338 articles
BharatMatrimony
BharatMatrimony is an Indian online matrimonial service, the flagship brand of NSE/BSE-listed Matrimony.com Limited founded by Murugavel Janakiraman. It runs 15 regional language portals, free registration with paid Gold/Diamond/Platinum/Assisted tiers, mandatory mobile verification, and 9.95 lakh paid profiles as of March 2025.
Bidar Kadın
Bidar Kadın (Bidâr Kadınefendi, 1858–1918), Circassian consort of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, mother of Naime Sultan and Şehzade Abdülkadir, second kadınefendi from 1895, died in Erenköy, Istanbul.
Bigamy
Bigamy: contracting a marriage while still legally married to another person; a crime in monogamy-recognizing countries, made felony by England's 1604 Act, a ground of annulment, and treated variously where personal law permits polygamy.
Boston marriage
Boston marriage: a late 19th- to early 20th-century New England term for a long-term cohabiting relationship between two unmarried, often college-educated and financially independent women; popularized by Henry James's The Bostonians (1886), exemplified by Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett.
Boyfriend
Boyfriend: a man or boy someone has a romantic or sexual relationship with; word first recorded 1895-1900, paired with girlfriend in early-1900s US dating culture. Also a fashion adjective for men's-inspired women's clothing.
Breadcrumbing
Breadcrumbing: sending intermittent, vague messages of interest to keep a dating partner hooked without intending commitment; colloquial term from Hansel and Gretel, driven by intermittent reinforcement, linked to loneliness and reduced life satisfaction.
Bridal shower
A bridal shower, also called a wedding shower, is a pre-wedding party, mainly in the United States, at which guests give the bride or couple gifts for their future home.
Bride
Bride: a woman on her wedding day, from Teutonic bruths/bryd. Covers etymology, bride-cake origins, the white dress popularized by Queen Victoria, bridal music, and marriage payments like bridewealth and dowry.
Bride price
Bride price, or bridewealth, is a marriage payment from the groom's family to the bride's family, the most common form of marriage compensation worldwide, contrasted with dowry, which moves in the opposite direction.
Bridesmaid
A bridesmaid is a woman who attends and supports the bride at a wedding. The role spans ceremony duties, months of planning labor, and costs of roughly $1,700 per bridesmaid, with parties shrinking to about four per side by 2026.
Buddhist views of marriage
Buddhist views of marriage treat marriage as a secular arrangement, neither holy nor unholy, with no canonical wedding rite and monks who bless couples but never officiate.
Bumble
Bumble is a dating app founded in 2014 by Whitney Wolfe Herd, known for its women-message-first rule, removed in August 2026; parent Bumble Inc. also owns Badoo and BFF.
Bundling (tradition)
Bundling, a courtship custom in Europe and colonial North America: courting couples shared a bed fully clothed, often separated by a board or bolster, to test compatibility before marriage; survives among Amish.
Burned Haystack Dating Method
Burned Haystack Dating Method (BHDM), created 2023 by rhetoric professor Jennie Young, is a high-filter online dating strategy using 10 rules, 33 red flag rhetorical patterns, and "block to burn" blocking, spread via a 260,000-member Facebook group and her book Burn the Haystack.
Candy Carson
Candy Carson, born Lacena Rustin, is an American author, musician, and philanthropist; wife of Ben Carson, co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund (1994), Yale-trained violinist with a Johns Hopkins MBA, and author of the 2016 memoir A Doctor in the House.
Casual dating
Casual dating is dating without expecting serious commitment, distinct from hookups, booty calls, and friends-with-benefits arrangements. Key facts: Pew 2023 shows 40% of dating-app users seek casual dating; outcome research finds lower relationship quality is explained by selectivity.
Casual sex
Casual sex, also called hooking up or uncommitted sexual encounters, is sex outside a committed relationship. Covers its forms, 1960s naming, emotional outcomes research, declining rates among US young adults, and STI prevention.
Catfishing
Catfishing is creating a false online identity to deceive someone, often romantically; also called romance scamming. Named from the 2010 documentary Catfish; FBI-reported US losses reached about $1 billion in 2021.
Celestial marriage
Celestial marriage, in LDS doctrine, is temple marriage for time and eternity, sealed by priesthood authority; historically the term also denoted plural marriage, ended by the 1890 Manifesto.
Chinese pre-wedding customs
Chinese pre-wedding customs, from the classical Six Rites and Three Letters to modern guo da li betrothal, bride price (caili) negotiation, hair-combing (shang tou), and pre-wedding photography in China and the diaspora.
Christian views on divorce
Christian views on divorce cover how traditions interpret Matthew's porneia exception clause, Mark and Luke's exceptionless prohibition, and 1 Corinthians 7, producing Catholic indissolubility with annulment, Orthodox penitential remarriage, and varied Protestant grounds.
Chuppah (חופה)
Chuppah (חופה, also huppah; plural chuppot) is the canopy under which a Jewish wedding ceremony is held, literally "covering." Originally the bridal chamber, it became a four-pole cloth canopy symbolizing the couple's new home, open on all sides.
Civil marriage
Civil marriage: marriage under state law, not religious authority. Also called civil wedding; related to marriage registry, Marriage Act 1836. Distinguished from religious marriage and civil partnership by state registration and its legal consequences.
Civil Partnership Act 2004
Civil Partnership Act 2004 (c. 33), UK statute assented 18 November 2004 and in force 5 December 2005, created civil partnership for same-sex couples with rights parallel to marriage; extended to opposite-sex couples from 2 December 2019 after Steinfeld and Keidan.
Clerical celibacy
Clerical celibacy is the church-law requirement that clergy be unmarried and continent, mandatory in the Latin Catholic Church since the Gregorian Reform and Lateran councils, while Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches ordain married priests but choose celibate bishops.
Clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church
Clerical celibacy in the Catholic Church: the Latin Church discipline binding clerics to continence and celibacy (canon 277), its history from Elvira to the Lateran councils, Eastern married-priest practice, exceptions, and official rationales.
Clerical marriage
Clerical marriage is the marriage of ordained clergy, permitted in Orthodox, most Eastern Catholic, and Protestant churches while barred in the Latin Catholic rite; history spans early married bishops, the 1139 nullification ban, and Meiji Japan's nikujiki saitai.
Coffee Meets Bagel
Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) is a dating app founded in 2012 by sisters Arum, Dawoon, and Soo Kang, known for daily curated matches at noon and for declining Mark Cuban's record $30 million Shark Tank offer.
Cohabitation
Cohabitation is an arrangement in which an unmarried couple share a household as an intimate partnership, now the normal way most couples in many countries begin shared lives.
Cohabitation agreement
Cohabitation agreement: a legal contract between unmarried people living together, covering finances, property, children and next of kin. Also used by non-romantic households; valid in England and Wales when made as a deed and signed.