I thought you meant cultures. In societies with Google = Internet, in a sense there is no culture, only sub-groups.
Until the invention of the railway in the mid-1800s, most people met people and married in a radius of 20 -50 km of their village. Unless you happened to live in a city like London, or left on a ship to make your fortune in the US, the choice was severely limited. So the problem was less “How do I search for the ideal partner among several million possible ones?” and more “I know about 100 people, of which I like about 5 people. I have known them for several years, so I don’t need to ask them for a specific term.”
That’s also why people - back in the middle ages - talked and wrote a lot about love, but didn’t really expect to marry romantically, because 90% of marriages were arranged in some way for convenience anyway.
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.
If a man and woman who felt what we could call asexual, but would be called “frigid” or similar back then, managed to meet* and come to an agreement, they could simply marry and not consummate. Two bachelors / spinsters could just live together, and people usually (going by popular literature) would not suspect anything. It seems to be a case of “This is not possible, therefore it does not happen” attitude.
And unless people are caught in flagrante delictio, homosexual/ lesbian sex is far more difficult to prove than hetero sex in times before the pill, since there are no unconvenient pregnancies that pop up. Platonic, that is, no-sex relation thus were even safer.
since the Church advocated for celibacy - at least until marriage, and maybe short term after the wedding - that would be a way to meet people less interested in sex.
Another movie about a couple getting married so the man can stay in the country (like the movie Green Card that constanze mentioned in post #15) who then fall in love is The Paper Wedding, although that’s set in Canada rather than in the U.S.:
The Paper Wedding was a 1990 movie. So was Green Card, incidentally. Have the rules about whether marriage guarantees an immigrant can stay changed in Canada in the past 27 years?
Apparently.
A former student of mine went on holidays to the Phillipines with a friend. He met a girl there, fell in love and got married a few months later, on another trip. He fought tooth and nail for over three years to get her and eventually their two children into Canada.
I’ve been told by coworkers from the Philipines that they had arranged marriages and that after children are produced, the norm is for the couple to be “best friends” and have other relationships.
That’s just anecdotal, of course.
Well, both. It just seems to me that it would be easier to find out about something on the Internet if it was already a long-standing practice, as opposed to something someone came up with last week.
I can’t speak for other cultures, but in concentration camps of WW2 (both Japanese and German) I believe many people formed pair bonds that were platonic and not romantic. The two would look out for each other and get each other through the bad times.
Not sure how cultural it is, but here in France a couple decades ago we (temporarily, I’m happy to say) circumnavigated the whole gay marriage thing by creating a new form of civil union called PACS (for Pacte Civil de Solidarité, no translation needed I assume), which grants most of the same financial and social benefits as marriage except any two people can enter it. While there is no legal or cultural requirement to “consummate the PACS” or in fact have any sort of romance going on, living together is a mandatory part of the deal.
It’s been, of course and as originally intended, used by gays ; but also by hetero couples, best friends, co-renters and so on ; to the point that these days gays are a tiny minority of PACSés.
So on the subject of third parties caring about if a couple gets jiggy with it : the “fiance visa” is a perfect example of a situation where INS does care. If they suspect visa fraud, while they probably won’t want to see a sex tape, agents might visit the couple’s house and observe if they appear to have a shared bed. If the female is pregnant or they have a baby, that’s also a clear sign that the marriage is legitimate. Similarly, I’ve read that if you go find a Ukrainian hottie to bring back to America as your fiance, you need to have a clear story of how you met, how long you knew each other for, and I’m sure implying that you had sex a bunch of times helps the INS agents come to the right decision.
So no doubt it’s all carefully couched in official language, but the U.S. government does have an interest in whether or not you get jiggy with it.
That is easy to get around. All you have to do is learn a few dance moves, take the agents to a hot nightclub and tip the DJ to play some vintage Will Smith rap.
If romance and regular sex were a requirement for domestic marriage, you would see the divorce or nullification rate skyrocket. That isn’t what marriage is primarily for and never has been.
This isn’t a domestic marriage, first of all. And second, that movie scene wouldn’t happen, obviously the agents aren’t going anywhere with you. And obviously it would be fairly easy to fake by setting up a shared bed with messy sheets with his and her clothes stored in the same room. And no doubt there are other factors involved, and you could still “pass” the investigation into visa fraud some other way. But if you don’t live together or sleep in separate rooms, that’s highly suspicious. If the agents obtain a warrant and view each person’s text messages and observe that both appear to be having sex with someone else, that’s highly suspicious. If a text message mentions a payment from the beneficiary to the U.S. citizen for helping him/her with their visa, that’s obviously a smoking gun.
So yeah, you wouldn’t go to jail/get deported just for not having sex with each other, but if a house visit makes the agent’s suspicious, they might investigate further and discover the actual smoking gun that lets them arrest both for fraud.
If you have internet, you google for the group of people who identify as asexual, because they would be more interested in platonic marriage than people who identify as hetero or gay/lesbian.
Also, the question is: what would the purpose of this platonic marriage be, as opposed to simply co-habiting without any formal name?
