Except the early Mormons, of course. They were descended from different cavemen.
And? It’s fiction. Elizabeth ends up with Darcy, who is not only wealthier but has the added benefit of being personally preferable.
I guess I could take queues about 21st century romance from Harlequin novels, too, but I’ll take them with a grain of salt.
Yet, all the major characters generally already had money. This might make a better point if a character chose a poor beggar to marry instead of an equally wealthy person.
The hidden assumption in all of these novels is that you marry within your class or slightly higher (if possible) or slightly lower (if it can’t be avoided). Exceptions can be made in the case of desperation or scads of money.
I’m not sure that counts as “psychological”, since the court did not purport to address any actual psychological evidence, but I see what you mean.
And early Hebrews. And early and current Muslims. And Hindus before 1955. And many Buddhist sects. 
I don’t know what the precise term is for it. (although this articletalks about studies that purport to show psychological harm to gays from bans on same-sex marriage. I make no representations about its merits, although a quick Google search suggests a number of outlets running with it).
As I read that, it is talking about love based on marriage, not marriage based on love. Sorry, but RNATB is totally right about this. Hell, we have cultures today where the vast majority of marriages are still not based on love but are arranged for political or economic reasons.
I think it’s easier to understand if you think of civil marriage as recognizing a relationship, not creating it.
People pair-bond. This seems to be pretty hard-wired. Being pair-bonded is DIFFERENT than having a roommate. It’s creating a familial bond. All those benefits arise out of the reality that the people married have a different sort of relationship than people that are not. Divorce recognizes when that relationship no longer exists.
It’s like other familial relationships. The law didn’t decide that children and parents, or people and their siblings, have a different sort of relationship than random strangers, or even good friends: the law recognized what was already true.
As an institution, marriage is older than governments. I really wish the whole marriage equality movement had been emphasized “recognition” rather than “legalization”. These were always marriages–the state was just willfully denying their existence, and refusing to provide the legal framework that support them.
So, to respond to the OP, I think it would be silly for the law to step back and start willfully denying that a special sort of relationship–largely economic–exists, when it clearly does.
Indeed that is a central point of several important court rulings, and it’s sufficiently important in my view that it pretty much obviates the ruminations in the OP about what marriage is “for”. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if in different times and circumstances it may have an emotional purpose or an economic one or some other mix of attributes that we might call a “social” purpose; what ultimately matters is that it remains an important social institution and that granting some individuals admission to that institution while rejecting others constitutes a fundamental kind of discrimination that robs those individuals of human dignity and relegates them to the status of second-class citizens.
So I’m in agreement with you, except that I think the phrase “psychological grounds” and the last sentence are significant understatements; it’s like saying that removing racial segregation provides some nice “psychological benefits” for black people.
Marriage is older than government, it is older than religion, it is older than history. We have no idea when human beings started marrying each other, but plenty of non-human primates have relationships that are similar, such as gibbons. Of course, our closest primate relatives don’t have such relationships. Orangutans live along and only come together to mate. Gorillas have a standard mammalian harem system. Chimpanzees live in mixed groups but don’t have exclusive sexual relationships.
So sometime in the distant past, we don’t know when but it certainly must have been before the time of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens, humans started having marriage relationships. These relationships didn’t depend on government, because there was no government. But they certainly involved the groups people lived in, because human beings are obliged to live in groups, we can’t live alone like Orangutans can. So the fact that two human beings were “together” was a social fact that all the other humans in the band or tribe or family were aware of.
There are no human societies without marriage. It is a universal human behavior. Of course what marriage means to a social group can vary, just like different people have different ideas about what birth and death mean even though these things are universal among humans.
So, what’s the point of marriage in 2014? Human beings get married. The marriage isn’t the government piece of paper, it isn’t the religious ceremony, any more than a birth certificate or a funeral service are what causes birth or death. Human beings marry each other, and governments and religions and societies just recognize that social arrangement. Sure we have polygamy, cheating, divorce, remarriage, premarital sex, adoption, arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, and so on. So what? Those are things that happen because marriage wasn’t created by God, but by fallible human beings muddling through their lives. And all these things aren’t modern innovations, but go way back to before human history. Just read the Bible and people were already writing about this in our earliest written texts.
Right. And marriage is simply a set of default assumptions and rights that attach to a couple because (and this is the key point) people wanted these defaults.
