> One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans.

Looking at marriage norms across the world actually suggests the opposite takeaway. What’s remarkable is how similar marriage norms are among people who had almost no historical contact with each other. Confucian marriage 2,000 years ago wasn’t that different from Christian marriage 100 years ago, despite those two cultures having almost nothing else in common.

When anthropologists identify societies with significantly different marriage norms, it’s always some random tribal society that never grew beyond a relatively small number of people and never developed civilization to speak of.