I hope you will all forgive me for not posting last 2 weeks. I had a very good reason—on October 10^th, I got married! For anyone who has ever been a part of a wedding, you know that it’s crazy right before and requires a lot of catching up afterward. Which means that I now have to catch up with all of you.

I’ve got some great stuff coming up next time that might let you put some of that new anatomy knowledge to use. But this week, in the aftermath of my perfect big day, I wanted to reflect a little on marriage and its meanings here in the United States.

Now I know that this is a column about sex and sexuality, but if you think about it, the way we understand marriage has so much to do with our views of sexuality. And while the debate about gay marriage is raging, I think it’s important to use a little history to put things in perspective.

The history of marriage leaves much to be desired. First of all, marriages were often arranged and not based on “love matches,” even in the United States. Couples were often promised to each other by their parents and married for practical (often financial) reasons. Of course, this still happens today, its most extreme form being mail order brides. Yes, this still exists: wealthy men pay to bring young women from other countries to the United States to be their wives.

Regardless of a couple’s intentions when entering a marriage, laws about marriage were not friendly to women for a long time. We all know that women lost all of their property when they entered into marriages; they essentially became non-entities, people who did not exist except as subordinates to their husbands. Did you know that a woman could even lose her United States citizenship if she married a non-American? The opposite was not true for men who married non-American women.

Property and legal status were not all that women lost entering into marriage; they lost all right to claim their bodies as their own. Men were legally permitted to hit their wives in order to “correct” them, and women had no right to refuse sex with their husbands. The history of marriage then tells us that women’s sexuality has long been considered something that can be owned by another person. In fact, even now it is extremely difficult to successfully prosecute a man for raping his wife.

Another important thing to remember is that there were also a host of laws that were in place to prevent certain people from marrying each other. The most obvious is the prohibition against whites and blacks marrying one another (and if you’re following the news, you know that a justice of the peace in Louisiana recently refused to perform a marriage for an interracial couple). The rules were in fact quite complex and took even the smallest amount of non-white blood into consideration; the end result, of course, was refusing to allow marriages based on race. Did you know that there were even laws forbidding white Americans from marrying Asians?

So what is the point? In this age of debate over the nature of marriage, it is important to remember that its definition has been changing throughout history. Many people who argue against gay marriage argue that marriage is a static institution that should not be changed. But where would we be if we hadn’t looked at our ideas about marriage throughout the years? What we now see as unthinkable, like allowing men to beat their wives or forbidding people of different races from marrying, were at one time considered to be important to the foundation of marriage. If we look at history, one thing it teaches us is that we need to be open to discussion and change.

Join me next week for some more applicable sex talk. And please, visit my expert’s corner and leave me a question.