Polygamy, Polyandry, Group Marriage

[Senethro]

Its beginning to take shape. For polygamous marriage to work you need partners of relatively equal power, a society not recovering from a history of misogyny, and a cultural standard of mediation not turning into vexatious litigation.

 

[Farm Boy]

That's a bar to be met never by definition.

Edit: Which wasn't supposed to be unnecessarily glib. Definitions do matter. I mean, let's ignore the examples of "18 when involving a position of trust(which is some not all)," and realize how many of those crazy extremist cults there really are.

Edit edit: Now that was supposed to be unnecessarily glib.

 

[Rashiminos]

You can burn a lot of candles before you wear out a candlestick. Why do you assume one guy and multiple wives?

Polygyny is the default mode when it comes to polygamy.

Polyandry might be worth trying out.
Women are more sensible than men and could have more husbands for more security.

Polyandry is difficult to maintain when the local sex ratios are relatively even.
If women are demanding children it's kind of odd for men to reject a large portion of them by consensus, and possibly at the risk of their own paternity.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Its beginning to take shape. For polygamous marriage to work you need partners of relatively equal power, a society not recovering from a history of misogyny, and a cultural standard of mediation not turning into vexatious litigation.

Besides the problems after the comma, the "relatively equal power" thing by itself is an entire barrel of snakes. If someone entrusts me with the power to "make them feel bad," which is a power I have no real interest in having in the first place, how do I maintain a "relatively equal" footing with that?

I personally don't have any problem with saying "if I make you feel bad then the really obvious solution is going our separate ways," but I have known a lot of people who have been basically enslaved by such relationships.

 

[Rashiminos]

That's how a lot of people feel about homosexuality/bisexuality/etc. Frankly I'm not comfortable with thinking about most people's sexuality (the 90% of the population who aren't hot females) but they should go for theirs however they like. Laws regarding consensual sex are nonsense & marriage shouldn't be the business of govt anyway.

Marriage is the business of natalist governments. The decoupling of state priorities from a need to increase the supply of fresh warm bodies is a recent phenomenon.

Rich mofos gonna hog all the chicks anyway. Allowing men legally to marry more than one woman will spur innovation. Most people cheat on their monogamous partner at least once anyway, why not drop the pretense?

Social and legal ostracization tends to keep the harem model less prominent than it would otherwise be, and that's likely a good thing if it costs* too much the keep the incel population anesthetized in a polyamorous society.

*Choose your suppression: drugs: incarceration, slavery, genocide, etc...

The bigger problem will be Mormons and ordinary folk who get into group marriages dominated by a manipulative and probably abusive (physical, emotional, sexual, whatever) men.

Those are the kinds of men polygynist marriages select for.

I think we have to separate children out from the polyamory question. That's why I say "consenting adults" probably has to be the starting point. Nobody here is suggesting that children be involved in polygamous relationships.

I think the likelihood of polygamy being broadly accepted without a concomitant attitude shift in the desirability of such arrangements having children is low, at best. You can try to keep the child question separate... you can try.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Mary's basically right here.

At best it enables certain groups that the man can take multiple wives but the women can't take multiple husband's regardless if what the law says.

It also enables abuse say rich man has multiple wives. One decided to leave and instead of getting half or whatever she gets a % assuming assets haven't been hidden in another wives name.

It will disproportionately impact women.

You can already live in such relationships there's just no legal recognition. It's a bad idea from pragmatic and economic reasons let alone moral ones.

Basic supply/demand suggests that's an anti-male position to take. Nothing about described scenario prevents women from entering monogamous marriages if they so choose, which makes the idea that this arrangement is somehow unfair to women ring hollow (it strictly increases their options, in contrast to men). Multiple husbands would likely be more rare, but it would happen because non-marriage arrangements like that are uncommon but happen now.

The losers in this equation would be men who are not capable of attracting multiple wives. So long as at least some women opt for poly marriages, there would be fewer women available for monogamous marriages.

Several of the posters here seem absolutely convinced (and keep carrying on about it, even after several posts I've made saying it's ludicrous to assume the same the same social standards and models would automatically apply - completely ignoring my common sense posts as though they don't exist and are not speedbumps in their ill-thought-out rants) that multiple marriage, if legalized, would instantly take on the exact same barbaric, elitist, and misogynist character of many traditional Middle-Eastern, Asian, and Southern African cultures, and many others in Antiquity and Medieval/Pre-Colonial times. That somehow, the assumption is made by these posters (again, ignoring my attempt at common sense posts, which are utterly ignored), that much more progressive rights for women and family law - including the full criminalization of domestic abuse, legal demand for consent, and the very differing dynamic of gender roles and economic standards, would magically no longer apply or be annulled instantly, like a switch, to return to a harem social model. I have no idea the logic behind that reasoning of certain other posters here.

It's strange. Especially because we have plenty of evidence that monogamous marriages under those cultures in history have a lot of very similar problems to the purported issues with poly marriages. Almost as if the causal factors *might* be something different.

