Is the institution of marriage unnatural?

Zen65 wrote: »

The context of the question is not clear to me: what do you mean by "natural"?

Our society is filled with rituals and technology that are patently unnatural, from wrist watches to mobile phones, and including activities such as queueing, wearing wigs, dieting, voting, investing money, and so forth. Marriage is unnatural in the same way: it is a ritual that was consciously introduced as a mechanism for achieving an end.

It's hard to say exactly why some of these rituals were introduced. There is no doubt that our ape-like ancestors discovered early on that the species would not survive nor prosper without some level of collaboration between beings in order to most effectively acquire food and clothing, and later to build suitable dwellings beyond the caves. For collaboration to work it was necessary to have various forms of understanding between the more aggressive males and in time this would require some sort of rule which ensured that battles over females did not tear communities apart. Hence was introduced the idea of denoting a special relationship between a man and a woman, which gave rise to further conventions:

• The children born into communities would belong to established parents and be raised by them.
• The woman in such a partnership was not to be preyed upon by other males looking to mate.
• Bed linen and coffee mornings

I expect that the initial partnerships were polygamous in nature, that is to say the male may have had many female partners whereas the women would each only have one (shared) male. This arrangement was very suitable for the women (home duties shared, less cleaning up after "him", and plenty of other interesting company to talk with) but was less suited to unlucky non-alpha males. Eventually the alpha males would come to fear packs of roaming nerd males who were bitter at having no partners, and after many frenzied pencil-attacks on the alpha males a new societal norm began to emerge in which the alpha male only claimed one female partner (the best looking one), leaving the nerds to sort themselves out with the left-overs.

As pagan religions increased their influence on societies, some of the most bitter nerd-male priests decreed that the God entities (there were more than one, before the Gods were amalgamated by later religions) favoured monogamy, leaving more women available for the priests (pre-Christianity male priests could have female partners). Hence many (but not all) religions imposed monogamy as a norm.

Centuries later, after the Christian church became established following the revelations of Moses, the matrimonial vow was made to have some sort of legal status. This had the advantage that the most nerdy of males who could not otherwise find females would prosper as lawyers, which in turn provided them with money with which they could afford to buy the cheapest of females.

Why did marriage catch on? Probably because societies which did not kill each other over potential mates bred more and so prospered. The very existence of the matrimonial tradition reduced in-fighting and so societies found other ways to focus their energies.... like sports. Sports gave rise to healthier populations which in turn boosted the population growth. The rapid growth of societies which practised marriage led to the idea of marriage becoming increasingly popular. It is an example of a natural evolution of an unnatural act.

You can fill in the obvious blanks and simplifications yourself by consulting Wikipedia.

So Op, why did you ask?


Z

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M1c7itPy3Y

Sid_Justice wrote: »

I genuinely don't believe women that say "I don't need a piece of paper to endorse my relationship with my spouse".

They are just trying to pretend it doesn't bother them.

Killer Pigeon wrote: »

The fact that it happens means that it's natural.

CarMe wrote: »

So you clearly don't actually know any women then, just the steriotype you read about. It's quite sad and I do have sympathy for you but you must be very small minded to even think a woman can't just love a man, to love him and for nothing more.

Paddy Cow wrote: »

I would love a legal partership though. I can't be arsed with the church, big day, declaring our love infront of hundreds of people etc. However, I would like the document that states that we are legally responsible for each other. Without it, one partner could be in an accident, end up in hospital and you have no rights to visit them/have a say in their medical care. If their family don't like you, they could make life very difficult. Plus grief does strange things to people and even if they do like you, they could totally take over and exclude you.

So for me, what I would like is to be able to go into a lawyer's office with my partner and we sign the document saying that we agree to legal responsibility for each other. No fuss or hassle. It would be like making a will except instead of declaring what you want to do when dead, you are declaring what you want to do when alive. We also include terms like a pre-nup. If we can't decide who gets what in the event we break up when we are madly in love, then it would be 100 times harder if we actually broke up and hated each other. I think it is natural to want to protect those you love and if marrying gives you that protection then it is natural.