Have you ever fallen in love with someone? Have you ever thought of marrying someone whom you really liked? Perhaps, you will say, "Yes." If so, how would you like to get wed? In a very simple or a luxurious way? Well, you have to talk about this matter with your bride or groom when you're ready to get married. Generally speaking, we need several normal steps such meeting, dating, falling in love, engagement, which eventually leads up to marriage if it works out well. This is a standard marriage procedure in our society today.

Well, how about the wedding custom long, long ago? Anthropologists classify the evolution of culture into three major periods: the hunting (600,000 - 10,000 years ago), the agricultural (10,000-5,000 years ago), and the civilization (5,000 years ago - present) periods. Several anthropologists speculate that there used to be a wedding custom called "marriage by capture" during the former two periods and even the large period of civilization before the concept of romance was developed during the 18th century. The custom of marriage by capture is quite different from the one we have now.

Originally, it developed during the hunting period when the supply of food was extremely short, and women were scarce. The primitive men used to acquire them by warfare when they couldn't hunt enough animals for food and shelter, and get women for instinctive and other practical purposes. When a man needed a woman, he came with a group of other men armed with weapons such as clubs, sticks, spears and rocks. By force, he took the woman from her cave or hut as she screamed, kicked, and cried. The frustrated parents of woman threw rocks or spears when the man took the woman with him. He hid out for a few days with the woman he took. Then the wedding was over.

This wedding custom, marriage by capture, is still practiced by primitive tribes in remote parts of the world. But our current wedding custom owes its roots to the marriage by capture practiced a long time ago. For instance, the honeymoon custom is not completely free from the influence of an old one in which the groom hid out with his bride for a few days. The upset parents of the bride along with her relatives, and many people in the wedding ceremony throw flowers, confetti, rice or other grains, and soft objects to the newlyweds, instead of rocks and spears thrown a hundred thousand years ago. Indeed, marriage by capture seems to be odd and uncivilized, but its influences still live with our current wedding custom.

Here are some quotations and sayings related to wedding & marriage.

They'll just come out of nowhere, ... You're not going to believe the wedding we went to last week. The best man started his toast with 'I've got a confession to make? ~ Brad Paisley

We had a lot of last-minute planning to do, a lot of things. But her mom did a lot with the wedding and Ashley did a lot, too. ~ David Eckstein

Nothing more vividly sums up the horrific situation in Iraq than what happened on Wednesday of this week when American helicopters attacked a wedding party in the west of Iraq killing 40 mostly women and children, a massacre. How long is the world going to stand for this? When I say the world I'm talking about civilized humanity. ~ John Pilger
I got caught kissing my dad's ex-girlfriend - at his wedding! ~ Lee Ryan

People are turning away from the more formal, traditionally posed wedding photos to a more intimate and natural approach, ~ James Levine

We all went to Kelsey's wedding, and yeah, we go to parties. We also go to each other's house. A group of us got together over at Kelsey's and just read through some plays just for the fun of it. That may not be everyone's idea of a good time, but we had a good time. ~ David Hyde Pierce

You have to remember you're not a nightclub or wedding DJ; you're a situational DJ. If (the team is) down by three goals, you're not going to be playing something happy. ~ Scott Jensen

It was good fun at our expense. We thought that after the plane flew by that that was it. But they have the funds to do more than that. I mean they even had wedding invitations, a D.J., someone to videotape it, flowers, even gifts. It was great. ~ Russ Adams

No wedding bells for me anymore. I've been happily married to my profession for years. ~ Shirley Bassey