Why do people get married? In modern society, it seems like there really is only one good answer to that question: Love.
But throughout history, people have pledged their troth to one another for a wide range of reasons that had little or nothing to do with love. People marry for money, government benefits, immigration benefits — or even criminal benefits.
Criminal benefits?
“Marrying to not go to jail seems like the exact opposite of marrying for love,” says Marcia Zug, the Miles and Ann Loadholdt Professor of Family Law at the University of South Carolina’s Joseph F. Rice School of Law. “But I had all these stories, and I realized that was clearly something that was driving a lot of marriages.”
Zug studies and teaches marriage as a legal concept. Her first book, Buying A Bride, explored the history of mail-order marriage in the U.S. Her new book, You’ll Do: A History of Marrying for Reasons Other than Love, looks at all those non-romantic love reasons to get married, including marrying someone to save their life.
Zug details her own family’s version of a non-romantic match in the opening of the book and credits it as her inspiration.
Her great-aunt Rosie was working in a garment factory in New York in the 1930s. She and many of her co-workers were Jewish, including her best friend, whose brother was living in Poland at that very dangerous time. The brother, Sol, could not get approved to move to America at that time because the U.S.’s immigration restrictions limited the immigration of ‘undesirable’ groups such as Jews, Zug explains.
“One of the questions that I always ask my law students is ‘How many federal benefits do you think attach to marriage?’”
In 1937, as Nazi Germany was preparing for war, Rosie agreed to marry Sol to get him safely out of Poland and into the U.S. They married, had a daughter and eventually fell in love.
“Rosie and Sol’s story has a happy ending, yet it’s a tale that haunts me,” Zug writes. “If Rosie hadn’t married Sol, he almost certainly would have died in a Nazi concentration camp. Marriage saved his life.”
Immigration benefits are just one of many federal benefits conveyed by marriage. And knowing the full scope of those benefits is important, she explains, because it can help people decide whether to get married.
“One of the questions that I always ask my law students is ‘How many federal benefits do you think attach to marriage?’” Zug says. “This year I think the starting bid was, like, 12. The students are flabbergasted when I tell them that there are well over a thousand federal benefits alone.”
Zug wrote the book to be accessible to a general audience because the themes are universal.
“My previous book was definitely for an academic audience, and I was pleasantly surprised when I got a decent amount of non-law-professor people who were interested,” she says. “It made me think — marriage and families — it’s a topic that lots of people have thoughts, opinions, worries or just an interest in.”
She also notes that opinions about marriage used to be generally more practical than they are today.
“There’s a big disconnect between marriage as this romantic emotional institution and marriage as a legal institution,” she says. “And there was a time when we recognized the legal benefits that come from marriage, and they were front and center, and it was fine to talk about them, and it was fine to marry for them. We’ve moved away from this, and the book explores why that happens.”