Pretty sure the child marriage thing was only the case for royalty and nobility though.
Nope, it was also common for the peasant and merchant classes. Marriage before was like a business contract. It was a way of getting in-laws, of making alliances and expanding the family labor force rather than a unification of 2 individuals in love that we know today. In fact that was the exact purpose of marriage up until recently when market economies started to rise.
Keep in mind; families had more mouths to feed and giving away a bride meant to lose a mouth (for the cost of a dowry), since she'd live with the "new family".
After finishing basic school education (elementary), my aunt was told that she doesn't need to know more than that, since her place would be in the kitchen. (no joke)
So she left school and got taught by my great-grandmother (a really scary white-haired lady with a voice like barbed wire) in how to manage a manor. She got married early and got her first child, then the second one and (since the times they are-a-changing and her husband was a good-for-nothing) got divorced.
She's almost 60yo now, unemployed, re-married another good-for-nothing and I don't have the first clue on what she'll live off in 10 years. Though I understand that my great-grandparents and my grand-parents generation thought to do the right thing, I'd very much would like to kick them for being so obstinately clinging to "it's always been that way"
Ugh... hindsight is 20/20 they say :P
It's strange actually... my grandma was born in like... 1909, married when she was 14 but her first kid came when she was 25. We always joked that people back then didn't have TV's so she ended up having 8 "surviving" children (I'm not sure how many were stillborn, but I heard "lots"), my dad being the last one, when she was 45.
Thing is... her husband was a good for nothing, who left her to raise another family somewhere else (never divorced her though... probably 'cause they were strong catholics and back then that wasn't an option, perhaps?), dad to this day gets a dark cloud over his face whenever someone brings up his father... I don't know how my grandma did it, being a single mother, raising 8 children (and having some those kids' families living with her part of the way) and still managing to live 101 years old. My dad's oldest sister's son is only 2 years younger than my father... Crazyness.
And that's just it - see my grand parents met each other after my grandmother fled from russia (at 12 yo with her mother); they met and well..."had fun together" and ...she got pregnant. Scandalous! My grandfather got thoroughly punished by HIS mother (he was barely 20 but that didn't stop her at all), and my grand mother tried to get rid of the baby (which didn't work, so my mother was born out of wedlock). They argued, broke up, got together...and she got pregnant again (*facepalming hard*).
And what happened? They had to marry. Right. They HAD TO. Otherwise my great-grandmother (the one with the missing pinky and a history as a pickpocket) would've ended up in jail under suspicion of prostituting her own daughter. Great-grandmother (grand fathers mother, barbed wire voice, scary as hell) only worry was "what would the people think". The result? An unhappy couple with unwanted additions (two girls, of all things, why did it have to be girls when all he wanted was BOYS), which stayed together until the end (if that was love, or just habitualness or just plain co-dependency...only they could've said) and produced unhappy children in unhappy families.
Pain patterns ahoi.
One might think that its 2017 and maybe high time we stop repeating dumb sh*# from the century before last because its....well...DUMB...and maybe no longer fitting...did I mention DUMB?! (And in no way do I mean we should invent new stupidity to replace the old!)
And then you're looking at your family hissing at each other to grab the best piece of grand mothers tableware and what-not (she wasn't even BURIED by then) and you just can't help to think: I'm part of an evolving species. PLEASE say I am.
Oh man... I've never had to deal with that bit (all older relatives were either dead by the time I was alive or so poor that when they died there wasn't much to fight for, I think in my grandma's case it was her books, but those just defaulted to the relatives that were living with her still), but my ex's family had a few deaths while we were together (2 grandma's and one grandpa) and boy... I COMPLETELY get what you mean about hoping you're the one evolving away from their antics.
I mean, I was really glad that my ex and his parents/siblings by far were the wiser ones of the people there, but I got to know their cousins and aunts and their children and boy... there was only ONE child that seemed to be levelheaded and didn't do embarrassing stuff at those times, and that was mainly 'cause she was too focused reading her books x)
Still, there was some hope for the future :D
There's not much hope to find on my husbands side of the family - his father died 2015 and since he'd lived separated from his wife (she in turn had a new partner while father-in-law was raising their 4 children, ranging vom 8yo to 17yo, while working full-time to feed them - all by his lonesome, since father-in-laws family in turn had decided his wife wasn't good enough for him - they were kind of right, but he was kind of stubborn, so they NEVER EVER TALKED AGAIN until his funeral), the kids held a meeting to divide his belongings - even though everyone's keeping contact with their mom, she was NOT part of that meeting by conclusion of the children she left. (And BOY was she pissed about it.) I can only hope that we'll be able to break those idiotic behavioural patterns and manage to raise our kids into ...at least decent human beings for a start.
But wow, spread out like this...our family tree could nurture tons of psychiatrists into the unforseeable future.
Your mother-in-law sounds quite like one of my ex's aunts. Cuts off everyone, badmouths them at any given chance, but throws a shitstorm of a tantrum if she's not included when the things are split up, even though she had been quite vocal about not wanting anything to do with that family.
People are crazy... psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists sure have their work cut out for them, sometimes I wonder if they have the patience of saints for wanting to deal with all of that :P
One of the rare shoujo mangas that i actually like. My only issue is the art... Aldina is drawn so young (don't remember catching her age in the storyline) and with her hair short I'm feeling like im reading shota T.T