Preindustrial marriage was not the fairy tale that many people imagine. Some assume that 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. In reality, limited partner choices, widely tolerated domestic abuse, and frequent early deaths meant marriage was fraught with challenges. In short, marriage wasn't always happily ever after.

People in the past faced few options when it came to marriage. The number of potential partners in one's tiny village was low—the few available choices might all be one's cousins, increasing the risk of birth defects in any resulting children.

Peasants typically married within their own villages, which were so insular that local dialects often proved unintelligible to people living just a few miles away. Travel was rarer, and communities were more secluded than a modern person can easily envision. As William Manchester evocatively put it in his book A World Lit Only by Fire, "Each hamlet was inbred, isolated, unaware of the world beyond the most familiar local landmark: a creek, or mill, or tall tree scarred by lightning." People typically gathered and socialized at a much smaller scale than the modern mind can fathom: The largest crowd recorded in 17th century England, the army that fought at Marston Moor, would easily fit five times over in a modern sports stadium. By the 18th century, little had changed, and the majority of villagers married people living within 10 miles of themselves.

The tiny pool of possible marriage partners often produced matches that might raise eyebrows today, such as blood relatives and couples with large age gaps. As Kirstin Olsen wrote in the book Daily Life in 18th-Century England, "A husband 10 or 15 years older than his bride would arouse little comment," for such relationships were common.

Given the highly limited pool of marriage partner choices, perhaps it is unsurprising that many people seemingly settled for spouses ill-suited to them. Olsen wrote that "much of the satirical literature of the 18th century…lampooned marriage as a hell or prison sentence for one or both partners. The most typical attitude toward marriage evinced in 18th century literature and visual art is a sly, collegial misery." The poem "Wedlock" by the Englishwoman Mehetabel Wesley Wright (1697–1750), herself pressured into a loveless marriage with a plumber, paints a typical picture:

Thou source of discord, pain and care,

Thou sure forerunner of despair,

Thou scorpion with a double face,

Thou lawful plague of human race,

Thou bane of freedom, ease and mirth,

Thou serpent which the angels fly,

Thou monster whom the beasts defy,

Whom wily Jesuits sneer at too;

And Satan (let him have his due)

Was never so confirmed a dunce

To risk damnation more than once.

That wretch, if such a wretch there be,

Who hopes for happiness from thee,

May search successfully as well

For truth in whores and ease in hell.

The Flemish poet and nun Anna Bijns (1493–1575) similarly advised other women to avoid marriage in her poem "Happy the Woman Without a Man." She wrote that a newlywed wife becomes "sorry and sad within a single year" as her husband gets drunk, beats her, cheats on her, and "consider[s] her a slave, that's all."

Men were also often unhappy in marriage. In 1682, an anonymous writer urged men to avoid the institution:

Husband! Thou Dull unpittied Miscreant

Wedded to Noise, to Misery, and Want;

…

Marry'd! O Hell and Furies! Name it not,

…

Begot in Hell to Prosecute Mankind.

'Tis the Destroyer of Our Peace and Health,

Mispender of our precious Time and Wealth;

The Enemy to Wit, Valour, Mirth, all

That we can Virtuous, Good, or Pleasant call.

By Day 'tis nothing but an endless Noise;

By Night the Eccho of Forgotten Joys:

Ye Gods! that Man by his own Slavish Law,

Should on himself such Inconvenience draw

…

And if thou'rt still Unmarry'd, thou art safe.

with whores thou can'st but venture, what is lost

May be Redeem'd again with Care and Cost;

But a Damn'd Wife, Inevitable Fate,

Destroys, Soul, Body, Credit, and Estates.

Disdain for one's wife was common, and many men were dissatisfied with their wives' appearance, lack of faithfulness, drinking habits, and temperaments. Emily Cockayne points out that "a curious little work of 1672 illustrated a misogynistic fantasy. It described a Dutch invention to help all unhappy husbands: a windmill to reform bad wives." The illustration depicts ugly, frowning women entering the mill, led by their husbands, and beautiful, smiling women exiting the contraption. An accompanying description claims that the mill can transform "all sorts of women, as the old, decreped, wrinkled, blear-ey'd, long-nosed, blind, lame, scolds, jealous, angry, poor, drunkerds, whores, sluts; or all others whatsoever. They shall come out of [the] mill, young, active, pleasant, handsome, wise, loving, vertuous and rich."

