Theory and Metatheory of Marriage

[sythyry]

I do not approve of the following decision! But I got outvoted. The wrongfolk have, wrongly, decided that everyone gets to make up their own form of marriage and to have it proclaimed a legal form of marriage by the legeriat.

This takes something that I think is perfectly reasonable -- everyone gets to make up their own marriage vows -- and generalizes it to madness. So, for example, Phaniet and Este want to make up an Binary-Open Marriage, which is a pretty conventional couple marriage, except that they can take lovers but they have to do it together. Arfaen, for her part, has decided that she likes having a tofyof, and wants something like that allowed by law too.

We're going to have a great big book listing all the currently available varieties of marriage. We already have the book itself -- a massive ledger book bound in green leather -- and I did manage to get some agreement that, when the book is full, we stop this game.

Anyhow, I'm worried about the game. It needs some rules, or someone's going to get hurt. Here are some rules I am thinking about, or that various of our more enthusiastic Rassimel and mock-Rassimel have discussed.

1. Marriages concern emotional and sexual bonds, long-term life plans, joint living situations, rights of kinship, and selected property matters. (Rationale: We probably have left some things off this list. But we don't want, say, two people who ought to be entering a business arrangement to phrase it as a marriage.)
2. A form of marriage must concern the attachments of a collection of consenting adults (called "spouses"). The collection of spouses is fixed at the time of the marriage.
3. The spouses must know, understand, and agree to the terms of the marriage before they can enter into it. (Rationale: You can't, say, marry the Duke of Vheshrame in a form marriage that gives you half his wealth, unless the Duke wants to.)
4. A spouse may unilaterally proclaim divorce, dissolving the whole marriage unless the terms of the marriage explain what will happen in the case of divorces. (Rationale: Divorce seems essential in various situations. Dissolving the whole marriage may seem rather drastic, but the alternative is chaos -- e.g., if five overzealous Orren have put together an intricate arrangement heavily based on the numerology of 5, and one leaves, there'll be no sensible way to interpret the remaining arrangement for 4. But a standard Cani marriage of 13 adults will turn into a standard Cani marriage of 12 in the natural way.)
5. Marriage vows never supercede other legal requirements. Prior marriage vows have precedence over newer ones. (Rationale: This system is going to be ridiculously unstable, but this rule makes it a touch more stable. Besides, if you don't like the prior vows, you can destroy that marriage and make one that fits your needs.)
Anyhow ... any ideas, suggestions, demands, proclamations, assertions, distractions, uglifications, or derisions?

Comments

[redbird]

Question: if (say) those 13 Cani with their standard Cani marriage want to marry a 14th Cani, do they have to first formally dissolve the existing marriage? Or would it be a good idea to modify rule 2 so that all the people currently in a marriage could agree to modify it by marrying one or more other primes, assuming that didn't violate the form of the marriage? I'd suggest, to match rule 4, adding to rule 2 something like "unless the terms of the marriage allow for adding spouses by unanimous consent."

Meta-question: this sounds as though any given person can only be in one marriage at a time, and someone (call zir Green) can only be married to both Red and Mauve if Red and Mauve are also married to each other. That is, there can be no overlapping marriages: Mauve can't also be married to Square and Triangle because the three of them are raising children together, with no connection between Square and Red. (Obviously, Mauve could be married to Square and Triangle, and have Yellow as a lover if the terms of Mauve, Square, and Triangle's marriage were about living together and all being responsible for supporting and caring for their children, but said nothing about other lovers.) If that's a rule, you should probably make it explicit; conversely, you might want to include "and people in this form of marriage may also have X, Y, Z forms of marriage with other people" in the book.

[beetiger.livejournal.com]

I hope that is not the case! It's a fairly normal form for Herethroy men to be in two marriages.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I hadn't thought of limiting people to one marriage at a time; it hadn't occurred to me that anyone might have that concept. Herethroy don't, as beetiger notes. And our second exemplar, Hanijan tofyofs, are another example of people in two different marriages at once.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Herethroy do for herethroy females...

[archadia.livejournal.com]

You lost me somewhere between Mauve and Square... (Didn't take much!) can't we all just raise the children communally and support each other and save the fortune in red tape?

(Though, admittedly, our city would make for a great location for a law school, now, wouldn't it?)

[redbird]

That works if we all want to raise the children; this is more about, okay, say three people want to have and raise children together. But one of them also is also deeply, goopily, in love with someone else, who doesn't want to be part of the child-raising. Overlapping relationships are one way to deal with that: the question is whether you/Sythyry's new city-state recognize both the child-raising triad and the childless romantic pairing as marriages, given that they have one person in common, and three people who are on good terms but no more committed to each other than you might be to a cousin. (I have a set of overlapping relationships, but most of the relationships in the network have no legal status, in part because the places I and my partners live not only don't allow that sort of overlapping marriages, they insist that a marriage can only consist of two people.)

[archadia.livejournal.com]

(I was being sarcastic and suggesting throwing marriages out the window due to legal exasperation.)