1/3 true love 2/3 hangnail anxiety

“Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still you find reasons to keep living.” - Princess Mononoke (1997)

Anyway, if you read marriage certificates from church records, a full 85% of first marriages for young women were around 18-19 years old. The rest skewed higher, into the early twenties, with only a few being below that age and only one in a thousand was younger than 16. 

The age of puberty has declined over the centuries as girls get better nutrition, as well, so throughout the middle ages the age at which a girl could expect her first period was around 16, where modern girls often get it much younger. 

The idea that women in earlier ages were married and mothers in their early teens is a myth. Marriages of children were usually only between noble families, and made for political reasons, or creepy old bastards who wanted a child-wife and could get away with it because they were rich and powerful. They often would point to the fact that the Roman elite did the same thing as justification. The Romans, of course, would point to the Greeks doing the same thing as justification, the Greeks pointed at the Assyrians, and so on back through the ages. 

It was considered disgusting by normal people then and still is. 

This myth is still brought out and touted by sick fuckers. Know it for what it is; a falsehood. 

And EVEN among the nobility marriages at such a young age were a much rarer occasion than those apologists would make you believe.

Let’s look an an egregious example, Henry the bloody VIII:

First marriage:

He was 18, Katharine of Aragon was 23.

Second marriage:

He was 40/41, Anne Boleyn, depending on which theory you believe, was anywhere between 24 to 32.

Third marriage:

He was 44, Jane Seymour was 28.

Fourth marriage:

He was 48, Anne of Cleves was 25

Fifth marriage:

He was 48, Catherine Howard, depending on which source you believe, was between 17-22. And yes, people at the time actually were squicked out by this age difference. And rightly so.

Sixth marriage:

He was 51, Catherine Parr was 31. 

Even the most notorious LECHER and WIFE MURDERER in history did not marry teenagers in at least 5 if not 6 out of 6 marriages. 

And here’s another Tudor tidbit, both Henry VII and VIII knew how traumatic and damaging it is for women marrying/having children too young. Henry VII’s mother was married at 12 and gave birth to Henry VII at 13. It caused so much damage and trauma that she never had another child after him despite being married three times.

So yes CUT THAT SHIT OUT. Teenage girls are NOT adults and anyone preying on them is pure evil.

YOU 

I LIKE YOU

And as for the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville to King Edward IV, she was 27 at the time. He? Was 22. 

She had been married before, and did marry young…at the age of sixteen or seventeen, to Sir John Gray, who was about five years her senior. 

@systlin This is good information, but do you have a source for the information about how most marriages back in the day were not actually usually from a younger age? I tried Googling it but I can only find things talking about modern day issues.

Well, if you don’t want to spend months crawling through digitized copies of marriage records preserved in church archives from the 12th through 18th centuries from England, Italy, Germany, France, ect (which you can do, and it will show you I’m right) you can go read  “ Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985. He did the archive crawling for you. 

Also  Peter Laslett’s book “The World We Have Lost”, where he details over a thousand marriage certificates, and he dug through many more in the writing of the work. 

Wait. I am spanish. Do they actually think henry/enrique VII married fucking katherin/catalina de Aragón as a teenager?

You know we see films about this in school and every one is pretty much adult there, both fisically and in the story.

There’s this…really weird trend in a lot of pseudo-European fantasy/ ‘historical’ books to have girls marry like…really young, to vastly older dudes. Like at about 13, getting married off to like 30 year olds. And then say “Well that’s what it was like back then.” 

(Sideyes G.R.R.M)

And…no. No it wasn’t. That’s gross. England was creeped TF out when Henry VIII married Catherine Howard when she was between 17 and 22 and he was 48 as stated above, and rightly so. 

All of this is excellent, and there is one thing I would add:

When you DID have these super-young marriages between nobility, it was more or less the same thing we do today when we scream “DIBS!” over who gets the TV remote. You might have a 13-year-old lord marrying a 14-year-old girl, but they weren’t expected to actually act as husband and wife, not yet. He had schooling to finish, she had to learn how to run a household. The union was purely political and not to be consummated until later–you know, at a point when they were 18 or 19 and she could carry a child without dying of it and he could actually support a wife.

I think one of the major causes of many misconceptions like this is because people have been basing their preceptions on life in the past off of works of FICTION written in the past. When I was studying Early Modern literature in undergrad, this topic was brought up regarding the presence of sexual abuse. There were many plays and what not that implied things such as this, however the scene in the play WAS CONSIDERED SHOCKING to people back then too. It would be like someone 500 years from now watching some grimdark noire mopey antihero cop drama in a city of sin, and then thinking that it demonstrates what the everyday life of today’s world is. No one in this thread is saying things like that NEVER happened back then, it was just… not as common as historical fiction and fiction written 500 years ago might have you believe. As OP mentioned, historical documents from the time have far fewer child marriages and sexual abuse than literary works from the time do.

Rebloging for A+ history. 