On this board, many people (not you, Manda JO) think of divorce as some sort of penalty or punishment after marriage instead of simply a set of processes for disentangling the extant entanglements that tries to protect the rights of the two parties. You could have other default rules, but it’s foolish not to have any.
The detriments in dissolving the relationship are due to the complications of the extra set of rules. If you have communal property, it’s necessarily going to be more complicated to dissolve that relationship that one that has none but is equivalent in all other respects. Perhaps some laws could be reworked to streamline the process, but that’s not really here nor there.
As for the purpose of altering the relationship between the government and the citizen, it serves other purposes. Legal status of a relationship is important, and that requires the government recognizing that relationship. If I’m married and I want my spouse to make medical decisions for me instead of my parents or siblings, that means the government needs to recognize that. And it makes sense, if you’re living together, operating as a single economic unit, it makes sense to bestow certain rights to either partner in the eyes of the government.
I agree that an important part of marriage, in my eyes the most important part, is the recognition of it by society as a whole, but I’m also of the opinion that we can’t legislate social acceptance. You can potentially require something like a business to not discriminate based on certain grounds, but you can’t make the Johnsons down the street who view homosexuality as an abomination not think that. In fact, I think trying to do legislate it often creates resentment that just impedes the natural process. As such, I think the best way to gain social acceptance is to put it out there, let people do it that want to, and over time society will sway one way or the other.
And this is why I’m all for extending the legal rights to any couple. We can’t make people accept them, but we can at least give them equal rights, and as younger generations grow up accustomed to it, they’ll be more open to accepting it. You’ll never convince the older generations en masse to accept something new like that. And that’s why the older generations are fighting extending those rights precisely because they know that if those rights are extended, their children and grand children will grow up just accepting that as the status quo.
It depends on the timeframe of reference. Passing a law isn’t going to immediately change social mores, not in the short term. But in the longer term, laws and court rulings do help to shift societal values and engender social acceptance. Racial discrimination is an example where both laws and court rulings have been essential instruments in achieving progress.
This.
Left to our own devices, humans tend to pair up. Because of this tendency, it’s useful for society to have a standardized set of rules in practices in place.
One can learn plenty about a society by reading its fiction, even–perhaps especially–bad fiction. The Twilight series may not be true, but there’s much than can be inferred from it about the type of person who would read and enjoy it.
Bang-on, and more articulate than I what I was about to say. Who cares what marriage is “for”, either now or throughout history? It now exists as a legal structure, and denying access on the basis of sexual orientation makes as much sense as not letting homosexuals form corporations or foundations.
They - and ancient kings and current rich Muslims - have a very broad definition of pair. Power thing, actually, some pairs are more equal than others.
Just as marriage recognizes, but does not create, a long term bond and is thus happy, divorce recognizes, but does not create, the dissolution of that bond. That’s often unhappy, which may be why some people see it as a penalty.
Marriages under duress are seen as unhappy (the old cliche of the woman being forced to marry someone) while divorces where both parties agree can not be unhappy.
They are duals.
Not that. Polygamy is generally the norm in human societies. Not that all males have more than one wife, of course, but those that can, do. Those that don’t aspire to it. It’s simply a matter of status. And the idea of arranged marriages, as opposed to “pairing up”, probably has deep roots in human pre-history.
Let us go back to basics. As it currently stands, the state gives special status to pairs in a relationship based on supporting each other and supporting a potential family. My argument is that the two should be separated and the benefits given only to those pair bonds which result in offspring (by natural or adoptive means.)
Let me give some hard examples
- Two widowed sisters who intend to live out their lives together. (advantage with income tax and inheritance tax)
- Daughter marrying her father. (to avoid inheritance tax as above)
Why should the state allow Catherine Zeta Jones to marry a man as old as her father and gain from inheritance tax benefits when she could not save any money in her family by marrying her father.
In case one, why should the sisters not be able to seek that shield when two middle age non-relatives could do so?
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In societal terms, I’d suggest you mean a narrow band of middle class readers, and the authors: they wrote from what they knew to an audience they knew.
In the long run, I believe that all forms of marriage should be abolished, because the nuclear family is the single most toxic aspect of modern society and a major impediment to our progressing as a species.
For now, though, allowing anyone to marry anyone is an acceptable compromise.