The Western European Marriage Pattern
Definition, Significance, and Misconceptions
What is the Western European Marriage Pattern?
The Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP) refers to a distinctive marriage pattern that seems to have developed in northwestern Europe in the 14th century after the Black Death. Given a map of Europe, you can draw a line (named the Hajnal line, after the demographer who discovered it) within which marriages had the following unique set of characteristics.
In JD Unwin’s taxonomy, absolute monogamy. Women are expected to remain chaste before marriage, a man can only have one wife, and divorce is difficult for both parties. Husbands have social and legal authority over their wives. As common (though not universal) with monogamous societies, age gaps between husbands and wives were small, and marriage (but not divorce) was by mutual consent rather than arranged.
Almost all children are born within marriage. Very low rates of bastardry (<6%) and cuckoldry (~1-2%)1.
Marriage is delayed until the new couple is economically self-sufficient enough to form a new nuclear family household (neolocality). This is the most unique aspect of the WEMP. In most of the settled agrarian world, including Eastern and Southern Europe, marriage often occurred while the groom was still economically dependent on his parents or extended family.
In bad times, which are very common in a Malthusian world, this leads to a late age of first marriage (often 24-26 for women) and a significant fraction (10-25%) of never married women23.
Implications of the WEMP
Demography: Population Control Without Family Planning
The WEMP created a negative feedback loop on population through the following mechanism: prosperity makes it easier for young men to form their own household early, which leads to more universal and younger marriage, which leads to higher fertility and thus population boom, which, in the context of a Malthusian agrarian economy, leads to poverty, which makes it harder for young men to form households, which leads to later and less frequent marriage, which leads to population decline, which leads to prosperity.
This allowed for maintaining population below the Malthusian subsistence limit (and thus raising living standards) without active use of contraception or infanticide (as in East Asia), extremely high disease burden (as in sub-Saharan Africa), or constant warfare with correspondingly high mortality (as in Eastern Europe).
Genetics: Clarkian Selection
In addition to the eugenic effects of monogamy (which are shared by other monogamous marriage patterns), the WEMP also creates a class gradient for fertility. Since children were gated by marriage, and marriage gated by wealth, the rich had children earlier (and thus had a lower generation time) and more frequently.
This selects for the traits that lead to wealth. In the context of a market economy with reputational or legal mechanisms to check fraud and scams and a state that checks crime4, this means intelligence, productivity, trustworthiness, industry, thrift, low time preference, and the ‘bourgeois virtues’ generally. This is one of the two chief mechanisms behind Clarkian selection5, the phenomenon by which the medieval middle class outbred and replaced the medieval lower classes.
Men’s Incentives: Paternal Certainty and Prosocial Reproduction
Both sex and a family are powerful motivators for men, and under the WEMP access to them is contingent on one’s personal economic success. In addition to selecting for productivity, trustworthiness, industry, thrift, low time preference, and so on, the WEMP also incentivizes these characteristics. In the context of scarce resources, as is the default in a Malthusian world, it also incentivizes the high-risk high-reward risk taking, such as transoceanic commerce and colonization, that so characterized early modern Europe. The bargain to young men is the following: your parents will not pay for your wife, so you need to step up and pull your own weight6. But if you succeed, you will get to lead7 your own family (independently of your parents) and you can be confident (in the era before paternity tests) that your children are yours.
This extremely high paternal certainty also incentivizes men to care about and work for the future. Most of what is impressive about civilization, whether it be building an enterprise, working on scientific discoveries and technological advances, or conquering an empire in the Americas, requires delaying gratification. But there is an intrinsic limit on delayed gratification: one’s lifespan. Since it is difficult to get full gratification out of personal enjoyment in old age (due to physical and mental ailments) and it takes time to develop the skills, connections, and experience to accomplish things (until young adulthood or longer), there are hard limits on delayed gratification for oneself. There are no such limits on sacrifice for posterity8.
Did the WEMP Contribute to Northwestern European Exceptionalism?
The first thing you realize when you first start reading about determinants of a society's quality9 is that national intelligence is the single most important measurable variable10. But the second thing you notice is that Northwestern Europe, along with the Anglosphere settler colonies descended primarily from Northwestern Europe, over perform their IQs relative to Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, and especially East Asia11. This is true whether you look at historical achievement or various present day metrics such as high end science or GDP per capita.