 

[rah]

Even if it were legal, I expect it wouldn't be very common. I could definitely see famous/wealthy women having multiple husbands.

As to the equality issue, I see no different with monogamous marriages. There can be abuses of power in either, and I don't think one form is more likely to enable abuse than the other. The power issue to me ignores that it currently exists already so what's so new about it.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I cannot believe that so many people are stuck on the "wealthy person collects spouses" model, which is so unlikely to happen that it is basically laughable. People get in group marriages to produce a larger support pool than they can produce in pairs or on their own. It's an option that is being denied to poor and working class people, not to these mythical sultans and queens.

 

[rah]

Spouses are expensive so it's easier to have more if you're wealthy. Simple math. But yeah, group survival for the non rich would occur also.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I cannot believe that so many people are stuck on the "wealthy person collects spouses" model, which is so unlikely to happen that it is basically laughable. People get in group marriages to produce a larger support pool than they can produce in pairs or on their own. It's an option that is being denied to poor and working class people, not to these mythical sultans and queens.

I expect you'd see it on both ends of wealth scale actually, albeit for different reasons.

I'm mostly arguing for intellectual/debate purposes though. Similar to you, the idea of covering multiple people in a relationship sounds untenable to me. Even one might be too much, so to me personally this discussion is more academic than something that would significantly change my life.

But on principle, I don't like arbitrarily denying options to people, because governance that does that will inevitably deny something I do care about with the same degree of arbitrary/non-reasoning.

 

[red_elk]

I cannot believe that so many people are stuck on the "wealthy person collects spouses" model, which is so unlikely to happen that it is basically laughable.

It's the model which exists and has been existing for centuries, in Sharia law.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It's the model which exists and has been existing for centuries, in Sharia law.

Well, since we are talking about the US, where we don't actually have a House of Saud equivalent, that doesn't really apply.

Spouses are expensive so it's easier to have more if you're wealthy. Simple math. But yeah, group survival for the non rich would occur also.

...so they are more affordable if the expense can be shared.

 

[Perfection]

A committed one-on-one relationship is pretty hard to manage
Three people in a group relationship contains 3 one-on-one relationships
Four people in a group relationship contains 6 one-on-one relationships
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's a lot more complicated.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

A committed one-on-one relationship is pretty hard to manage
Three people in a group relationship contains 3 one-on-one relationships
Four people in a group relationship contains 6 one-on-one relationships
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's a lot more complicated.

Two people loading a two hundred pound refrigerator into a truck isn't impossible, but it's pretty tough to manage. It's a lot easier with three, or four. How much of the hardships that end one-on-one relationships are due specifically to the limited resources that two people can provide?

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Basic supply/demand suggests that's an anti-male position to take. Nothing about described scenario prevents women from entering monogamous marriages if they so choose, which makes the idea that this arrangement is somehow unfair to women ring hollow (it strictly increases their options, in contrast to men).

How is it not also increasing men's options?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

How is it not also increasing men's options?

I am operating under the granted (to them) premise of the vast majority of poly marriages being multiple women per man. Unless you are one of those men (who, by sheer mathematics, will be a minority and likely biased towards both rich and poor ends of wealth spectrum) you would expect men to have fewer options on average, since most men won't have the option of poly marriages while most women would (if they desired that).

If you reject this premise you should reasonably expect different results, but that also wouldn't be consistent with the arguments I was refuting which seemed to assume it. I think that assumption is partially correct, but similarly to Patine don't think poly marriages look even kind of similar to old variants in the context of modern legal system.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Even if it were legal, I expect it wouldn't be very common.

Same here. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone I've known who's been in a polyamorous relationship, which of course are perfectly legal (it's only multiple-partner marriages that aren't sanctioned). Of course, it's unconventional enough that people in such a relationship might keep their cards close to their chest. I have a hard time imagining myself in a relationship with more than 1 partner, but never say never, I guess.

 

[rah]

Think of how many men have a relationship with their wife and their mistress. That's the same with a little deception.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Same here. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone I've known who's been in a polyamorous relationship, which of course are perfectly legal (it's only multiple-partner marriages that aren't sanctioned). Of course, it's unconventional enough that people in such a relationship might keep their cards close to their chest. I have a hard time imagining myself in a relationship with more than 1 partner, but never say never, I guess.

You might be assuming that a "polyamorous relationship" means sexual relationships among all partners. On some level the legal definition of such a relationship would apply, as an example, to the family I lived next door to in Hawaii. There were three sisters, all with husbands, their mother and one mother in law, and a whole passel of kids. I assume, without knowing for a fact, that sexual relations only occurred between specific pairings, but the financial responsibilities, child raising responsibilities, housekeeping and maintenance responsibilities...pretty much everything...were distributed throughout the group in some sort of borderline democratic fashion that was far beyond my ability to follow.

 

[rah]

Many communes in the 60's and 70's operated in a similar manner.