#OH GOOD someone brought up the ceremonial marriage that was really about placeholding the actual marriage when the royal was old enough#there was no consumation#and often both parties weren’t present#it was one person attesting they would marry the other in order to uphold the truce or agreement the marriage brokered#SO YEAH (via @wingedkiare)

Also, looking through the marriage records of ordinary people, you’ll find that they didn’t get married really young, either. Why? Because people had to be in an economic position to be able to afford to support a family, which meant being established in their occupation, and they were much more likely to be in that situation at age 21 than age 16. And then, like now, most people married someone of approximately their own age, at least for a first marriage. Where the differences in ages tended to crop up was when a widower, particularly one with young children, would remarry. If he was marrying a spinster, then she’d tend to be younger. But it was also quite common for widowers to marry widows, so, again, the ages of both partners tended to be closer than you might expect.

Animal Crossing is a very interesting game because it’s like…the antithesis of instant gratification. Want Blathers to bring his butt to your island? Well, you got to wait, travel takes time. Want those flowers to bloom? Water and wait, buddy. Like I’m frustrated but also like…what have I become that I can’t wait a day for something? So, I go about my day doing little things and explore. And I wait. And that’s ok because now, in this little island, I can breathe, you know? 

In juxtaposition, Stardew Valley is like: you have 50 seconds in a day and if you don’t make use of every moment you’re not going to make any money and you won’t be able to buy a barn in order to buy a cow in order to make milk in order to make cheese and oh god it’s 11:30pm I forgot to water the crops so I have to go out there and do it or I won’t make a profit so I do it and right as I get back to my front door it turns to 2am and I pass out and a Joja employee moves me the 2 inches into my house, steals my stuff, and charges me $50,000

420 years ago, on 4/20, the moon was made of weed.

This is the only day you can reblog this. Do it for Weed Moon.

This post, despite being funny for exactly 1 (one) day, has been reblogged heavily over the past year for whatever reason, and I’m going to appreciate the few days before it completely blows up again. God help us all.

bitches whose music taste is "whatever sounds good" will be like "i'm really into this band" because they liked more than 1 of their songs

this is the first time I have ever been bitches

I've never been bitches this much in my life

Do you want your character or pet drawn in the Animal Crossing style? I’m charging $20 a portrait, so if you’re interested, DM me so we can talk design!

would you survive on a "deserted" island

This quiz made me SCREAM.

honestly one of the things that’s least appealing to me in the sciences is like. when personalities get very popular, or when things are named after the people who discovered them. the former has allowed a LOT of abusers to flourish and the latter lends the impression that those concepts would not be discovered without that individual.

all in all, these things make science about an individual’s accomplishments, and moves away from the fact that science is and honestly has always been a collaborative effort. sure, there have been people that have discovered and conceptualized many things in leaps and bounds, but the intellect of an individual will never be as impressive to me as the reality of the world we live in. science is taking steps to more fully understand the world, not to stroke human egos.

I think focusing on an individual’s ‘genius’ (even aside of the result of an abuser’s ‘genius’ commonly being used to shield them from critique or consequence) and not science/the world itself does a huge disservice.

adhd is like "i love my classes so much! they're incredible and fascinating and fun. also i will die before i do any work outside of class"

also i will die before I do any work during class or outside

Ok ok ok so it occurred to me, the shades are called "lingering wills", right? But not only do they Have a will, they literally Are wills; just instead of money it's a lot of ptsd and regrets. They're willful wills. Willy willy wills.

Anyways the moment I had that sobering thought I was immediately like, what if they all had different regrets tho. And like ghost had to put them 2 rest by solving their ghost problems. And then I thought... They're. Literal children. What regrets would they have.

So my new hc is they have a wii in the abyss, thanks for coming to my ted talk,

ya’ll i am fucking sobbing at these photos of a horse catching a frisbee 

valid to eat frisbees

grocery shopping b like..... ah fuck i forgot to bring in my reusable bags. i’ll remember them next time! ah fuck i forgot to bring in my reusable bags. i’ll remember them next time! ah fuck i forgot to bring in my reusable bags. i’ll remember them next time! ah fuck

lets take it a step further and acknowledge that generation discourse--

 which, for the most part is “haha old people are all racist and are ruining the planet” 

--not only ignores the realities of elderly and middle aged PoC, but also implies that white millenials and gen-z’rs arent/cant be racist when that simply isnt the case. 

being a guy in love with a guy is not always cute or romantic or soft or tender. sometimes it's pushing your boyfriend's face away yelling because you have viral bronchitis and he keeps trying to kiss you knowing this because he's a himbo with no sense of self preservation

update: he got bronchitis! you'll never guess how

I love seeing people’s picrew art styles because you can just look at them and be like

“You read homestuck and it was a big part of your life for a few years, you’re not into steven universe but you did watch it, and you had an intense black butler phase in middle school and doodled their eyes over and over again in your spiral notebooks”

Art is the biggest snitch ever man like have you ever read a fanfic and been like “Oh the author is working through some trauma here”

Or when people rec songs/shows/fics and you suddenly know everything you need to know about who they are as a person?

Like I know art is inherently an attempt to make others understand what is going on inside our lonely little heads but sometimes the mortifying ordeal of being known just slips in there while you’re not looking

New ask game: Make super specific assumptions about me based on my art syle