in cash rather than recorded assets. What followed the ban, paradoxically, was an escalation — not a decline — in dowry-related violence. As India's economy grew in the 1970s and 1980s, the consumer goods available to a new household multiplied: refrigerators, televisions, motorcycles, eventually cars and apartments. Groom's families began demanding these goods as part of dowry negotiations. When demands went unmet — or when a family that had paid a dowry fell into financial difficulty and could not meet escalating "post-wedding demands" — the consequences for brides became lethal.

Dowry deaths — the killing of young wives by husbands or in-laws dissatisfied with dowry payments, most commonly staged as kitchen "accidents" involving kerosene stoves — became a documented, tracked, and horrifying feature of Indian social statistics. The National Crime Records Bureau of India recorded over 6,400 dowry deaths in 2022 alone. That figure almost certainly undercounts the actual toll, as many deaths are recorded as accidents or suicides rather than homicides, and family and community pressure to suppress complaints is substantial. Dowry harassment, a lesser offense, is reported in the tens of thousands of cases annually.

Dowry in India: The Numbers

• The Dowry Prohibition Act has been on the books since 1961. Enforcement remains minimal; convictions are rare and often overturned on appeal.

• Over 6,400 dowry deaths were officially recorded in India in 2022 — roughly one every 90 minutes. Researchers believe the true figure is higher.

• A 2021 study published in World Development estimated that dowry payments in India have inflated dramatically since the 1960s, with average real dowry values rising by 60–100% in some regions despite the legal ban.

• Sex-selective abortion — the termination of female fetuses — is partly driven by the economic calculation that daughters represent a dowry liability. India's skewed sex ratio at birth (approximately 111 boys per 100 girls in some states) reflects this calculation in demographic data.

• In recent years, urban educated Indian families have rebranded dowry as "wedding expenses" and "gifts," with the economic transfer continuing in kind while the social stigma of the word "dowry" is avoided.

• Bride price (the reverse transfer, from groom to bride's family) historically predominated in lower-caste and tribal communities; colonial and post-colonial "Sanskritization" — lower-caste adoption of upper-caste customs as markers of status — has in some areas shifted these communities toward dowry, spreading the economic burden further.

The persistence of dowry in India is not a failure of modernity to arrive. It is a demonstration of how deeply economic logic is embedded in marriage institutions — and how resistant those institutions are to legal reform when the underlying economic incentives remain unchanged. As long as women's labor is undervalued, as long as a son is an economic asset (a future earner who will support aging parents) and a daughter is perceived as an economic liability (who will leave the family and take resources with her), the economic calculus that produces dowry will remain in place. A law cannot repeal an economic structure.

The 18th and 19th Centuries: When Love Entered the Equation

The idea that one should marry for love — that romantic feeling is not just a pleasant bonus but the primary legitimate reason for marriage — is historically quite recent. Its origins lie in the Enlightenment's valorization of individual reason and sentiment, in the Romantic movement's elevation of feeling above social obligation, and in the specific economic conditions of industrial capitalism that gradually made the love match economically possible.

As industrial economies expanded and wage labor became more common, young men and women increasingly had access to income independent of their parents. They could, in principle, support a household without inheriting land or waiting for a parental transfer of capital. This economic independence gave individuals — men first, then slowly women — the practical ability to choose their own partners. The ideology of romantic love filled the resulting cultural space.

But even as the love match became the stated ideal, economic calculation persisted underneath it. The 19th-century marriage market — the Season in London, the ball in the American South, the matchmaking networks of the Jewish Pale of Settlement — was explicitly about presenting eligible men and women of compatible economic backgrounds to one another. One was expected to fall in love with someone of appropriate means. Falling in love with someone of wildly inappropriate means was called a "misalliance" and treated as a social catastrophe. Jane Austen was not satirizing her society from the outside when she wrote about financial calculations in matters of the heart. She was describing it from the inside, with clear eyes.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

The 20th Century and the Incomplete Revolution

The 20th century produced what might be called the love marriage revolution — the genuine, widespread adoption of romantic choice as the primary criterion for marriage selection, accompanied by legal reforms that dismantled many of the most nakedly economic features of the institution. In most Western countries, married women gained the right to own property separately from their husbands, enter contracts, maintain their own bank accounts, and eventually file for divorce without proving fault. These reforms were profound.

