Talk:Marriage
- but homosexual marriage is beginning to gain acceptance.
- In recent years there has been a growing movement to extend the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples.
Where??? That seems like a very important piece of information to impart. Remember, this isn't just an encyclopedia about the United States. (I would supply the desired information but frankly, I don't know where it's beginning to gain acceptance.)
I think the article could also stand to have a bit more information about traditional marriage between members of the opposite sex, since that's by far the most common type of marriage practiced... For example, statistics on marriage in the U.S., Europe, Japan, China, and other countries would be very interesting to consider. Moreover, some considerations of the purposes of marriage--the most obvious being to provide a home for children. Again, I'd add this information myself, but I think I'd have to do too much research to be able to do it quickly. --LMS
Try all over Europe: Netherlands has legalized full gay marriage, as I believe Belgium has as well. Germany, France, Denmark have introduced or are in the process of introducing domestic partnership legislation, which is often a step along the way. So it isn't just the US. Of course, this isn't happening without a lot of controversy, but you can see where the trend is heading at the moment. -- Simon J Kissane
- Yeah, but anywhere else? Europe and the U.S. is not the world.
I don't know, but I don't think so. As far as I'm aware the gay rights movement hasn't been particularly successful yet except in the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand. In most of the rest of the world they've still got too many more basic issues to be worrying about than gay marriage. As to Australia (where I live), while the gay rights movement has been successful in a lot of ways (witness the Mardi Gras), they haven't managed to get gay marriage on the political agenda yet -- the only stuff I have heard about in the Australian media is what is going on overseas.
But even if its only a sizeable movement in the US and Europe, I'd say that while the US and Europe are not the whole world, they are a significant portion of it. -- SJK
I don't know anything about the Onieda Community. Was its form of marriage the usually seen of lifelong procreative marriage or merely a religious ritual? --rmhermen
Procreative, I believe. I don't know enough to go into detail (19th century religious movements amuse me more than they fascinate me, but I live in Upstate NY, home of Mormonism (Joseph Smith found the golden plates within 10 miles of where I sit typing), the Oneida Community, the Fox Sisters and spiritualism, and other exciting flavors of American Religious Expression.
The Oneida Community was a utopian community that evolved (or devolved, depending on your committment to the founder's mission) into the Oneida Ltd. silverware company. --MichaelTinkler
Makes you wonder what goes on at the Oneida Ltd. board meetings...
- Funny. And yet, somehow rude....
I have qualms with the initial claim of this article. In anthropology classes (I have an A.B. in Anthro), we learned that the primary purpose of marriage in most societies is to establish familial ties for the children, *not* the people getting married. Another element was establishing ties between the families. That's why arranged marriages made sense for the society; you were going to let your young and impetuous children decide your familial ties? The whole "love" concept of marriage is largely Western, and makes sense in a society where people are more distant -- both physically and emotionally -- and thus the relationship between the two individuals is of overriding importance. (And as a result, more divorces -- the marriage is more dependent on that one relationship, and that relationship is under greater pressure.) -- Belltower
- If you've got an A.B. in Anthro and learned stuff to improve the article, by golly then, don't be shy about improving it! Go right ahead! --LMS
- I guess the current wording is more objective? However, it strikes me (from personal experience) that the article is now heavily slanted towards defining marriage as a social, rather than a personal bond, whereas most people I know (in the Netherlands) marry because it signifies the strength of the bond between the two of them, rather than the starting of a family. In most cases, the family has already started.
- Also, gay marriage is now effective in the Netherlands, so perhaps that weird comment can be changed? And why is gay marriage an oxymoron? Am I missing the ethymology here of either 'gay' or 'marriage'?
