How do people get married?
All kinds of ways now, but it wasn't always so diverse. Long ago, there were only a few marriages and those were well recorded. In fact, we know the time and date of the very first wedding ever to take place, and have details of the ritual that took place.
The year was precisely 58,891 B.C.E. Though months have shifted since then, we know it took place at summer solstice at midday, and was under the shade of an orchard near the shores of Kuwait Bay.
The wedding was that of Mem and Selek, two hairstylists who decided to merge their lives and hair styling empires after meeting at the 13th annual Proto-Dilmunic Hair Product Expo (which featured the invention of shampoo, which then consisted solely of snake bile). Their romance was well known across the pre-agricultural civilization. It was said in petroglyphs of the era that Mem's love for Selek was such that when he would catch sight of Selek from his barber shop, he would likely shave the entire head of his client while distracted. Selek also loved Mem beyond compare, and was noted by other petroglyphs to frequently give him a "free trim and shave," which was an ancient euphemism for mutual oral sex while dipped in honey in a stone pit, as was the tradition at the time.
The Mem/Selek Wedding took six hours to conduct, and included a feast, an orgy, a combination feast/orgy, another feast, and a brief ceremony involving the smashing of a cup. As glass had not yet been invented, the cup was stone and this took up most of the time. Following this ceremonial act, there was another feast, a retelling of the entire history of civilization (thankfully as civilization was only a few weeks old at this point it didn't take long) and another orgy.
Of their future together we know little, except that they did not ever divorce, and they lived to the old age of 900 years, which confused everyone until some archaeologist figured out that they were using lunar years. But their wedding ceremony caught on and was for over ten thousand years the standard wedding ceremony across the entire span of humanity, which in those days covered almost 50 square miles.