Widespread antipathy toward one's spouse also found expression in distasteful jokes, such as the following from The Spirit of English Wit:

To "a gentleman in the country, whose wife had the misfortune to hang herself on an apple-tree, a neighbour came in, and begged he would give him a cyon [scion] of that tree, that he might graft it upon one in his own orchard; 'for who knows,' said he, 'but it may bear the same fruit?'"

Not Your Grandparents' 'Traditional' Marriage

Those who imagine that the people of the past unfailingly adhered to stricter standards of sexual restraint and chastity might be alarmed at the frequency of shotgun marriages: A third of all brides were already pregnant at their weddings. Moreover, in England, one historian has suggested that in the 17th century, only about half of those regarded as married were actually married according to canon law (i.e., the ecclesiastical legal system). Many couples forwent a formal wedding and simply moved in together; they were treated as married under common law.

Although shotgun and informal marriages were frequent, marriages often ended in a less-than-ideal manner as well, typically with the untimely death of the husband or wife. Life in 17th century Europe was so fraught with disease, war, and accidents that most marriages ended with a spouse's early death, making remarriage and blended families far more common in the preindustrial past than today, despite what many might assume. Indeed, because life expectancy was low, couples who married in their mid- to late 20s typically had fewer than 20 years together before death ended their union. There often was no lengthy mourning period between a spouse's death and remarriage. In England, up to one-third of widows remarried, and half of them did so within a year of their husbands' passing.

The devastation wrought by the death of a spouse was worsened by sexist inheritance laws. Widows were often dependent on the sons who inherited their husbands' property for support.

Even during wedding celebrations, death was never far from our ancestors' minds. The rate of death in childbirth for medieval women was astronomical. Manchester writes: "On her wedding day, traditionally, [a bride's] mother gave her a piece of fine cloth which could be made into a frock. Six or seven years later it would become her shroud."

Still, people eked out what joy they could get from wedding celebrations. Among ordinary people, weddings were rude and raucous affairs. Olsen explains, "The guests kissed the bride, played practical jokes, sang obscene songs, and ate." When the couple withdrew to their dwelling after the ceremony, they were offered little privacy, as "outside the revelers sang dirty songs and shouted insinuations about what was going on in the bedroom." In Scotland, in a tradition called "the blackening," revelers pelted the bride and groom with rotting food, manure, and mud in preparation for the hardships of marriage.

Weddings were also occasions for alcohol abuse and physical altercations, as historian A. Lynn Martin notes in a research paper:

The anonymous author of In the Christen State of Matrimony (1543) complained that, "when they come to the preaching they are half drunk, some all together….When they come home from the church, then begins excess of eating and drinking and as much is wasted in one day as were sufficient for the two newly married folks half a year to live upon."…The amount of drink consumed was in truth gargantuan…so much wine was consumed by so many people at a wedding at Parma in 1247 that a relatively few banished men were able to seize control of the town.

The situation was no better in France. In the Auvergne region, weddings often ended with evening bouts of violence, after many hours of drunken rowdiness led to fistfights.

Physical fights were far from the only disturbing part of preindustrial weddings. The bride, and the groom for that matter, might both be children. As Manchester writes: "Females could marry…when they reached their twelfth birthday. The age for males was fourteen. Even before she had reached her teens, a girl knew that unless she married before she was twenty-one, society would consider her useless, fit only for the nunnery, or, in England, the spinning wheel (a 'spinster')." Even in the 18th century, in England, legally the groom might be as young as 14 and the bride merely 12 years old, though thankfully that was rare in practice. Early marriages did occur, however. In 1623, a London parish clerk wrote disapprovingly of the wedding of a 17-year-old boy working as a thread maker to the 14-year-old daughter of a porter, calling them a "couple of young Fooles."

People born in ordinary households at least usually had some say in whom they married and when, whereas children in elite families were frequently betrothed from preposterously young ages. Patricians typically arranged betrothals for their children soon after age 7, and in some cases as early as 3.

Following these prepubescent betrothals, marriages could take place soon after the bride reached the age of puberty. Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204) married Louis VII of France when she was 15 and he was 17. Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519), a prominent Italian noblewoman, was married off to her first husband when she was just 13. The groom was 27. As another example, England's King John (1166–1216), the monarch who issued the Magna Carta, married Isabella of Angoulême when she was 12 years old. He was 33. In 1533, Charles V negotiated a marriage contract for his 11-year-old niece, Christina of Denmark, and a man four times her age, granting the groom the right to consummate the union immediately.

