This is a great excuse for me to talk about American teachers and marriage because it's a fascinating window into the push/pull of teaching as a profession and as a thing that white women did.

The short history that's helpful to understand is that prior to the 1830s, teaching was very much men's work. Schoolhouses were typically dirty, poorly maintained buildings and the teachers who worked in them were usually on their way to another career or another part of the country. Those who stayed in the job were more likely to be tutors, supporting the sons of men in power or with access to power. However, after decades of campaigning by a variety of advocates including some of the Founders, the idea of public education as an essential tool of democracy had caught on. In addition to securing dollars, advocates of tax-payer funded schools needed teachers. Lots of them.

There's a whole lot of complicated history behind the rationale for the decision to make teaching women's work but the numbers couldn't be denied: there was an entire workforce just waiting to be put to work. Unmarried white teenagers and young women were old enough to leave their parents' home but, for whatever reason, had not yet become wives. So, public school advocates started a PR campaign that involved cleaning up the schoolhouse, convincing fathers to let their daughters leave home, and persuading those daughters that they were born to be teachers.

Statistics vary, but it's estimated that by the mid-1800s, more than half of all white women in New England states had been a teacher at one point in their life. The reason for the high turnover was the thinking that a woman could not be a teacher and a wife - that not only would the demands be too much but it would say something about the man if he needed his wife to bring in income. To be sure, there was a fairly large gap between social expectations and realities - there were plenty of married women who worked but the general sentiment was that "wife" and "teacher" were mutually exclusive.

While the sentiment did change following suffrage for white women, a woman's ability to remain a teacher after getting married likely came down to a few different factors. First was her superintendent, principal, or school board's feelings on the matter. If he didn't want married women as teachers... off she'd go. Second was the economy. During the Great Depression, schools cracked down on married teachers as a way to ensure that there were jobs available for men. (They had no qualms about firing women who were unmarried if a more qualified man presented himself. But since teaching was so effectively coded as women's work, it wasn't a viable career for most men.) There were even instances where teachers were fired because they took a trip that someone suspected might have been a honeymoon. Teachers had varying degrees of success suing to get their jobs back and in some states and cities, were able to get laws changed. There was also her own interest in staying in the job or leaving as well as her husband's willingness to "let" her work. Each of these factors ebbed and flowed and varied from place to place - some Southern states maintain the no "married teachers" until well within the 20th century and in some Northern states, schoolmen stopped having an issue with married women and started having an issue with pregnant ones. But that's a tale for a different time.

Anyone with a passing interest in the life of Stalin probably knows he was married, seeing how he had children who were famous in their own right (his daughter Svetlana defected to the US in the 1960s, then re-defected in the 1980s; son Vasili was a drunken general; both are featured prominently in the film Death of Stalin). Their mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, was notable for her death, which was likely a suicide (though some contend Stalin himself shot her; based on what I've read I don't think so), but she was not his only wife. Stalin was briefly married in his youth, and it is his first wife, Kato Svanidze, who I'll discuss.

Svanidze, like Stalin, was Georgian (her name roughly means Svan-son; Svans being a Georgian people from the region of Svaneti), and apparently descended from minor Georgian nobility (not as interesting as it sounds; something like 10% of Georgia was noble at the time). She had two sisters and one brother, and the four of them were living in Tiflis (modern Tbilisi) when in 1905 they met a young revolutionary named Ioseb Jughashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin). The sisters worked in an atelier shop, with some of the leading figures of Tiflis society as clients, so it was felt the shop was a perfect hiding place for revolutionaries, including Jughashvili, who was a good friend of the brother, Alyosha and started staying at their place frequently. It was through this that Jughashvili and Svanidze became close.

In the summer of 1906 the two got married; one historian suggests that this was because Svanidze was newly pregnant, though she may not have realized it yet. A wedding though was not so easy: Jughashvili was known to the police, so had to keep hiding, but his very devout mother insisted on a religious wedding, which complicated things. Luckily they knew a priest who could work within the semi-illegal confines they needed, and at 2.00 in July a short service was held. Despite Jughashvili's mother's stance, she was not invited to the wedding, or even told about it until after the fact, and Svanidze did not record the marriage in her internal passport, which she was required to do by law.

