Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   3

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80
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  e Welsh, pushover roman-
tics  that  they  are,  like  to 
start weddings off  with home 
invasions and kidnapping. 
(Hey, it’s tradition!) Before 
the ceremony, the groom and 
groomsmen try to break into 
the bride’s locked house. If 
they do—and the bride’s own 
family hasn’t kidnapped her 
fi 
rst—she hides from the 
rowdy men, often in disguise 
as  an  old  woman.  Once  ap-
prehended, the bride is “kid-
napped” and taken to the 
church—or if she’s fast and 
wily, chased there.
✖  ✖  ✖
Chances are, you’ve heard of 
polygamy, polyandry’s better-
known cousin: Mormons used 
to do it; Saudi Muslims can 
get away with it; relatively 
speaking, having a gaggle of wives is downright common-
place. But a woman having fi ve husbands? In Tibet, where a 
father and his sons could share the same wife, it was the cus-
tom for centuries. Anthropologists suggest it was a matter 
of necessity. Because female infanticide was prevalent, there 
weren’t a lot of women to go around, and because there isn’t 
a lot of arable land in mountainous Tibet, polyandry kept 
the birth rate—and the starvation rate—low. When the 
The Las Vegas of 
Victorian England
Long before Vegas was even 
a twinkle in a gangster’s eye, 
Scotland was the quickie wed-
ding capital of the world. It all 
started in 1753, when Eng-
land passed Lord Hardwicke’s 
Marriage Act, restricting kids 
under 21 from marrying with-
out parental consent. Rough-
and-tumble Scotland had no 
such rule, so lovers as young 
as 12 eloped across the bor-
der in droves. The fi rst  village 
they reached was Gretna 
Green, where thousands have 
since been married in a ram-
shackle blacksmith’s shop, 
their unions sealed by the 
now-traditional—and always 
ear-piercing—hammering of 
an anvil.

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81
Breaking Up Isn’t 
So Hard to Do,
 After All
A 2001 study showed that 43 
percent of fi rst marriages in 
the U.S. end in divorce, and 
that number is only climbing. 
Soon, experts predict, more 
people will divorce each year 
than marry. Compare that to 
the U.S. divorce rate in 1940, 
which was just two divorcees 
per 1,000 people. In fact, un-
tying the knot is so popular, 
we’ll wager it’s not long be-
fore it has its own set of wacky 
customs and traditions. Why 
does everything seem to 
fall 
apart
? A good question, but 
an even better lead-in. . . .
 
Chinese invaded in 1950, 
they put the kibosh on such 
nontraditional forms of mar-
riage, not to mention a couple 
of other things.