Marriage had already changed a lot through the first half of the 20th century.

By 1954, the idea of arranged marriage – your parents selecting your spouse – had pretty much ended. Many of the early 20th century immigrants, from every part of the world, had brought the idea to America.

The idea that superseded it, of course, was love. It sometimes bothered older people that younger people chose their spouse on that basis. But that’s how it worked.

One of the reasons for arranged marriages was the notion of keeping your tribe intact. A mixed marriage in an Italian family was when somebody from Venice married someone from Sicily.

But that, too, began to change as Americans began to intermingle with people of different backgrounds. Irish and Italian. Polish and Spanish. German and Greek.

There remained some taboos. The first was race.

It was all right, supposedly, for white people to marry white people, Black people to marry Black people, Asians to marry other Asians, and so on. 

Interracial marriage caused people to gasp. And the words used to describe it had negative bias: Miscegenation. Mongrelization. Octaroon.  In some states, any form of interracial marriage, but particularly Black and white marriage, was illegal.

Yet, as time passed, love prevailed.

People just married who they wanted anyway. And, finally, in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned a Virginia law barring interracial relationships, specifically in the case of the appropriately named Mildred and Richard Loving.

Interracial marriage produced mixed-race children, who seemed unbothered by the idea. As of the 2020 Census, more than 10% of the nation’s population says it is multiracial. 

One of those people became President of the United States.

And, of course, two of them are my children, who have been telling people since they were tweens that they were Chitalian.

The final taboo didn’t fall until this century. 

People of the same sex have loved each other since we evolved into humans. But often it has been looked on as some kind of sin, as if a loving sexual relationship between two people could not possibly involve two men or two women.

But some brave people said the hell with that. They not only wanted to share their love with the person they loved, they wanted everyone to know and respect it. 

So they fought for the right of people of the same sex to marry each other. 

It’s an idea that seemed impossible when this century began, just a few years after an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as between one man and one woman. President Bill Clinton complained about the law. But given the veto-proof majorities in both houses, he acquiesced and signed it.

That didn’t stop love.

The idea of same-sex marriage was not popular even as recently as 2008, when California narrowly approved a state constitutional amendment banning it. But that amendment proved to be the basis of legal appeals, and then state referenda and legislative action.

Until, in 2015, the Supreme Court – in Obergefell v. Hodges – ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote of those seeking the right to marry: “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”

And that ruling gave people like my daughter a chance to be happy.

Seventy years after my birth, my family would have startled my parents had they known what was coming. But, in the end, they’re exactly like us, because they were bonded by one thing that no arrangement or prejudice can overcome.

Love.