Marriage Facts

In France, it is legal to marry a dead person.

In 1967, Barack Obama's mother Ann Dunham married her second husband, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia. Like many Javanese Muslims, Lolo practiced a syncretic form of Islam that blended traditional Islamic beliefs with indigenous Javanese spirituality and Hindu-Buddhist influences.

According to widespread superstition, once a wedding ring has been placed on the finger, removing it brings bad luck to the marriage.

First-cousin marriages are legal in Utah, so long as both parties are 65 or older!

It is a recognized practice in some communities in Southern India for a man to marry his elder sister's daughter, a form of cross-cousin marriage, though its prevalence is declining.

The average person dates 7 people before finding their spouse, though they may go on dozens of dates with each person along the way.

Cleopatra married two of her brothers.

In some tribal communities in India, people perform ceremonial 'marriages' to dogs as part of traditional rituals to ward off curses or evil spirits!

35% of the people using personal ads for dating are already married!

In November 2013, a woman in Florida named Linda Ducharme married a Ferris wheel named Bruce, becoming one of the few people to legally wed an inanimate object under objectum sexuality.

In ancient Greece, tossing an apple to a girl was a traditional proposal of marriage. Catching it meant that she accepted.

In 2011, more than a third of all US divorce filings contained the word 'Facebook'.

The Band-Aid was originally made for the inventor's wife, who often cut and burned herself while cooking.

When a fire shut down an Ohio dairy's milking parlor, 11 other dairies took in its 1,100 cows within a day and milked them for months. The farmer's daughter logged every truck that came. One driver almost stayed home. She asked his name at his truck. Today they are married, and the herd is back on the family farm.

A Florida pastor who wrote a book on how to love your spouse was arrested for allegedly marrying a second woman while still legally wed to the first. Leslie Williams, 62, ran a faith-based ministry at The Villages and published the 2017 book "Love Her Like This." He is charged with felony bigamy.