Our ancestors were not always faithful to their spouses, but the lower classes may have had a slightly cleaner record than the nobles in that regard. Among the nobility, adultery was nearly universal. In fact, Manchester claims: "Those wives in the noblesse d'épée who remained faithful to their husbands were mocked by the others. To abstain from…adultery was almost a breach of etiquette, like failing to curtsy before royalty."

Abuse, Divorce, Murder, and Wives for Sale

Formal divorce was beyond the means of most ordinary people, so marriages typically dissolved when one spouse died or through abandonment. In 18th century England, only the wealthy could afford the means to secure private acts of Parliament to obtain a divorce, a process that was both complex and extremely costly, requiring both substantial money and influence. A rather shocking (to modern sensibilities) form of divorce known as wife selling sometimes occurred among those who could not afford a formal dissolution of marriage; the Ipswich Journal records such a sale occurring in 1789:

Oct. 29, Samuel Balls sold his wife to Abraham Rade in the parish of Blythburgh in his county for 1 [shilling]. A halter was put around her neck and she was resigned up to this Abraham Rade.

Charles V was a symbol of numerous problems with preindustrial marriage: His deformed jaw was the result of consanguineous marriages in his family, and he also once negotiated a marriage contract between his 11-year-old niece and a man four times her age, granting the right to consummate the union immediately. Portrait of Emperor Charles V, c. 1514.

Such bizarre episodes offer insight into the somewhat quizzical attitude that ordinary people held toward the official marriage code, with local customs and practices varying wildly. Despite the rarity of formal legal divorce among ordinary people, marriage did not usually last long given the high rate of premature death, and it was common for someone to marry several times after being repeatedly widowed.

Many unhappy marriages turned downright abusive. Olsen says, "Domestic violence was tolerated by the courts so long as it was limited to 'moderate physical correction,' and a man could even commit his wife to an insane asylum against her will." Domestic violence was celebrated in works of popular culture such as the upbeat wife beater's anthem, "The Cooper of Fife," a traditional Scottish folk song that inspired a country dance and similar English and American folk ballads. The contrast between the lyrics, which tell a tale of domestic violence, and the song's cheerful tune is jarring to a modern listener. An abused woman's best hope was often not legal recourse, but the possibility that a male relative, neighbor, or sympathetic passerby might notice her plight and take action on her behalf. Olsen wrote: "Neighbors [sometimes] intervened when men beat their wives, shaming the abusers with public processions and chants, or simply stopping a beating, as a saddler did in 1703, telling the abusive husband, 'you shall not beat your wife.'"

Oddly enough, roving nocturnal gangs of bored, drunken young men were perhaps an abused wife's most likely defenders. Some such "youth groups," A. Roger Ekirch relates, "contributed to social control, disciplining adulterers, abusive husbands, and cuckolds for violating common morality. Often occurring at night, charivaris in France, mattinata in Italy, and 'skimmington rides' in England subjected errant neighbors to 'rough music,' mockery, and on occasion, physical abuse."

Women, for their part, were also known to engage in criminal cruelty toward their husbands, such as by lethally poisoning them. Sometimes, these murders were committed in retaliation for domestic abuse. "Aqua Tofana," which one writer called the "bottled revenge of the 17th century wife," was a poison discovered in 17th century Sicily, notoriously sold through much of Italy by women to other women seeking to discreetly end their husbands' lives. Hundreds of victims (mainly men murdered by their wives) are estimated to have perished from the colorless, odorless poison, the precise ingredients of which are today unknown. Women were also occasionally known to attack their husbands at night while the latter slept, according to Ekirch:

An abused housewife in York warned her loutish spouse that she could kill him in bed at night if she wanted. In Germany, Margaretha Craft of Hallbach slew her second husband in bed with an axe "shortly after their union," later covering with manure his severed remains in the cellar. In 1737, a Connecticut husband—perchance while snoring—received from his wife a shovel of hot embers in his gaping mouth.

Interestingly, in England and Scotland, women who killed their husbands were charged not with murder but with petty treason, for defying the "government" of their husbands.

Not all abuse amounted to murder. A church court record from 1598 in Scotland describes a woman named Margaret Schort confessing to throwing a shovel at her husband, splashing ale in his face, cursing at him, and scratching him, for which her public punishment was recommended.

Although women certainly engaged in abuse of men as well, sexist laws frequently enabled men's abuse of women. Should a woman earn money, her husband could appear at any moment and claim her earnings, which the law recognized as his property. For example, in 18th century Britain, a wife could not enter into a contract, draft a will without her husband's consent, or determine her children's education or apprenticeships. In a separation, she lost custody automatically.

