I have friends who are Afghan who have had arranged marriages so this led me to be curious to ask, why does this practice still persist into the 21st century?
I have friends who are Afghan who have had arranged marriages so this led me to be curious to ask, why does this practice still persist into the 21st century?
It’s not clear to my why you draw parallels with slavery. Spending a massive sum on the days is not an intrinsic prerequisite for marriage, neither is a dowry.
All marriage is, is a formal public oath between two people to spend the rest of their lives together, to look after each other and to share resources.
As an institution, it has many benefits including to the married people’s health. It also negefurs the state in that the mutual commitment to care it tends to reduce healthcare and social costs. So the state may provide some benefits.
The main disadvantage is that she stacks the dishwasher wrong.
The oath is a crutch for many and used as a leverage point. As a disabled guy with nothing to offer anyone, I have every reason to view marriage as the opposite, but I don’t. It’s not right to view a partnership as an oath in my opinion it implies a safety that makes no sense. A relationship is work. There is no right to the rest of someone’s life on either side should they change their mind or evolve in different directions; that is slavery. A relationship has no right of ownership over another person under any circumstances. If you want to go, you have the autonomy to do so. I’m fiercely loyal myself and form close relationships, but I have no right to say “I’m done” or hold any leverage over another person. I will ask them no to leave, I will make my case why they shouldn’t, but I have no right to stop them. This is true equality and freedom. It is a fundamental human right.
That is only slavery if the involved parties didn’t willingly commit to it. And it’s not as if divorce is non-existent.
The act of enslaving one’s self to pay debts and for other reasons is very common throughout history. One can willing make themselves a slave.
Divorce has long been restricted and still is in many places. It is all part of an evolving spectrum that inevitably results in true equality and the end of the practice in the very long term. It is a cornerstone of the underlying issue of misogyny in western culture. The only way to eliminate misogyny is to be truly equal and to be truly equal one must always possess full autonomy.
How does gay marriage fit into your claims of misogyny? I have at least 3 sets of gay friends who, after decades of waiting were delighted to make formal public promises to each other.
My argument has nothing to do with the sexes like this. Western cultural misogyny is a subtle blind spot overall. I’m willing to bet in many cases both parties are at risk of mistreatment. My point is about autonomy, so there is no difference in that vain, your still signing over autonomy to an arbitrator as a superior controlling entity.
im lost as to how you consider it slavery when it’s supposed to be a consensual and mutual legal agreement of partnership. keep in mind that in most cases, either party can exit the legal partnership whenever they want through the process of divorce.
if either side does not want the marriage, then sure. but having a dedication to a loved one hardly constitutes “slavery”.
See other comment. The issue is actually autonomy not marriage. No one has a right to control another’s autonomy. Life is not binary and to make it so is to neglect reality. It is possible to love someone and spend a lifetime with them while never owning their autonomy.
Divorce, at a minimum is a hassle, a scare tactic, and a massive financial and emotional burden that has nothing to do with the partnership. If one needs such leverage, they are stealing the other’s autonomy. If someone wishes to leave, they should have every right to leave freely. The imbalance in relationships should be the burden of the relationship not some court arbitration. When the imbalance occurs it should be addressed immediately. This should be a cornerstone of culture. A partnership should never be a leverage point because owning another’s autonomy is fundamentally wrong.
So, your actual problem is the legal expense and legal hassles involved in divorce?
Many/most of these are to do with the painful untangling of shared resources and responsibilities that come from sharing a life and resources. Marriage simplifies many things for two people - ‘we own this thing together’ becomes much simpler with marriage. The legal process of negotiating whether 20 or 40 or 50% of the house belongs to partner A is what tends to cause the pain.
No my actual problem, as described, is autonomy. I’ve yet to see anyone that seems to fully grasp the point I am making. It is a subtle difference.
In writing science fiction for a hobby, I have explored a lot of this recently. I can’t say that I have it all figured out or am some kind of expert. I’ve explored the idea of systems where there are the resources and systems in place to arbitrate without the need for any absolute laws, a place where the guidelines are communicated clearly and a reasonable and just outcome is possible without an arbitrary binary law. With a lot of idealized assumptions glossed over for the sake of conversation, any system that addresses the needs of more people amicably is a better system.
The way marriage is set up presently, it is made for the needs of a majority, but there are many outliers. If you consider this system in abstract, there are 3 people in the marriage; person A, person B and the superior member of the arbitrator as a governing stakeholder. The role of the stakeholder is to uphold a set of complicated laws that may or may not fit the situation of the individuals. In essence, the stakeholder takes away the autonomy of the individual, more or less equally. To our culture, we ignore this loss of autonomy and the neglected outliers. If these types of oversimplified laws were superseded by a system where it is unacceptable to have minority outliers, and the law can flex to the situation in a deterministic, unbiased, and just way, it changes everything about the system and institution of marriage. This is hard to think about in a modern context without a detailed story to explain it by example. The entire system in the present is based on a loss of autonomy. I consider every loss of autonomy to be a form of slavery. That is not to say it is some binary good or bad. It is hyperbole intended to stress a weak spot in present culture. We largely fail to culturally understand how important autonomy is and all the places where we have given it away to others.
I grew up in places where no one had the money to get a divorce, and where it was used as a form of control and abuse. I’ve seen it making people miserable because of stupid choices they made long before their prefrontal cortex was developed. It mostly harms the people at the bottom.
If you trace back in time, marriage has always had an element of misogyny and loss of autonomy. It was far worse in the past. I think that line of evolving change will continue and people of the future will look at the present much as we do the past. Asking myself how that will play out in the distant future, I believe the answer is a much better social awareness of autonomy. This is the trend line that we are on, and improvements have been made, but those will continue into the future. The present is not some benchmark of perfection.
Firstly, of course many people cohabit very happily for a lifetime, there’s no requirement to get married. They settle their affairs with bespoke agreements property contracts and wills. It works fine for them - it’s just a bit more complex than the standard package that marriage presents , but not a real problem.
Don’t want marriage, but quite fancy the tax benefits? In the UK you can opt for a Civil Partnerships which handles most of the outliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_partnership_in_the_United_Kingdom
Bottom line -for people who want to get married, there’s marriage. For people who want to formally merge most of their financial affairs and tax obligations, there is civil partnership, for everyone else, there are bespoke legal and financial arrangements and contracts.
No compulsion, no loss of autonomy (other than mutually agreed) and certainly no slavery.
Good, eh?
Absolutely. And it’s an oath is just a commitment to work at it, and not just throw up hands at the earliest opportunity
It’s not a “a right to another’s life” it’s a commitment to a shared life. And yes, that commitment can not work out, which is why divorce is now thankfully pretty easy.
Not using any common definition of the word, no.
See, divorce - above. Some marriages don’t work out, or are abusive. That doesn’t mean there’s no value in marriage.