There are many, many maps of Europe or the world that look like this.
One explanation for this is the WEMP. In addition to the beneficial effects of monogamy on cooperation12, neolocality meant that new households could not fall back on extended families for support in their old age and to buffer shocks. This led to the development of non-genetically-based impersonal institutions, such as strong capital markets, to perform these functions. Those families that were unable to work with these institutions (for instance, due to a propensity to cheat them) would have been selected out of the gene pool via Clarkian selection. As such, there was gene-culture coevolution in Northwestern Europe for large-scale cooperation with unrelated strangers, with massive consequences for every aspect of society.
Correcting A Common Misconception: The Sexual Revolution is Not the WEMP
The Western European Marriage Pattern is often confused with the fourth characteristic, late and infrequent marriage13, which invites a misleading comparison to the modern day. Under the WEMP, late and infrequent marriage is a product of poor economic conditions. Under good economic conditions, such as those immediately after the Black Death, during the Industrial Revolution in 19th century England, in the colonial American settler colonies, or during the Baby Boom, marriage was earlier and more common. From The European marriage pattern and labour markets in the North Sea region in the late medieval and early modern period:
The very high average ages of marriage that we find in western Europe in the early modern period are the result of the EMP under circumstances of ‘high pressure’; that is, low real wages and relatively high population pressure. In the fifteenth century, by contrast, the same EMP could result in a somewhat lower age of marriage, as conditions were more favorable. The data that we have for late medieval Holland and Zeeland, for example, point to a relatively low age of marriage. (...) On the basis of this evidence it seems that in 1505 in Zeeland the age of marriage of farmers and craftsmen was 20 years or somewhat less. For 1540–1, another rather fragmentary source allows us to estimate the average age of marriage of a group of men and women in the countryside around Leiden (the source mainly contains information on proto-industrial households). It appears that women probably married at the age of 20–1 (n =10), whereas men were one or two years older(21–2) (n =29) (...)These estimates are comparable to those for fifteenth-century England, which show a range between about 18 and 23 years (for women). (...) In both countries the average age of marriage increased considerably during the sixteenth century, to reach the levels that were thought by Hajnal to be characteristic of the EMP in the second half of the sixteenth century. In the 1580s and 1590s, the mean age at first marriage for women in Amsterdam fluctuated between 23.5 and 25 years, and it remained at this level until the 1660s, when it started to rise even further. The mean age at marriage for men was about 1 to 1.5 years higher on average. (...) Similarly, in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the average age of (first) marriage in England had increased to more than 25 years for women and about 27.5 years for men. Whereas Hajnal considered those high marriage ages to be one of the fundamental characteristics of the EMP, we propose that they were to some extent the result of the deterioration of living standards during the sixteenth century in a system based on consensus and neolocality [emphasis mine].
As the climate worsened and population densities increased in the centuries after the Black Death, marriage ages increased to the levels used by Hajnal to characterize the pattern. In Sweden, for instance, this occurred late, during the 18th century.
Similarly, after the great famine in 1848, Irish women in London married three years younger then their compatriots in Ireland, and even younger in the United States.
The massive population boom caused by falling age and increasing frequency of marriage in 19th century Britain (due to greatly expanded opportunities for wage work thanks to the Industrial Revolution) is what made the “First Industrial Revolution” (1760-1870) so revolutionary.
Something similar occurred in colonial America, thanks to the abundance of land and high wages, leading to extraordinarily rapid population growth.
The WEMP + economic prosperity (which, by the standards of medieval Europe, exists in every non-agrarian country) gives you colonial America. Combined with prosperity, low mortality, and contraception14, it gives you the Baby Boom. The post-Sexual Revolution West, marked only by late and infrequent marriage, but also the breakdown of absolute monogamy and extraordinarily high rates of illegitimacy, is closer to Africa + contraception than to the WEMP.
Conclusions
The Western European Marriage Pattern no longer exists. Neither patriarchy, absolute monogamy, or extremely high legitimacy exist in the West outside of niche religious communities, and modern late and infrequent marriage comes from a different source than it did in medieval Europe. The modern day is far outside the historic Western norm. If the WEMP really did contribute to Western exceptionalism, should we be worried?