With so many difficulties accompanying marriage in the premodern age, it may seem a wonder that anyone married at all. Many people didn't. Contrary to popular belief, in much of Europe, marriage was less common in the past than in modern times. A large number of people never married. Married people were only about a third of the population, compared with about 50 percent in Western Europe today. In northwestern Europe, being married was not common for most adults until well into the 17th century.

But remaining single in the preindustrial world brought its own challenges, as Olsen notes: "The life of a spinster could be a difficult one, with extended family using unattached female relatives as temporary live-in housekeepers when a wife died." In other words, marriage was often the only way that women could avoid the fate of becoming unpaid live-in housekeepers to relatives. Economic necessity thus motivated many marriages. Marrying for love only began to emerge as an ideal in the 18th century and became more and more accepted during the 19th century.

This article is adapted from The Grim Old Days by permission of the Cato Institute.

The post Wives for Sale, Poisoned Husbands, and 12-Year-Old Brides: The Grim Reality of Preindustrial Marriage appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas had waged an unusually public campaign against the denomination’s demands for control.

© Desiree Rios for The New York Times

It's relentless. Newspapers run stories declaring the glorious liberation of mid-life divorce while Hollywood and Netflix get in on the act. Why are we all being encouraged to break up our families, asks Joanna Gray.

The post Why Are We All Being Encouraged to Get Divorced? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

• My husband and I have different approaches to investing.
• He's risk-tolerant, and I'm a bit more risk-averse.
• Still, we've managed to talk through financial decisions and find a common ground.

The conversation started because of a windfall: it was the first month that we didn't have the preschool tuition payment because my son was starting kindergarten. "I'd love for this money not to just disappear into the monthly budget," I said to my husband.

He nodded, and immediately had a suggestion. "What if we used it to start up a brokerage account? It'd be good to have some investments that are accessible without penalty before retirement."

Our approaches to investing differ

I knew, deep down, that this was a reasonable response to my point: we both already were on board with the idea of paying ourselves first, where we commit to an amount ahead of time for savings and retirement investments and then live on whatever we earn above that. This strategy served us well, and I wasn't opposed… exactly.

"I was actually hoping to use some of it to add to our emergency fund," I told him slowly. "And maybe getting some additional solar panels I've been looking at."

We have recently lived through instability that made me really appreciate the kinds of standard comforts that are currently easily accessible. Our family experienced the impact of a major hurricane only two years ago (Hurricane Helene), and when water, electricity, and telecommunications were interrupted for days and then weeks, I realized that a relatively modest amount of money and supplies would have made weathering a period of instability easier.

This is the place where my husband and I diverge: I tend to see things somewhat pessimistically, believing there's a good chance supply chains will be interrupted more than a few times during our lifetimes due to a variety of factors.

My husband has a generally optimistic, risk-tolerant approach to life. He knows we've made a solid plan for retirement, so he sees that a brokerage account offers promising returns (not guaranteed, but based on historical data) on funds that we've worked hard to earn. I'm sometimes fearful of the possibility of losing everything in a stock market crash.

I don't think either of us is truly at odds with the other person: my husband witnessed Helene and set to work setting up a battery backup system for our solar panels, an impressive feat and investment that falls more in line with my own risk-averse nature.

And I've never squashed his goals of investing for both short and long-term stability, even if, deep down, I want all our savings in high-yield savings accounts with FDIC protection.

We've learned how to figure out what's right for us

In order to make these conversations civil and positive, we tend to follow three steps.

First, we each get to make the case for why this investment, and why right now.

I think some of the way that we both get over our anxieties about spending or saving well is that we want to be heard, so he hears me out when I want to construct an expensive greenhouse on our property to grow more food, and I hear him out when he identifies that our current ages merit a somewhat risk-tolerant strategy so that we can reap the benefits when the market jumps higher.

Frequently, this process of hearing each other out helps us find an in-between pretty organically, and finding an in-between is the second step. Sometimes, we realize that, for instance, we are too busy to take full advantage of a greenhouse right now and should table it for a year or two. However, maybe this is a good year to invest in a higher-speed home charger for our electric car. Because many of his goals are "invest as much as possible," it's usually possible to buy some portion of the physical items I want while still contributing to our investments.

