Marriage was different for whatever class and culture you were in the Colonial Era. Marriage was decided by the amount of money you had. If you were gentry class, you would have a large and wonderful ceremony filled with traditions. All cultures and classes had unique rituals not just in their ceremonies but also in the sense of starting a family together. African, European, and Native all had marriage in their cultures, maybe not very similar, but they all wanted everyone to be happy. Woman needed men in their lives, not only to be happy, but also to improve their financial status. They didn’t have much money because they weren’t allowed to work for it, but marrying a man would help them by a lot. Men could have jobs, they were allowed to work much more than women. The colonial period needed marriage in their lives for happiness. The colony would have been lonely with men ruling everything everywhere. Marriage gave the women chances to have a little more freedom than they used to have. If marriage wasn’t such a financial competition, would more people have been equal? If you think about it, marriage made people brag and show how good they were if they were married. That shows how big of a deal marriage was, it’s not just a form of two people in love sharing life together. It was also a competition, a cruel life you were forced into and a job in which you had to work for, for a long time.