Yet the economic infrastructure of marriage did not disappear. It transformed. Tax codes continued (and in many countries still continue) to treat married couples as a single economic unit. Health insurance, in the uniquely American system, is distributed largely through employment and extended to spouses. Social Security survivor benefits, inheritance law, hospital visitation rights, immigration sponsorship — all of these continued to be organized around the legal status of marriage, creating powerful economic incentives to formalize relationships regardless of their emotional content.

The persistence of economically advantaged "assortative mating" — the tendency of people to marry others of similar educational and economic backgrounds — suggests that even freely chosen marriages continue to reproduce economic stratification. Studies consistently find that college-educated Americans are far more likely to marry other college-educated Americans than their parents' or grandparents' generations were. Love may be the stated reason. The mechanism of social and economic sorting continues to operate in the background.

Marriage's Economic Functions Today (United States)

• Married couples file joint tax returns, often at rates more favorable than two single individuals of equivalent income — the so-called "marriage bonus" (though a "marriage penalty" exists in some income ranges).

• A surviving spouse inherits assets up to any amount free of federal estate tax; unmarried partners do not receive this exemption automatically.

• Social Security survivor benefits extend to surviving spouses, providing significant financial security unavailable to long-term unmarried partners.

• Employer-provided health insurance covers spouses; covering unmarried domestic partners is optional and taxable as imputed income.

• The U.S. immigration system grants spousal visas as a pathway to permanent residency, an economic and legal benefit unavailable to unmarried partners without alternative visa categories.

The Liberation Dividend: What Happens When Women Don't Need Marriage to Survive

The single most disruptive force in the five-thousand-year history of marriage as an economic institution has not been romantic love, religious reform, or even legal change. It has been women's access to independent economic and reproductive power. When women can earn their own income, control their own reproduction, own property, and access credit in their own names, the foundational logic of compulsory marriage collapses. Not marriage itself — but the version of marriage built on female dependency and male control.

The 20th century delivered this transformation in waves, unevenly distributed across the globe but unmistakable in its direction. In the United States, the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 finally made it illegal for banks to deny a woman credit without a male co-signer — meaning that before 1974, an American woman could not legally open a credit card in her own name without her husband's permission. That is not ancient history. People alive today were adults when that changed.

Reproductive autonomy followed a parallel trajectory. The Supreme Court's Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) established the right of married couples to use contraception. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended that right to unmarried individuals. Roe v. Wade (1973) recognized a constitutional right to abortion. Together, these decisions gave American women something that had been available to almost no women in human history: the practical ability to decide if and when to bear children, independent of marriage. The economic consequences were immediate and measurable. Women who could control their reproductive timing invested more in their own education. They entered the workforce in larger numbers. They postponed marriage. They left bad marriages more readily. They earned more.

"The ability to control the timing of childbearing is probably the single most important factor in women's economic advancement over the past half century."

Economist Claudia Goldin, Nobel Prize in Economics (2023)

Globally, the picture is similarly striking. In Scandinavia, where robust welfare states provide universal healthcare, subsidized childcare, and generous parental leave regardless of marital status, marriage rates have declined sharply — not because people love each other less, but because the economic compulsion to marry has been substantially removed. Women there do not need a husband's income to raise a child, access healthcare, or secure housing. They marry, or don't, based on what they actually want. The result is lower marriage rates and, perhaps counterintuitively, some of the world's highest levels of reported relationship satisfaction.

In South Korea, Japan, and increasingly urban China, young women are opting out of marriage at historic rates. South Korean women, who face some of the developed world's most stubborn gender wage gaps and pervasive workplace discrimination, have begun articulating an explicit refusal — the "4B movement" (biyeonae, bihon, bisekseu, bichulsan: no dating, no marriage, no sex with men, no childbirth) — as a political and economic statement. When marriage is still structured to extract disproportionate domestic labor from women while offering them diminished career prospects and social status, they are doing the math. They are declining the contract.

