Stephanie Coontz

Well, I've been studying the history of family life for many, many years, but I specifically got interested in marriage as we got into these debates about what traditional marriage was.

Marriage originally arose in more egalitarian band level societies as a way of sharing resources and establishing peaceful relations with groups that you might otherwise only see occasionally and you might not know if they were going to be friends or enemies.

I marry my child off to you and that means you owe me things but I also owe you things.

Well, then Caesar died, and Mark Anthony came along.

And, of course, the story tells that she seduced him.

But, you know, when you really look at what was happening practically, this was another political alliance.

First, as did Caesar.

And Anthony could rule in his place.

So it was a great big political alliance, just like Game of Thrones.

So people who were bakers married other bakers.

This clip you used is perfect because it illustrates the fact that men found it easier to embrace the love match than women did.

Men could marry down because they could go out and earn wages.

Women had to be very, very cautious.

You know, as you could say, my heart inclines to Harry, but, you know, I'd better marry who my parents want me to and the person who is most likely to be able to support me.

And so there was a prolonged period of time where men actually were more romantic than women in the courtship arena.

And you got this new theory that love was a union of opposites.

Well, absolutely.

But what's interesting about this clip is that the concept of the male breadwinner was unknown before the 19th century.

Women worked in the home, but so did men.

And men didn't go out and bring home the bacon.

Women helped raise the pig.

Maybe the man butchered it, but the woman often cured the bacon and took the bacon to market.

So, again, this was part of this new idea of love that I talked about earlier.

the idea that men and women were so different that the man had to do all the outside stuff because the woman couldn't do it, and the woman had to do all the inside stuff because the man couldn't do it and wasn't supposed to do it.

You know, it's important to understand that love itself, the definition has changed.

It's different today than it was at the beginning of the love match when it was a union of opposites.

And today it's really like a union of people who share so many values.

Since my children were young, I've lost both my parents to cancer, had to manage the business of death and of grieving on my own as being an only child.

And my children also had witnessed a violent attack that happened on the porch of our old home.

I also found out that I had two rare medical conditions.

One of them took a few years and a lot of stress to get diagnosed, and the other one just requires a lot of stressful surveillance.

So this is just a short part of the list.

but I definitely felt the pressure for a redemptive spin on my life and basically I spent my last several years just dealing with the fallout of this I have no elevator pitch to give to people at parties about you know how my life has somehow come to a meaningful culmination out of all of this but I

You know, I guess what's gotten me through is just that I realized that we were hit by an onslaught of events that most of which were out of our control.

And we bear the scars, but we're still putting one foot in front of the other.

And our story is still continuing.

Thank you.