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Changes to Relationship with George Washington section[edit]
I made a couple of edits to this section. I don't think there's much controversial in them, but purely because summarising them accurately would take more space than the edit summary box allows, I'm summarising my changes here:
I reworded the opening sentence so it wasn't so tortuous. It managed to say "Fairfax" three times (one of which implied that it was Sally Fairfax's maiden name) and jumped around unnecessarily in people's family relationships ("Mrs. X's sister-in-law, Mrs. Y, married Mr. Y soon after her brother Mr. X", making 'her' ambiguous, instead of just "Mr. X's sister Mrs. Y").
George William Fairfax was three years older than George Washington, assuming the birthdate in George William Fairfax is in New Style dating; if it's in Old Style, he was only two years older. Since this means they were just about the same age, I took out the assertion that GWF was "considerably older" than GW.
I added Citation Needed tags to the assertions that the reason nothing happened between GW and SF was because GW was just too perfect. Such statements would need citing for anyone, but it's especially important to cite them when speaking of Founding Fathers so as to avoid hagiography.
I removed the words "initially" and "only" from the assertion that GW married Martha Custis "initially perhaps only to heighten his social status" because there's no "initially" about why you marry someone, unless you end up marrying them multiple times. It only takes an hour or so to marry someone, so GW's reasons for marrying MC on their wedding day are his reasons for marrying her, not for "initially" marrying her, regardless of whether or not they subsequently enjoyed a lifetime of close and exemplary married life. You can maybe argue that this doesn't apply to a twenty-first century marriage, when divorce is socially acceptable and easily obtained, but it was neither of things in the eighteenth century, so a couple failing to get divorced back then is not an indicator that they both willingly consent to continue to be married. Binabik80 (talk) 21:03, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]
