CHAPTER TWO: THE ETIQUETTE OF ENGAGEMENTS AND WEDDINGS

THE HISTORIC ASPECT

"Matrimony," sings Homer, the poet, "is a holy estate and not
lightly to be entered into." The "old Roman" is right.

A modern wedding is one of the most intricate and exhausting of
social customs. Young men and women of our better classes are now
forced to devote a large part of their lives to acting as brides,
grooms, ushers and bridesmaids at various elaborate nuptials.
Weeks are generally required in preparation for an up-to-date
wedding; months are necessary in recovering from such an affair.
Indeed, some of the participants, notably the bride and groom,
never quite get over the effects of a marriage.

It was not "always thus." Time was when the wedding was a
comparatively simple. affair. In the Paleolithic Age, for
example, (as Mr. H. G. Wells of England points out in his able
"Outline of History"), there is no evidence of any particular
ceremony conjunctive with the marriage of "a male and a female."
Even with the advent of Neolithic man, a wedding seems to have
been consummated by the rather simple process of having the
bridegroom crack the bride over the head with a plain,
unornamented stone ax. There were no ushers--no bridesmaids. But
shortly after that (c- 10,329--30 B.C. to be exact) two young
Neoliths named Haig, living in what is now supposed to be