In March 1907 the couple's son was born; he was named Iakob (more about him below). A few months later Jughashvili was involved in a major bank robbery in Tiflis, and the three fled to Baku (now in Azerbaijan) to escape. Jughashvili, who was a rather prominent figure in the revolutionary movement, was often away, leaving Svanidze and their son alone. Between the warm climate (Baku is fairly warm) and the unfamiliar city, Svanidze was very alone, and also developed a serious illness. While her family wanted her to return to Georgia, she refused to leave Jughashvili (when he was around), but her condition worsened, so they returned to Tiflis in October 1907. However she didn't get better (she likely had typhus, or something like that) and died in November 1907.

Jughashvili took her death hard: he reportedly said at the funeral that "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity" and apparently tried to go into the grave with her, only to be dragged out (neither story has ever been confirmed). He also was unable to properly grieve, as he was followed by the secret police, and had to flee the funeral, and Tiflis in general. Young Iakob was left with his Svanidze relatives, and it would be years before Jughashvili (by then Stalin) saw him again.

The Svanidze family did keep in touch with Jughashvili as he grew into Stalin: Alyosha served as a Soviet trade envoy to Germany, while the two sisters also had high roles in the Bolsheviks. All three would be arrested and shot during the Great Purge starting in 1936. In an interesting aside, the son of Alyosha, Ivan Svanidze (actually born "Dzhonrid", in honour of John Reed, an American socialist reporter and author of "Ten Days That Shook the World", a first-hand account of the October Revolution) was briefly married to Stalin's daughter, but that ended in divorce.

I'll end with a note about Svanidze's son, Iakob. He was effectively disowned by Stalin, and grew up in Georgia. When Stalin decided to bring Iakob with him to Moscow, Iakob had a lot of trouble fitting in: he didn't speak Russian well, and was several years older than his half-siblings, and neglected by Stalin (he was not even allowed to use the name "Stalin"; it is believed that Stalin hated to be reminded of Svanidze, thus the hate towards his son). Depressed he started drinking at a young age, being given vodka by a bodyguard, and was not allowed to enter university until he was 23. When he was denied the ability to marry, he tried to shoot himself; he failed, with Stalin apparently quipping "he can't even shoot straight."

Iakob joined the Red Army, and was serving on the front during Operation Barbarossa when he was captured in July 1941. On being recognized as the son of Stalin the Nazis did treat him fairly well in hopes of trading him for someone high up (including Field Marshall Paulus, who lost the Battle of Stalingrad), but Stalin refused, stating his son was not worth anymore than any other POW. After that Iakob's status fell, and he was put in a concentration camp until his death in April 1943. His death is disputed: he reportedly ran towards the fence in order to be shot by a guard in a suicide bid, but again nothing was ever confirmed. After hearing of the death Stalin apparently did lessen his hatred to his eldest son, stating "fate treated him unjustly."

I got a question to start this off I guess: How did marriage develop before/outside Christianity and what were the influences on it? How long has it been the two person promise kind of deal?

In Crusader Kings I have the option to matrilineal marry my daughters so that they remain in my dynasty. Was that actually a thing at any point?

Sharing an older answer of mine on the topic ... It was hard to choose as I've written so much about marriage! The question was, "How true is the assumption that marriage in pre-20th century Europe was primarily about money and status?"

(Sort of a continuation of an answer on consent in marriage.)

