Such is the case with the true story of African prince Seretse Khama and English clerk Ruth Williams, the interracial couple whose simple wish to live together as man and wife in Seretse's native Botswana led to a decades-long bitter fight between his family and the British Empire that ended in that African country's independence from Britain.
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After changing sex, Ila loses the memory of being the other gender. During one such period, Ila marries Budha (the god of the planet Mercury). Although Budha knows of Ila's alternating gender, he doesn't enlighten the 'male' Ila, who remains unaware of his life as a woman. The two live together as man and wife only when Ila is female.
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Unfortunately, the plane crashes with no survivors. Bianca, obsessed with Marco, does not stop searching for him and finds him stranded in an island. Marco suffers amnesia but remembers Bianca from his childhood. Bianca decides to use his amnesia and builds an intricate lie to him about his life: she tells him she is his wife and they live together as man and wife.
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Despite her family's disapproval of their relationship, Fanny began to write passionate letters to Kent, "filled with repeated entreaties to spend the rest of their lives together". He eventually allowed her to join him at lodgings in East Greenwich near London. The two decided to live together as man and wife, making wills in each other's favour and hoping to remain discreet. In this, however, they did not reckon on Fanny's relations.
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Zina and Henry Jacobs continued to live together as man and wife, and Zina's "connubial relations with Joseph Smith, if any occurred at all, [were] certainly infrequent and irregular." She never had any children with Joseph, but she and Jacobs had another son, Henry Chariton Jacobs, on March 22, 1846. Her husband Henry was constantly called on missions (he served at least eight between 1839 and 1845) and was thus often absent from the house. In the face of such absences, Zina did not turn to Joseph but rather sought relief from female kin.
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In the portrayals by the early European visitors, which dominated our image of the South Sea societies until well into the 20th century, the erotic aspects of Arioi culture were emphasized, indeed overemphasized. Therefore, one must take into account that these reports mainly came from missionaries, and self- educated travelers such as Forster and Moerenhout were deeply entrenched in the prudish society of the late 18th and 19th centuries. An example of this is the following description of the Arioi from James Cook's journal of his first trip in 1769: : Many of these people contract intimacies and live together as man and wife for years, in the course of which the children that are born are destroy'd. They are so far from concealing it that they look upon it as a branch of freedom upon which they value themselves.
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Marriage gave a couple rights over each other which conflicted with the enslavers' claims. Most marriages between enslaved black people were not legally recognized during American slavery, Taylor quotes from an 1882 ruling by Justice James Eakin of the Arkansas Supreme Court: 'There were no valid marriages amongst that class [the slaves], in the slave states of America before their general emancipation...' as in law marriage was held to be a civil contract, and civil contracts required the consent of free persons. A New York court upheld the retrospective validity of a marriage between Anthony Jones and Patsy Minor, even though at the time and place it had been contracted such marriages between enslaved people were not legally recognized. Both Jones and Minor had been enslaved in Virginia when, with consent of their respective masters, they declared an intention to live together as man and wife.
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