- Finally, through the public debate in the Netherlands over gay marriage it became clear that many Christians feel 'marriage' is a term that should be reserved for a religiously instigated marriage (although it never became clear to me why 'civil marriage' had been tolerated for so long then). In other words, they objected to the word 'huwelijk' being used to indicate a formal (sexual-familial) bond between to members of the same sex. I never quite got what it was about, but it seemed to be important to them, and therefor may deserve mention. -- branko
I also have qualms with the intro of the article. I think it presents one opinion on marriage as unvarying fact when there is controversy and change. I changed the first sentence from "Marriage is the socially sanctioned union that reproduces the family. It may do this biologically, through children, and/or socially, through forming a household. " to
- Marriage is the social institution by which people join together their lives in emotional and economic ways through forming a household. It confers rights and obligations with respect to raising children, holding property, sexual behaviour, kinship ties, tribal membership, relationship to society, inheritance, emotional intimacy, and love. These rights and responsibilities differ from culture to culture, and over time within a culture. Marriage is found in all societies, but in widely varying forms.
I thought the article as a whole presented marriage in a rather negative light, so I added a Religion section that attempts to summarize marriage as viewed by the five great world religions, and added some other comments here and there just to balance some negative aspects of marriage with some positive ones. I don't think I deleted much, if anything, and I've tried to be objective. Hope no one is too offended. --Wesley
- In most societies, marriage is monogamous, meaning that a person can be married to only one other person at once. Some societies however, permit polygamy, the having of multiple marriage partners at the same time.
Afaik the proportions are exactly opposite. Most societies allow small-size polygyny, only recently due to expansion of Europeans the proportions were changed. Taw
"In most of Europe, the first recognized legal union between a man and a woman was marriage by capture. A man would kidnap a woman from her home and rape her, afterwards she was considered his wife. That practice died out and the practice of marriage by purchase took its place."
- It would be nice if someone give some kind of references for this, as it sounds somewhat more like speculation than it does like well-established history.
- Seconded. Took the passage off the page until we get some refs.
- Homer is the earliest source I know, though not nearly the earliest available, and here we find both bridal prices and dowries, but nothing like formalized kidnap-marriage, and in contemporary tribal societies one usually hears about arranged marriages and special ceremonies instead.
- AFAIK "kidnap-marriage" has existed in some societies, but the idea of a semi-standardized evolutionary timeline of "marriage by kidnap" replaced by "marriage by purchase" replaced by "marriage by mutual consent" sounds very suspicious.
I propose splitting off homosexual marriage as it's a considerable topic in itself. Ed Poor
- Ed. No. Stop. There is no paper limitation here -- the article can be as long as it needs to be to be inclusive. You are leaning towards exclusivity.
- Otherwise, the article currently suffers from incorrect or at least faulty usage in terms of brideprice and dowry. They aren't the same. Brideprice (in Germanic societies, Morgengeld) is paid byy the groom. Dowry is provided by the wife's family.
Okay, I won't split it, 209.20.225.xxx (I generally avoid making major changes like an article split when others object). Ed Poor
- Thanks, Ed! ;-)
Someone linked Spouse to Marriage, but it's not defined there.
I've made a few changes to this page, and I intend to make more as I can pull the words together. I've made quite a study of the sociology and history of marriage as practised in the United States. I've listed my changes at other places on this /Talk page. Jim DeLaHunt (JDLH)
- I think the new opening is flawed in that it would not apply to marriage in all cultures. I put back the previous introduction, which I think provides the best general description of marriage, not only in the US but elsewhere. I did not remove any of the newly added material, but I did add some qualifying words. Slrubenstein
Removed this and replaced it with a description of how marriage varies from culture to culture.
- The most common type of marriage is the union of one or more men with one or more women. Marriage is usually heterosexual and entails exclusive rights and duties of sexual performance, but there are instructive exceptions (see gay marriage).
I have big problems with the section on history of marriage. The view of the history of marriage seems awfully stereotypical.
Moved to talk:
- Other topics that could be mentioned on this page (or on pages of their own): criteria for validity of marriage, arranged marriage, differing laws on divorce, arguments for/against gay marriage, common-law marriage, annulment in the Catholic tradition, minimum legal age for marriage, polygamy, wedding ceremonies, honeymoon, mail-order brides
Many of these items have articles of their own by now. - Montréalais