# Are there any cultures with... "platonic marriage", I guess you could call it? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 2, 2017, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931 "2017-06-02T15:04:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [June 4, 2017, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/41 "2017-06-04T23:51:02Z")
> [@Malleus\_Incus\_Stapes](#): > > For a hypothetical culture that had this all long? Could be almost anything. Maybe “blood brothers” are considered actual family and it affects incest taboos. Maybe it has religious significance. Maybe friendship bonds are held in high enough regard that it happens a lot, so there’s a word for it. You can find almost any practice if you look at enough cultures. What you are describing sounds a lot like the _Hunka_ relationship in Lakota culture. You might translate it as “relative by choice”, but it’s not meant to be in place of marriage (it’s usually between two men), nor do the two people live together. You can read about it [here.](http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/pla/sdo/sdo34.htm) It’s really more about two people who think of their relationship as being more like family than friends. At any rate, I think that’s as close as you’re going to get to their being a word for what you are looking for. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/42 "2017-06-05T04:19:30Z")
> [@SamuelA](#): > > This sort of thing is both amusing - how did we go from a past culture that was ok with live sex shows from people you knew to now - and you realize this was the only ‘porn’ anyone from that era ever got to see. I have heard that some medieval villages had a tradition where the newly married couple would consummate their marriage in full view of everyone else in the village. I guess in those days, that was the best entertainment you could reasonably get… Well, they didn’t \*need \*porn - in any big city there was porn going on right in the taverns, streets and doorways. All you had to do was find the local “Gropecunt Lane” or similar. And the married couple thing went both ways - if a couple didn’t look like they were doing much in the bedroom and People Started to Talk, or they went too long without having children, or the husband seemed like he was henpecked, or any of the two went dogging around while the marriage stalled ; the happy couple was stripped naked and paraded through the streets of the village ; or the whole village would gather and bang pots and pans in front of their house all day, that kind of thing. Public shaming used to be a big ticket item back in the day. Public everything, really. Even the biggest cities had that small town feel (which is a quaint way of saying everybody was all up in your shit all of the time), and your name & reputation was _everything_. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/43 "2017-06-05T06:12:30Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > What you are describing sounds a lot like the _Hunka_ relationship in Lakota culture. You might translate it as “relative by choice”, but it’s not meant to be in place of marriage (it’s usually between two men), nor do the two people live together. […] It’s really more about two people who think of their relationship as being more like family than friends. So, not _A Big Hunka’ Love_, then? ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/44 "2017-06-05T12:45:05Z")
> [@constanze](#): > > Some states used to encourage children (e.g. the DDR/GDR helped couples with a loan at the start of the marriage, which got reduced/ canceled if they had children, see “abkindern”), but with overpopulation a Problem for the past decades, this has been reduced. > > Read recently somewhere (here?) that in Japan, adults can be adopted originally to pass on Family Business, but recently has been repurposed for gay couples to get rights similar to marriage. > > - Though in the Middle Ages, People could take a vow of voluntary celibacy for the first x months/ years of marriage because it was purer than having sex; and pre-Vaticanum II, very pious Catholics could turn to a “Joseph’s marriage” after having “enough” sex = children. This Comes from the Catholic Interpretation (not found in scripture) that Josef was a really old man, and after Mary gave birth to Jesus, they both lived sexless, and thus sinless, and all those “sisters and Brothers” of Jesus in the New Testament were really only Cousins. The GDR’s fertility policies actually worked quite well. I was surprised to learn this, since one tends to associate atheistic communist regimes with low fertility, but the GDR’s fertility rate in the early 1980s was around 1.9, compared to 1.3 or so in the west. (It drpped to much below the west in the 1990s, and today has converged around the same as the west). There also continue to be plenty of countries which offer financial or other incentives for childbearing today. Overpopulation is a problem in some parts of the world but not others, over half the world’s countries have sub-replacement fertility, and so there are a lot of countries with fertility rates (and future population projections) lower than they would like. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/45 "2017-06-05T13:08:59Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > So, not _A Big Hunka’ Love_, then? Not even _A Big Hunk 'o Love_, either. ---
**Author:** ![Doubticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@Doubticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doubticus)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 3:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/46 "2017-06-05T15:45:20Z")
IIRC, Shakers have platonic marriages as they do not believe in procreation. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 4:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/47 "2017-06-05T16:39:24Z")
> [@constanze](#): > > E.g. D. L. Sayers, writing crime novels with Lord Peter Wimsey in the interwar period in England, had female spinsters living together in the countryside. It was obviously not called marriage and didn’t have the benefits re: inheritance, and it was not explicatly spelled out whether they were lesbians or just asexual, because nobody talked about sex. And two spinsters living together “for aid and comfort and less rent money” - or two male bachelors like Watson and Sherlock Holmes “sharing rent” was far less scandalous than an unmarried woman and man living together. This reminded me of another example from my own life. My mother-in-law had a pair of spinster friends, who lived together for several decades; their partnership ended when one of the pair died a few years ago. When I first met the two of them (when I started dating the woman I eventually married), I just assumed that they were a middle-aged lesbian couple. They were obviously very close, they co-owned a house, they traveled together, and they had been together for a long time. It wasn’t until some time later, after I got to know them, and finally asked my then-girlfriend about them, that I discovered that the two of them were not, in fact, romantically involved nor lesbians (and that they would have been deeply shocked and offended had I actually suggested such to them, as they were both highly conservative and traditional). The surviving one of the couple is, I’m fairly certain, asexual – AFAIK, she’s never ever been involved in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. She’s also always been extremely involved with the church, and, had she been raised Catholic instead of Lutheran, I have no doubt that she would have been a nun. The other one, I think, did have a relationship or two when she was younger, but she never married, and never dated while she was living with her friend. ISTR that the two of them had filed “durable power of attorney” with each other, but there was, otherwise, obviously, no legal or cultural term for the relationship that they shared. And, I do know that, when the one was dying, she was having to make very certain that it was her friend (and not her family) who had the ultimate power to determine the course of her treatment and follow her wishes (something that would simply have been assumed if they were spouses). ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [June 5, 2017, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931/48 "2017-06-05T17:15:40Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > This reminded me of another example from my own life. > > My mother-in-law had a pair of spinster friends, who lived together for several decades; their partnership ended when one of the pair died a few years ago. > > When I first met the two of them (when I started dating the woman I eventually married), I just assumed that they were a middle-aged lesbian couple. They were obviously very close, they co-owned a house, they traveled together, and they had been together for a long time. It wasn’t until some time later, after I got to know them, and finally asked my then-girlfriend about them, that I discovered that the two of them were not, in fact, romantically involved nor lesbians (and that they would have been deeply shocked and offended had I actually suggested such to them, as they were both highly conservative and traditional). > > The surviving one of the couple is, I’m fairly certain, asexual – AFAIK, she’s never ever been involved in any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with anyone. She’s also always been extremely involved with the church, and, had she been raised Catholic instead of Lutheran, I have no doubt that she would have been a nun. The other one, I think, did have a relationship or two when she was younger, but she never married, and never dated while she was living with her friend. > > ISTR that the two of them had filed “durable power of attorney” with each other, but there was, otherwise, obviously, no legal or cultural term for the relationship that they shared. And, I do know that, when the one was dying, she was having to make very certain that it was her friend (and not her family) who had the ultimate power to determine the course of her treatment and follow her wishes (something that would simply have been assumed if they were spouses). I have heard this kind of relationship referred to as a [Boston marriage](https://www.google.com/#q=Boston+marriage+&spf=1496682837314). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-there-any-cultures-with-platonic-marriage-i-guess-you-could-call-it/787931.md?page=2)