Every marriage has its weird side, but some of the strangest ones in history went beyond the norm to become something else entirely.
Matching became the project
Couples rub off on each other, that’s completely normal, but Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer’s marriage was something else. P-Orridge, yes, that really was her last name, was an English musician, part of the band Throbbing Gristle. She married Breyer in the 1990s.
They believed in an idea that they called Pandrogeny, where a couple becomes more like one shared person, instead of two individuals. The pair had haircuts, changed clothes, wore makeup, and even had surgery to look alike. Talk about dedication.
Rome got a bridegroom
Emperor Nero was someone with a pretty chaotic life, that’s no surprise, but it all got weirder when he met the young freedman, Sporus. The emperor had Sporus castrated and then married him in a ceremony that copied the Roman wedding rites, right down to the bridal veil and dowry.Â
That wasn’t all, though, because Nero apparently treated Sporus as a wife and even called him Sabina. It wasn’t a random name, it was the name of Nero’s late wife, Poppaea Sabina, who died before Nero met Sporus. Grief makes you do some strange things, clearly.
Vesta entered the palace
Elagabalus was only a teenager when he became Roman emperor, so you already know things would be weird. But how weird? In A.D. 220, he married Julia Aquilia Severa, a Vestal Virgin, a kind of priestess who seriously believed in celibacy.
So much so, in fact, that they weren’t supposed to get married, let alone sleep with a partner. Elagabalus didn’t care because he argued that any children they had would be divine, obviously, but then he divorced her, married someone else, and went back to Severa later.
Hatred at the crowning
In 1795, George IV, then Prince of Wales, married Caroline of Brunswick in London, and it was doomed from the start. He was already secretly married to Maria Fitzherbert, for one. Caroline had a child with George the next year, and then he returned to Fitzherbert.
Because, apparently, he couldn’t stand Caroline. George forced Caroline out of his home before he became king, and even went as far as banning her from his 1821 coronation, that’s some serious wedding drama.Â
Bedrooms moved by schedule
Conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker were born in what is now Thailand in 1811. They decided to move to North Carolina and married sisters in 1843, with Eng marrying Sarah Yates, and Chang marrying Adelaide Yates. The household setup was, well, not exactly simple.
It involved them having two homes and moving between them every three days, Chang’s house for a few days, Eng’s the next. It didn’t seem to affect the romance, though, because the two marriages had 21 children between them.
A familiar stranger
A man walked into Artigat, France, in the 1550s, and said he was Martin Guerre, pretty normal stuff. Except, no, Guerre had disappeared years before. His wife accepted him as her husband, and so did many relatives since he looked the same and knew private details.Â
So what’s the problem? That came three years later, when the real Martin re-appeared, like something out of a soap opera. Turns out, the fake Guerre was actually a man named Arnaud du Tilh, who was later found guilty of being an impostor and executed.
Breakfast had observers
Psychologists are bound to do things a little differently, but Winthrop and Luella Kellogg took it to the next level. The pair raised a 7-month-old chimpanzee named Gua during the 1930s, alongside their 10-month-old son, Donald. Yes, same house, same routines, different species.
Their goal was to see how the pair responded differently to things. Commands, objects, food, clothes, daily handling, all of it was worth studying, apparently, and the experiment lasted nine months. They published it as a book in 1933, called The Ape and the Child.
Halloween kept calling
Harry Houdini. He was known for his incredible performances, and they didn’t stop during his marriage, either. Before Harry died in 1926, he made a pact with his wife, Bess, that whoever died first would try to contact the other, using coded messages. Seriously.
They had to prove that they were talking to them beyond the grave, when that moment came. Bess held séances for years and, apparently, she spoke to Harry. Her final big one was on Halloween in 1936, because of course it was, it had to be theatrical.
Angels joined the paperwork
John Dee was an Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer, and adviser to powerful people. But it’s his marriage to Jane Dee that really pushed things to the extreme, though, and it started with John’s work with Edward Kelley. Kelley was a scryer, a special kind of medium.
He claimed angels sent him messages, one of which came in 1587. The angels ‘told’ him that the two men had to share everything, including their wives. That’s exactly what they did, they became angelically approved swingers in Elizabethan England.
Letters opened the castle
In 1934, artist Salvador Dalà married Gala, and to show his love, he restored a medieval castle for her in Púbol, Spain. Pretty romantic, right? Gala used it as her own private place, although Dalà wasn’t allowed to come by whenever he wanted, definitely not.
He could only go to the castle if she sent him a written invitation. Yes, he painted the rooms, and yes, he left little things for her there, but he still had to wait for permission to enter because, after all, it was a castle. Gala died in 1982 and was buried at the castle.
Museum started at the door
EVA & ADELE were a couple that arrived more like an event than two people in a relationship. They were performance artists based in Berlin, and they wore matching outfits, shaved heads, bright makeup, basically everything was the same.
They didn’t want people to see the other person without the other. The pair were unofficially married at Berlin’s Gropius Bau in 1991, then they got legally married in 2011 after a gender-recognition case. Their motto? ‘Wherever we are is museum,’ makes sense, really.
The midway wrote the poster
Percilla Bejano was born in Puerto Rico in 1911 with hypertrichosis, a condition that causes heavy hair growth, and hyperdontia, giving her extra teeth. She joined the sideshow and became known as ‘The Monkey Girl.’
Emmitt Bejano performed as ‘The Alligator Man’ due to a skin condition that gave him scaly skin. The pair met, fell in love, married in 1938, then continued to perform together. They were billed as ‘The World’s Strangest Married Couple,’ kind of harsh, honestly.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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