Two of the advantages of the WEMP are no longer relevant. Avoiding overpopulation is not a concern in a post-Malthusian, low mortality, post-family planning world, and the genetic effects, in theory, could be easily replaced with current technology using embryo selection and polygenic scores1516.
But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be drawn from it. Given that men build civilization, men’s incentives are very important, and the current status quo does a very poor job at incentivizing men to act in a pro-civilizational manner compared to the WEMP. And while overpopulation is irrelevant today, below replacement fertility with all of its attendant maladies is a major problem, and the historic example of the WEMP + mostly modern technology (prosperity, low mortality, family planning), the Baby Boom, shows that the WEMP can help solve it. We can and should use the foundations of past Western success to repeat the feat for the future, not passively accept decline.
Further Reading
“A Farewell to Alms,” by Gregory Clark. If you only read one book, make it this one. Dynamics of a Malthusian economy, what caused the Industrial Revolution (he thinks genetic change rather than innovation or institutions), marriage and fertility patterns, enormous numbers of graphs and data. It more than lives up to the subtitle “A Brief Economic History of the World.” It is available on Library Genesis.
Article on the origins and implications of the WEMP, arguing that it resulted from a combination of Catholic doctrine, the post-Black Death market economy, and inheritance law, and was an important factor in the Great Divergence: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227988504_Girl_power_The_European_marriage_pattern_and_labour_markets_in_the_North_Sea_region_in_the_late_medieval_and_early_modern_period
Peter Frost on gene-culture coevolution in Northwestern Europe due to the Western European Marriage Pattern: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=78813
Inquisitive Bird on Western European exceptionalism, tracing it back to 1300 (about when the WEMP first appears):
This low rate of historical cuckoldry among Western populations is sometimes mistakenly generalized to humans in general. This is not the case. For instance, “extra-pair paternity” (ie, cuckoldry) is 48% among the Himba of Namibia.
A large fraction of never-married men is common throughout history, whether because of polygamy, high male mortality, or sex-selective infanticide, or some combination of those. Northwestern Europe male marriage-less rates were comparable to contemporary China. But such a high fraction of never-married women is rare.
Another contributor to the high rates of never married women were skewed sex ratios due to war or emigration combined with monogamy, particularly in the Netherlands (in the 17th and 18th centuries, about 1/7 Dutch men, including immigrants, died in service with the VOC, per A Farewell to Alms).
Which requires both capacity and willingness.
The other being higher mortality among the poor, which is almost universal historically.
Contrast this with, say, premodern China, where there’s a similar (though weaker) class gradient in fertility, but marriage requires no agency on the part of the groom, as it is arranged by parents, which incentivizes safe grinding over risky adventures.
Actually lead. Most husbands today do not lead their families, as their authority is deliberately undermined by the state and as such requires some combination of uncommon strength of personality, sincere patriarchal religion (rare, don’t think Evangelicals, think Haredim), or consensual submissiveness on the part of the wife. This is still worth doing (albeit risky), but it’s a much worse bargain (for men) then that of the WEMP.
For more on this, see the “An Alternative Explanation” section of my review of Sex and Culture.
Some combination of wealth, accomplishment, livability, and so forth. You could call it “Human Flourishing” instead. This is not a mathematically rigorous concept, but it’s a clear observation. You might argue whether Sweden or Japan or the United States is better, but you can’t credibly argue that they’re not better then, say, Nigeria.
See Cognitive Capitalism, Hive Mind, or National IQ is the Best Predictor of Economic Growth for some examples.
You can think of three different aspects among high-IQ populations: competence, genius, and large-scale cooperation. Competence basically tracks IQ, but NW Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews punch above, and East Asians below, their IQ weight for generating geniuses, while NW Europeans alone punch above their IQ weight for large-scale cooperation.
Which apply to Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, much of East Asia, and parts of the rest of the world as well.
In part because looking at age of first marriage is how it was originally discovered.
The idea of family planning as something moral mattering more than specific techniques or technologies. Baby Boom marital fertility, unlike nuptiality, was not very high.
The first embryo selected baby selected via polygenic score was born in 2021.
Admittedly, we’d need some sort of PGS for bourgeois virtues, rather than just intelligence. But I don’t think this would be too hard to construct.