The data is consistent across contexts: as women's economic independence rises, their dependence on marriage falls. This does not mean women stop forming partnerships or stop wanting companionship. It means the transaction changes. Women who do not need marriage for survival choose it differently — more deliberately, with higher expectations, and with greater willingness to leave when those expectations are not met. Divorce rates in countries with high female labor force participation are higher not because those marriages are worse, but because women in them have the economic capacity to exit. They always had reasons to leave. Now they have options.

The Global Retreat from Compulsory Marriage

• In the United States, the share of adults who have never married has more than doubled since 1960 — from roughly 10% to over 35% as of the mid-2020s, with the steepest increases among women with college degrees.

• South Korea recorded a total fertility rate of approximately 0.72 in 2023 — the lowest of any country ever recorded. Economists link the decline directly to the cost-benefit calculus facing educated Korean women who anticipate career penalties upon marriage and motherhood.

• In Iceland, over 70% of children are born outside of marriage — not into instability, but into stable cohabiting partnerships that carry full legal protections equivalent to marriage. The institution has been largely decoupled from childrearing.

• In sub-Saharan Africa, expansions of girls' secondary education are the single strongest predictor of delayed marriage age — stronger than legal age minimums, stronger than economic development alone.

• Women in countries with legal access to contraception marry on average 1.5–2 years later than women in countries without it — a gap with compounding economic consequences across a lifetime.

Putting Women Back in the Box: The Heritage Foundation and the Politics of Domestic Restoration

The relationship between women's economic independence and declining marriage rates has not gone unnoticed by those who view both trends as problems. In the United States, a constellation of conservative policy organizations — most prominently the Heritage Foundation, but also the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a network of think tanks aligned with the Christian nationalist movement — have spent the past three decades developing policy frameworks explicitly designed to make marriage more economically necessary and female independence more economically costly. They call it "family policy." The architecture is familiar to anyone who has studied the last five thousand years of marriage history.

The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 and the intellectual engine behind the Reagan Revolution's social agenda, has consistently framed declining marriage rates as a civilizational crisis. Its researchers produce regular reports arguing that marriage — specifically heterosexual, first marriage — is the primary antidote to poverty, crime, and social dysfunction. The causal claim is contested by mainstream family demographers, who point out that the correlation between marriage and economic stability runs substantially in the other direction: economically stable people marry more, rather than marriage making people economically stable. But the Heritage framing serves a political function that the academic literature does not, which is why it persists.

Heritage's Project 2025 — the 920-page governing blueprint prepared for a potential second Trump administration, published in 2023 — contains extensive marriage and family policy provisions. The document calls for eliminating federal funding for contraception access through Title X, restricting no-fault divorce, restructuring tax policy to more heavily incentivize marriage over single parenthood, and defunding comprehensive sex education in favor of abstinence-only curricula. Each of these provisions, examined individually, is a policy choice about resource allocation. Examined together, they form a coherent program: reduce women's access to reproductive autonomy, increase the financial penalty for single motherhood, and make the economic calculus of marriage more compelling by degrading the alternatives.

"The document reads less like a policy platform and more like a restoration project — an attempt to rebuild the economic conditions that made women's dependence on marriage structurally mandatory."

Political scientist Melinda Cooper, Family Values (2017)

The Dobbs decision — Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, decided by the Supreme Court in June 2022 — overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion. The immediate policy consequence was that abortion became illegal or severely restricted in roughly half of U.S. states. The economic consequence, which has received less sustained attention in mainstream coverage, is that women in those states now face a measurably increased risk of unplanned parenthood.

Research on previous abortion restrictions — including studies of the period before Roe — consistently finds that when women cannot control their reproductive timing, they interrupt their education, reduce their workforce participation, and earn less across their lifetimes. They also become more financially dependent on male partners. That dependency, in turn, makes marriage more economically necessary. The medieval lord who charged fees to permit a serf's daughter to marry would recognize the mechanism, even if he would not recognize the vocabulary.

