Reply #26: Well said, REP [View All]

[Shanty Oilish]

I agree with 99% of all you've written on this thread. Marriage, I think, came about when societies got complex enough to need to formalize a basically natural relationship (pair bond). Establish a formula and you don't have to keep on reinventing the phenomenon. There seems to be an instinctive bias against single people, maybe because they're one-not-two, thus easier prey; maybe because they strike people as unsettled somehow. Sex gets in the way of anything else and theoretically marriage settles that. :eyes:
Women as property...I bet that goes back to pre-human stage. Females are not the stronger apes, and they constitute a valuable commodity, so who shall control it? the mightier ape.
Marriage has lasted because, given the ubiquitous oppression of the female, the female found it to be less offensive than any alternative. Without a prior male to fear, many a male would freely assault a female in the wild. And IMO we are still very much in the wild, civilization being a fragile thing.
Children likewise are better protected by marriage than they would be in sexual free-for-all.
Given the persistent state of nature, I believe marriage is a good thing, but not a perfect thing.
I'm curious about one comment you made: that it's offensive to give legal ownership of one's fertility to another. Yet you cite technology as having made marriage obsolete. Don't you think that because technology enables us to determine paternity, a man has a stronger claim now than he ever did? (I don't, but I'd love to hear the reasoning.)