338 articles
Colorado City, Arizona
Colorado City, Arizona, twin of Hildale, Utah, forms the Short Creek community, an FLDS polygamist stronghold raided in 1953, sued by the Justice Department, and transformed after court supervision ended in 2025.
Comparison of online dating services
Comparison of online dating services: Match.com, eHarmony, OkCupid, Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble differ in matching method, freemium pricing, ownership (Match Group versus Bumble), user demographics, harassment rates, and safety practices.
Concubinage
Concubinage, from Latin concubina, is cohabitation as married persons without full legal marriage. Covers Roman law status, medieval church tolerance, Council of Trent abolition, Islamic and Chinese concubinage, and modern French and Mexican inheritance law.
Consanguinity
Consanguinity (close-kin marriage, second cousins or closer): about 10.4% of the global population; first-cousin unions carry an inbreeding coefficient of 1/16 and roughly double congenital disorder risk, with practice concentrated in MENA and South Asia.
Coparenting
Coparenting is the support, solidarity, and coordination between adults sharing a child's upbringing, studied across intact, divorced, step-, and kinship families; dimensions include cooperation, conflict, and triangulation, with meta-analytic links to child adjustment.
Cougar (slang)
Cougar slang: an older woman who dates or pursues much younger men, attested by 2002, probably from Canada, popularized by Valerie Gibson's 2001 book; informal, often offensive, distinct from the wild cat.
Courtship
Courtship is the social interaction through which people or animals develop a romantic bond in preparation for mating or marriage, spanning animal sexual displays, family-arranged betrothals, twentieth-century dating, and modern dating apps.
Courtship in the Philippines
Courtship in the Philippines (ligaw or panliligaw) is the traditional Filipino process in which a man openly courts a woman, serves her family, and proves sincerity until she accepts. Distinguishing practices: harana serenading, pamamanhikan family visit, and slow family-mediated acceptance, now shifting to app-based dating.
Cousin marriage
Cousin marriage, or consanguineous marriage, is marriage between cousins, typically first cousins. Legal in most of the world, banned in many US states; raises autosomal recessive disorder risk roughly twofold.
Cousin marriage in the Middle East
Cousin (consanguineous) marriage in the Middle East: unions between second cousins or closer (F ≥ 0.0156), reaching 20–70% of marriages in Arab countries, driven by property retention, education, and rural residence.
Cousin marriage law in the United States
US state statutes restricting or banning first-cousin marriage, with the federal government silent: 22 permissive states, 6 conditional, and 22 bans since Kansas's first in 1858.
Covenant marriage
Covenant marriage is a legally distinct U.S. marriage form in Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas requiring premarital counseling and restricting divorce to fault-based grounds; take-up is under 5%.
Dating
Dating, a twentieth-century American form of courtship between people assessing a relationship, evolved from supervised 'calling' to commercial dates, going steady, the post-1960 sexual revolution, and algorithmic online matching.
Deborah Read
Deborah Read Franklin (c. 1707/1708-1774) was Benjamin Franklin's common-law wife from 1730 and a Philadelphia businesswoman who managed the Franklin shops, printing operations, and post office affairs during his long absences in Europe; she died of a stroke in December 1774.
Declaration of nullity
Declaration of nullity (annulment, decree of nullity): a court or tribunal ruling that a marriage or other legal act was never valid from the outset; covers void vs voidable marriages in civil law and declarative nullity judgments in Catholic canon law.
Decree nisi
Decree nisi: provisional divorce order (now "conditional order" in England and Wales since 6 April 2022) showing the court sees no bar to divorce; parties stay married until the decree absolute (final order), applyable 43 days later.
Demographics of online dating
Demographics of online dating describes who uses dating sites and apps, measured by age, gender, sexual orientation, education, and geography, together with research on the relationships they produce.
Denys Finch Hatton
Denys Finch Hatton (1887–1931), Hon. Denys George Finch Hatton, English aristocrat, farmer and white hunter in Kenya; Karen Blixen's lover, model for Out of Africa, killed in a Gipsy Moth crash near Voi.
Diana Fox Carney
Diana Fox Carney (born 1965), British-Canadian development and climate economist, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney; Oxford-educated, hockey player, ex-Canada 2020, IPPR, Pi Capital, Eurasia Group senior advisor.
Divorce demography
Divorce demography studies divorce frequency, timing, and social distribution using crude and refined divorce rates and cohort measures. Key findings: US rates rose fourfold 1900–2018 then declined; divorce law explains little; education and age stratify risk.
Divorce law by country
Divorce law by country: national rules for dissolving marriage, distinguishing fault-based grounds from no-fault and mutual-consent regimes. Covers California's 1969 first US no-fault law, European reforms, Korea, Indonesia, Australia, extrajudicial EU divorce, and measured divorce-rate effects.
Domestic partnership in California
A domestic partnership in California is a legal relationship registered with the Secretary of State giving partners the same rights and duties as spouses under state law.
Domestic partnership in the United States
Domestic partnership in the United States: a state or local legal status for unmarried couples, same-sex or opposite-sex, granting rights like hospital visitation and insurance; unrecognized federally, diminished after Obergefell 2015.
Dona Celeste
Dona Celeste (Celeste Arantes do Nascimento, 1922–2024), Brazilian mother of footballer Pelé and wife of Dondinho; born in Três Corações, honored as Brazilian Mother of the Year 1966, died aged 101 in Santos.
Dowry
Dowry: wealth transfer from a bride's family to the groom or his family at marriage, the reverse of bride price. Rare cross-culturally (3% of Ethnographic Atlas sample), concentrated in South Asia where over 80% of marriages in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan involve it; widely decried for links to violence against women.
Duchess of Edinburgh
Duchess of Edinburgh, British royal title for the wife of the Duke of Edinburgh, created 1726 and held 2023 by Sophie, wife of Prince Edward, after Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
Effects of divorce
Effects of divorce cover consequences of marital dissolution for adults and children. US research links parental divorce to lower adult earnings, higher incarceration, teen births, and mortality, mediated by income loss, neighborhood change, and reduced parent proximity.
EHarmony
eHarmony (eharmony) is an American online dating service founded in 2000 by psychologist Neil Clark Warren in Pasadena, California. Known for its Compatibility Quiz and patented 29 Dimensions matching model, it targets serious, marriage-minded daters and is owned by ParshipMeet Group.
Elizabeth Harris Aitken
Elizabeth Harris Aitken, born Elizabeth Rees-Williams (Cardiff, 1936 – 2022), Welsh socialite, daughter of the first Baron Ogmore; married Richard Harris, Sir Rex Harrison, Peter Aitken and Jonathan Aitken; wrote Love, Honour and Dismay.
Elizabeth Kloepfer
Elizabeth Kloepfer (pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall), Ted Bundy's girlfriend 1969–1975, wrote the 1981 memoir The Phantom Prince and reported her suspicions of him to Seattle police.