When I'm advocating for a deeper emergency fund, housed in a high-yield savings account rather than a market-invested brokerage account, I typically ask that we contribute in a percentage-based way. If I ask, for instance, for a windfall to be split 30/70, he gets to invest 70% of the money toward higher yields, and I get 30% in a very secure account. It's not exactly what either of us would like, but it ultimately gives us some benefits of both risk-averse and risk-tolerant strategies.

Finally, any time we find a split that really feels aligned for us, we see if we can make it a rule for the future, the third step. No one loves having to reinvent the wheel every time new money conversations come up. When that 70/30 split worked well for us once, I've returned to it for later money decisions, and while it sometimes needs to be adapted, it lets us balance each of our needs without a long discussion. My husband, famously of few words, likes when we can keep the conversations a little shorter and get back to playing a board game or watching a silly TV show to relax.

When we hear each other out, find a useful middle ground, and operationalize the result for future use, we find ways to invest in both a more secure and a more growth-focused future, favoring methods that work well for both our risk tolerance levels.

No doubt Ed Davey lovingly cares for his disabled son, says Joanna Gray. But he's not his "carer"; he's his father. It's a distinction Britain is fast losing sight of, to the detriment of us all.

The post No Ed Davey, You’re a Father, Not a “Carer” appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

A parliamentary inquiry by Alternative for Germany (AfD) lawmakers in the German state of Baden-Württemberg has brought to light official data showing that authorities have recorded 358 so-called child marriages since April 2012, with courts formally annulling only eight of them between 2018 and 2024.

The figures, released in early October 2026 in response to questions from state parliament members Nikolaos Boutakoglou and Emely Knorr, have drawn sharp attention to the prevalence of underage marriages — overwhelmingly involving people from migrant backgrounds — and the limited number of legal interventions.

Among the annulled cases was the 2020 marriage of an 11-year-old Iraqi girl to a 17-year-old Iraqi boy. In 2018, authorities annulled the marriage of a 14-year-old Afghan girl to a 30-year-old Afghan man. Two further annulments occurred in 2024: one involving a 16-year-old German girl and a 25-year-old Pakistani man, and another between a 16-year-old Syrian girl and a 27-year-old Syrian man, according to Welt newspaper.

Germany is failing to fight child marriages in migrant communities

The other annulled marriages involved individuals from Afghanistan, Romania, Moldova, Croatia, Serbia, and elsewhere. The state Interior Ministry stated that no court proceedings for annulment were pending at the time of its reply.

The remaining approximately 350 cases, documented by the government of Tübingen were closed under the category of “other resolutions.” Possible reasons cited by the government include the death of a partner, a decision to forgo annulment, or a subsequent marriage abroad. 

These files still include striking examples of very young brides. In 2020, a 12-year-old Afghan girl was recorded as married to an 18-year-old man. In 2022, a 12-year-old Syrian girl was married to a 28-year-old Syrian man, and in 2023 a 12-year-old Afghan girl to a 21-year-old Afghan man. Multiple cases involving 13- and 14-year-old girls also appear in the data, and some reports note nine marriages in which the girl was under the age of 14 at the time of the union.

The demographic pattern is pronounced. Men from Syria accounted for 132 of the recorded cases, nearly 40 percent, followed by nationals of Bulgaria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. 

Child marriages between two German citizens made up only about 0.3 percent of the total. It is also unclear if these German citizens have a migration background, but given the pattern seen among foreigners, it is very probable. 

Most of the 358 cases date from 2015 onward when the migration crisis truly began to grow in Germany. Boutakoglou highlighted the figures on social media, stating: “Almost without exception, every child marriage in Baden-Württemberg since 2017 can be traced back to mass migration! Nearly 40% of the child marriages were contracted between Syrians, while child marriages between two Germans account for only 0.3%.”

Fast ausnahmslos jede Kinderehe in Baden-Württemberg seit 2017 ist auf die Massenmigration zurückzuführen! Das ergab meine Kleine Anfrage an die Landesregierung. Fast 40 % der Kinderehen wurden zwischen Syrern geschlossen, Kinderehen unter zwei Deutschen machen nur 0,3 % aus! https://t.co/BeJ4wS3CJL

— Nikolaos Boutakoglou (@Nik_Boutakoglou) October 5, 2026

Emely Knorr, co-author of the government inquiry, wrote: “Child marriages are incompatible with our values. Children have a right to safety, education, and a self-determined future. That is why we need effective protection, early intervention, and decisive action against forced marriages.”

Germany raised the minimum marriage age to 18 in 2017 and generally does not recognize foreign marriages involving minors under certain conditions. The Tübingen authority deals exclusively with marriages contracted abroad that come to the attention of German registry offices.