In most modern states, the concern - as we see with the arguments about Gay marriage - is: possible tax breaks for married couples (income tax and inheritance tax); possible rights to children, if co-adoption is more difficult; rights of visitation and medical decisions in case of illness/ emergency.
In many modern countries, there are also civil unions for gays - not only France - which would fulfil many of the above rights (not always all, but more than simple co-habitation). Aside from the visa problem mentioned, many states take “living together” and an interview “do you know each other’s favourite colour/ hobby/ the names of each parents” (to show that they actually talked to each other, and not just met 4 hours before) as proof for civil union.
Whether, similar to the “visa marriage” the state or society considers a non-sex marriage for tax benefits/ rights a case of “fraud or gaming the system” (and therefore do strict controls), or a case of “how much/little sex happens in a marriage is each pairs personal business” (and thus don’t care) varies.
Some countries also re-consider tax breaks for married couples and switch to tax-breaks only for families with children, whether marriage or civil union, because that’s the only secular-rational* interest the state has in a marriage.
The argument that “it’s the state’s duty to protect the sanctity of marriage, hence real full marriage only for 1 man and 1 woman” is based on a narrow religious and/ or traditional interpretation, not rational logic.
Some US states did the same thing. My state, CA, had so-called “civil unions”. That was the safe and trendy things for politicians to support before it because popular enough to actually support SSM.
But it’s not sex that’s required, it’s a “relationship”. They want to know how much they know about the partner, they want to see them living together (as you said). After all, even bureaucrats trying to prevent fraud or misuse of the system know (should know) that normal married couples don’t have sex every night; or many elder couples have seperate beds because one partner snores, making it impossible to sleep for the other.
So if the agents of INS come and investigate a couple for potential fraud, soiled sheets or a sex tape won’t be more convincing if the rest of the life looks “off” vs. a couple that has seperate beds but everything else is obviously together.
At least I hope that agents consider that, because otherwise, people who really marry somebody from another country for love have difficulties getting acknowledged just because the agents are too narrow-minded or not experienced enough to know how many flavours real/ normal marriages can come in.
Kings and similar used to consumate their marriage in front of dozens of witnesses (court officials) so people could be “sure” not only that the bride was a virgin and hence suitable* but also that any baby being born some months later could be declared heir as officially descened from the king and his wife.
and as many women from the cultures that get hung up over the membrane know, tricky old women can fake a membran and blood, because not every time it tears enough for blood
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 if King Henry VIII, a middle-aged guy with a paunch and suffering from some diseases, climbed up on his second/ third wife, I would think of it more as “pass the brain bleach, please” and less as “porn”.
There were also marriages arragned between princes and princesses when they were still pre-teens or teens; the wedding would be held, but the marriage would be consumated once they reached adulthood (apparently, people had observed that teen pregnancies had even more complications than 20-year old getting pregnant).
Rich people had other way of getting porn: you commissioned a painting of a “heathen” (Greek or Roman myth) subject, e.g. Leda with the Swan, Europe with the bull, Godiva, and got around the taboo of painting nude stuff, because heathen stuff, or saints, didn’t count.
For common villagers, I have not heard of that. Only with important people like royals and similar, and not for fun purposes.
At the court of Louis XVI, people stood in line to hand the king one single item of clothing at a time when he was getting dressed in the morning, and I don’t know if he had privacy when taking a poop. It was special access to the king, thus privilege, not about how a guy dealing with disease and being overweight might look half-naked.
The question is biased with the Abrahamic religions concept of marriage and hence answering it is difficult. For example : By strict definition, Hindu marriages did not require any societal approval or ceremony. So a man and a woman can marry with only fire ( a flame) as the witness to their marriage.
In the Guru Shishya Parampara, a man (guru/teacher/coach) can have one or many students (male or female) that live together and the Guru imparts spiritual knowledge or even teaches a trait. The Indian music gharanas (lineage) follow this method of teaching. Ravi Shankar was from the Maihar Gharana.
Famously, Ramakrishna (Ramakrishna - Wikipedia) who was a Hindu monk (but dabbled in Islam and Christianity too) never consummated his marriage but el bated his wife to a mother’s stature and worshipped her.
Among Hijras of India (Hijra (South Asia) - Wikipedia) officially recognized as the third gender, many are transsexuals and form usual relationships based on Philia and Eros. Some though claim to be truly sexless and adopt relationships based on philia alone.
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.
For here and now? Just making expectations clear when you’re looking for a partner. I mean, if you want to get married, and you don’t know anyone you’d want to date, you go look on a dating website or put out a personal ad, and you’ll find thousands of other people looking for the same thing, because “dating” is a thing we understand in our society. “Marriage” is a thing we understand to be long-term, even for the rest of your life.
If you put out an ad for a roommate, you’ll get someone who plans to live with you for a time. Maybe even a long time. But she probably won’t be going into it thinking, “I’m gonna stay with Jane 'till death does us part.” If she finds a nicer house in a different state and you get upset that she’s leaving you, you’ll be told to get over yourself because she’s an adult and can do what she wants. Whereas if it were a husband walking out on you, it would be an entirely different story.