Historians generally talk about the rise of the affectionate, companionate marriage as happening in the late eighteenth century, along with a number of other related social changes that I discussed in this answer about views of women's sexuality:

But we know that attitudes did change. As with a number of issues, this comes down to societal changes in the second half of the eighteenth century, changes often called the "cult of sensibility" - "sensibility" in this sense refers to emotionality, kindness, and refined feeling. In a sentimental novel of the period, it was important for both male and female characters to display how strong their emotions were by fainting and crying at every opportunity; in real life, few could really match the sensibility of a character like Richardson's Pamela, but women of genteel backgrounds were considered to have larger reserves of the quality, and to be inherently more delicate than women of the lower orders and all men. That is, weaker, but in a positive sense. This weakness, rather than targeting their moral susceptibility to temptation, affected the nerves and the body - including their physical capacity for sex. This carried the seeds for the "cult of domesticity": good women were physically weak but morally strong, and therefore suited to stay at home and tend to the well-being of her husband and children.

In light of these developments, women on the whole could not be seen as inherently carnal beings. Women whose marriages had been consummated or who had sex outside of marriage were still seen as having been awakened into a new state of sexuality, but the strong moral sense of the women who insisted on being married before engaging in sex prevented them from becoming insatiable; the women who were "ruined", on the other hand, lacked that moral sense and were generally seen as as rapacious as all women had been seen a century earlier.

As women were "naturally" welcoming and refined, it was most appropriate for their marital partners to treat them with the affection and tenderness they deserved. In addition, parents were supposed to be more personally nurturing to their younger children, and give their older children the freedom to practice autonomy while continuing to be supportive - a major change from the stern discipline and hierarchy expected earlier. That being said, the viewpoint that the shift to companionate marriage occurred in the late eighteenth century tends to come from historians who primarily study that period; Martha Howell, in The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550, states that the seeds of affectionate partnerships were in the Late Middle Ages, for instance, and Tim Thornton and Katharine Carlton write in The Gentleman's Mistress: Illegitimate Relationships and Children, 1450-1640 that "companionate marriage, involving love between partners, within a closed, nuclear family was either on the rise or already well established" in the Early Modern period. I would say the distinction to draw is that these earlier periods showed that love within marriage was a norm, but it's the late eighteenth century that we really see elite and affluent young women expected to conduct courtships and expect to marry based on love, and the success suitors had at convincing them that they were in love (ambiguous gender neutral plural pronouns intended).

Yet at the same time, status and money were paramount. It was certainly not expected that young men or young women would fall in love with and then marry just anyone: they were to always keep in mind the relative social situations of all parties involved. (And in any case, they would typically not meet socially with anyone truly beyond the pale, preventing them from conducting a romance and wanting to marry someone completely unsuitable.) As usual for late eighteenth/early nineteenth century social stuff, Jane Austen provides excellent illustrative examples. In Emma, Emma Woodhouse knows her worth very well, and is affronted at the local clergyman's advances to her partly on the grounds that he was aiming way too high; in Pride and Prejudice, the Bennet sisters are wealthy enough to not even consider marrying tradesmen or merchants, but with basically no dowries they also have little chance of being considered eligible by men of their own class. You see this tension in fiction all the way through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - typically, heroines with enough gentility that the narrative does not even present working- or lower-middle-class male characters as potential romantic interests, but reduced financial circumstances that either take them out of the running for all the men of their own class who aren't fully in love or keep them from encountering men of their own class (e.g. they have to live in the country, she can't afford evening dress, etc.). In evidence from real life, we see plenty of examples of couples having long engagements due to the need for the future husband to earn enough money or attain a particular occupational position, or potential spouses being nixed by parents for lack of money or status. Most, though, would likely just conform to expectations and choose from the selection implicitly laid out by their friends and relations.

I have a question that never got answered.

Say a wife dies in Europe around late 1500s early 1600s period. The husband remarried. How are his children generally treated by the wife and new family?

What’s the earliest documented divorce?

Who came up with the idea/ when is the earliest documented marriage?

How was marriage recorded before computers and detailed documentation etc?

For example in England or Ancient Rome (but im curious about anywhere) was there a log somewhere of married couples? Or was it up to the people married to record it somehow. Or maybe the church?

How widespread and ancient are the traditions of wedding rings and wearing them on the left ring finger?