The AfD inquiry was prompted in part by a Terre des Femmes leaflet warning of the risk of forced marriage during school holidays, but the state government said it had no financial involvement in the leaflet.

As Remix News has reported in the past, the issue is not just child marriages. Mass migration has brought new backward cultural norms to Europe that are completely incompatible with European human rights. For example, already in 2020, the German government admitted that there were at least 68,000 female genital mutilation victims in the country, rising 44 percent since 2017. 

Germany has 68,000 female genital mutilation victims and migration is to blame: German family minister

According to then German Minister for Family Affairs Franziska Giffey, mainly migration is to blame for the massive increase as many migrants coming to Germany commonly practice FGM in their own home countries. The practice, which is a human rights violation, involves the ritual cutting off some or all of the external female genitalia.

Germany is far from the only country dealing with this trend. Remix News reported this year that a female genital mutilation crisis had hit Paris, with over 140,000 such cases seen across the country. 

Genital mutilation crisis hits multicultural Paris neighborhood, nearly 140,000 women affected across France

The post Germany: 358 recorded child marriages since 2012, including an 11-year-old Iraqi girl appeared first on Remix News.

This story moves chronologically through a marriage that begins to unravel—with fatal consequences. The victim is Dan Markel, the ex-husband of Wendi Adelson, but it’s the involvement of Wendi’s domineering mother, Donna, and her brother, Charlie, that leads to his tragic end. Katherine Laidlaw shows how there were far more than two people in this marriage—and far more than two lives destroyed when it fell apart.

Harvey was nominally the breadwinner, but Donna ruled the family. She had strict ideas about how her children should live, pushing them to earn advanced degrees and build prestigious careers. Rob became a doctor, and Charlie became a periodontist, eventually buying his father’s dental practice. Donna obsessed, too, about her children’s love lives, scrolling through online dating profiles and sending them lists of promising candidates. When Rob started seeing a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Donna interfered so aggressively that he eventually broke it off and briefly married someone else. (He has since married his original non-Jewish girlfriend.) At first, Donna was thrilled that her daughter was seeing Dan, then a lawyer at a boutique firm. She was less thrilled when he left to pursue academia, a path that she felt paid poorly and lacked cachet.

Bilawal described the rumors as a “social media circus” aimed at diverting public attention from more serious issues.

The post Bilawal Bhutto denies reports of engagement, marriage appeared first on BOL News.

I used to be in a friend group chat called “Tinder Spinsters,” a group of girls offering support as we navigated the tumultuous dating world. Faith Hill’s chat is named “Lonely Hearts Club,” but are these groups becoming a thing of the past? Are people even still trying? In a 2025 YouGov poll, 69 percent of single respondents said they “rarely” or “never” go on dates. Nowadays, it’s complicated. On the positive side, a relationship is no longer seen as essential for a happy life—women’s interest in men, in particular, has dimmed as their financial independence has grown. But many people would still love to find a partner; they are just finding that modern romance requires a toll “paid in energy, in sanity, in cash, in hours—and not everyone can afford it.”

The hug was the last round, though, and then real life resumed. We mingled, but the intimacy had disappeared. One man told me that he had high emotional intelligence and could tell that I did too—then he suggested that we travel together someday, handed me his business card, and walked away. I gave a few people my phone number, including one man who sent me a picture of his face the very next morning and another who texted me so much (even after a polite rebuff) that I had to block him. One date with another guy resulted, but I wasn’t interested in a second. The perception of abundance had, once again, evaporated into nothing.

Next to rubble and pictures of the deceased, people in Gaza are still getting married. Athar Abu Samra reports on why couples are refusing to delay their nuptials. With so much already lost, and so much still under threat, families in Gaza are seizing moments of joy wherever they can. Marriage ceremonies are no longer what they once were—nor do they express hope in quite the same way—but they have become powerful testaments to resilience.

As I worked on this story, I came to understand that the war has not only transformed weddings in Gaza. It has transformed people’s relationship with time itself. Before the war, marriage followed a familiar sequence. People finished their education, found work, built or rented a home, saved enough money and only then began planning a wedding. Families often postponed marriages until those expectations had been met. But now no one has that luxury — the luxury of time.

I spoke with one mother who had lost several of her children during the war, yet hurried to arrange the marriage of her youngest son. She told me she had always dreamed, like any mother, of watching all of her children grow up, get married, and fill her home with grandchildren. The war had taken much of that dream away, but she was determined not to lose what remained.