How has history specifically shaped our current model of coupledom and marriage?
Fran Dolan: The very particular circumstances of 16th and 17th century (or “early modern”) English culture, which is then transported to Colonial America and Canada through English books, laws and customs, created a (usually unacknowledged) legacy that still shapes how we describe what it means to be in a couple. The biblical figuration of marriage as the fusion of two persons into one flesh; the idea under common law that husband and wife achieve “unity of person,” [is] an idea that was always a legal fiction. [It] has been superceded in law, yet survives in the common practice of a wife taking her husband’s last name and [in] the popular question “who wears the pants in the family?” [It’s] a question that is still sometimes asked: If partners are equals, then they are also combatants in a “battle of the sexes” and… this battle can only be avoided or resolved if the couple comes to an agreement about who should wear the pants and have the final say. How does this idea negatively affec