The Heritage Foundation's social policy is not framed in terms of economic control. It is framed in terms of children's welfare, religious values, and civilizational continuity — the same rhetorical registers that have been used to justify the economic architecture of marriage for most of recorded history. Ancient texts framed the bride price as honoring the bride's family. Medieval canon law framed marriage restrictions as protecting the sanctity of the sacrament. Victorian moralists framed the confinement of women to the domestic sphere as protecting their purity and their children's character. In each case, the moral language dressed an economic arrangement. The Heritage Foundation is working in a long tradition.

Policy Provisions and Their Economic Effects on Women

• Restricting contraception access: Studies of Title X funding find that every dollar invested in family planning saves roughly seven dollars in public health and social services — the savings accrue to the state; the cost of restriction falls on low-income women who cannot access private alternatives.

• Eliminating no-fault divorce: States with easier divorce access show lower rates of domestic violence and female suicide — findings consistent with the economic logic that exit options reduce abuse. Restricting divorce removes women's ability to leave without proving fault in court, a process that is expensive, slow, and often retraumatizing.

• Abstinence-only education: A comprehensive review of the evidence finds that abstinence-only programs do not reduce teen sexual activity but are associated with higher rates of unintended pregnancy — outcomes that disproportionately constrain young women's educational and economic trajectories.

• Post-Dobbs reproductive restrictions: Early economic research projects that abortion bans will reduce women's labor force participation by 2–4% in affected states, with the largest effects on women without college degrees — the women with the least ability to travel for reproductive care.

• Tax restructuring favoring marriage: Heritage proposals to expand the Child Tax Credit exclusively to married parents, rather than to all parents, would directly penalize single mothers — 80% of single-parent households are headed by women — for their marital status rather than their parenting.

It is worth being precise about what is and is not being claimed here. The Heritage Foundation and its allies are not wrong that marriage, on average, correlates with better economic outcomes for children. They are wrong — or at minimum, deeply misleading — when they present that correlation as evidence that promoting marriage is the best policy tool for improving children's lives, rather than directly addressing the poverty and inequality that make family instability more likely in the first place. And they are engaged in something more than selective use of evidence when they design policies that systematically degrade the alternatives to marriage for women while presenting the result as "family values." They are, whether they articulate it this way or not, attempting to restore the economic conditions under which marriage was not a choice but a structural necessity.

Women around the world are voting with their lives on this question. They are delaying marriage, leaving marriages, refusing marriage, and demanding that when they do marry, the terms be different from the terms their grandmothers faced. The conservative backlash to this — not just in the United States but in Hungary, Russia, Turkey, and across the developing world, where governments have variously restricted divorce, criminalized abortion, cut childcare, and offered cash incentives for bearing children within marriage — is a political acknowledgment that the ancient economic logic of marriage is losing its grip. The only way to restore it is to restore the conditions of female dependency that made it work.

The history of marriage is not a story of love gradually overcoming economic self-interest. It is a story of economic organization that has, in some times and places, made room for love — and has, in those same times and places, continued to function as an economic institution underneath the romantic narrative placed atop it. The bride price in ancient Mesopotamia, the dowry in medieval Florence, the lobola in southern Africa, the kerosene-stove deaths in modern India, and the policy provisions of Project 2025 are not separate phenomena. They are points on a continuous line.

What has changed — what is genuinely new in the last century, and particularly the last fifty years — is that women in much of the world have, for the first time in recorded history, acquired the economic and reproductive tools to negotiate the terms of that contract, or to decline it entirely. Education, wages, contraception, credit, legal property rights, and the ability to exit bad marriages without financial ruin: these are not amenities. They are the preconditions of genuine consent. Every one of them is currently under political pressure somewhere in the world.

The question our moment is actually asking — beneath the culture war language about "traditional values" and "the decline of the family" — is the same question that has animated marriage policy since the first clay tablet contract in Ur: who controls the terms? For five thousand years, the answer was: not women. The last hundred years have been the first sustained challenge to that arrangement. The resistance to that challenge, and its ferocity, tells us everything about what was always really at stake.

Love, whether in or out of marriage, remains a gift. But marriage itself was built for other purposes. And the fight to keep those purposes intact — or to finally dismantle them — is very much still underway.