[p1necone]

Presumably slavish dedication to historical accuracy. Although were there really no cultures in that era that allowed same sex marriage?

I personally wouldn't want a seemingly historically accurate (ish) game to present the churches of the age as being okay with same sex marriage when they weren't. Although being able to toggle it on in the settings would be cool.

[chaorace]

CKIII has several "fun" toggles for ahistoric behavior, so I'm not sure if this argument fits. For example: you can flip the default inheritence system to favor women or even make the majority of people homosexual.

I'm guessing it's just more or less something they didn't get around to implementing. Perhaps they wanted to tackle it in a future patch or DLC (I can see this happening if turning this on somehow led to buggy behavior in other areas)

[p1necone]

Yeah that's exactly what I'd want for marriage. I'm definitely more inclined to think this is just one of many features they didn't get around to adding rather than an intentional omission.

[omegaworks]

It's expressing a constraint that wasn't entirely set until the end of the period of time the game is set in, as the power of the nobility and church consolidate. It would be more interesting if it allowed you to play with some of the tensions between the church and the nobility. Want to marry your same-sex spouse? Throw your weight around a la King Henry VIII and establish your own church.

https://theconversation.com/a-thousand-years-ago-the-catholi...

[Blikkentrekker]

To translate the concept of “marriage” between cultures is a fool's errand. — historical, and current cultures often had a variety of different concepts one could all call “marriage”.

It is as though one attempt to translate the ranks of entirely different historical military structures.

Though, such is also often done, such as the “Kings” of Rome which were elected and had a co-ruler.

In any case, one might for instance argue that a male Japanese samurai in 1800 could be “bound” to both a male and a female at the same time, but only one of each, but only the latter union is traditionally translated as “marriage” for “reasons” even though the former comes no less close. In act, the former union was typically more so one of love, and the latter more so one of business.

[krapp]

>Although were there really no cultures in that era that allowed same sex marriage?

No Christian cultures, obviously.

[kergonath]

Was there any historical culture in which same-sex marriage was common or accepted? I can’t think of one, Christian or otherwise (though I can think of a couple of examples of same-sex people got married by subterfuge).

[michaelpb]

Yep, many! Today's era is quit unusual in how few open gay and bisexual relationships are had by public officials (which are the unions that are typically best recorded). In many other historical periods across different regions, today's standards would be considered unusually heterosexual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions

[xanth]

Given that the game simulates 867 to 1453 it was much more of a rarity, don't get me wrong I'd love to have the feature but I'm glad they shipped core features of the historical simulation game and more than likely left it on the backlog.

[michaelpb]

Gay marriage was more common than you might think during that time period as well, even in Europe! I found a few interesting accounts, from this summary of an older book on the topic: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/when-marriage-between-gay...

[notsureaboutpg]

No there were not. The other reply confuses acceptance of homosexual activity with acceptance of homosexual marriage. The latter is a new concept, the former was common in many cultures (notably Ancient Rome / Greece).

Homosexual activity cannot result in biological children so there was really never any society that considered anything like homosexual marriage until our own. The main reason for marriage was to control sexual unions and the children who might result from them. In societies which had marriage (many had no such concept) homosexual marriage didn't make much sense.

The wikipedia article on historical same-sex unions mentions that some cultures had rituals around cementing homosexual relationships but those wouldn't be considered the same as marriage, they'd be more like any pre-sexual / pre-relationship rituals. Marriage typically is about the sharing of finances, responsibilities, the raising and rights of children, etc. And none of the examples in the wikipedia article on historical same-sex unions concerned any of these.

[staticassertion]

Not to delve, but the article does mention a number of relationships that are explicitly comparable (according to the article) to heterosexual marriage, or are otherwise described as unions. There are multiple references to homosexual marriage and union.

I'm not sure that the points you're making about shared finances are particularly important, or even true, based on this. But I'm not a historian.

[notsureaboutpg]

The article is being too generous to these accounts. Here is an example: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_D...

In this account of the relationship between two men they are termed in quotes as "husband" and "wife" to imply sarcasm . They were not literally considered with seriousness to be married by their society the way we consider men to be able to do to each other now.

Marriage, in societies where it existed often served two functions: binding families and providing for the legal rights of children. Unions of lovers did not do either of these.

Many ritualized unions of a same-sex variety in history were of the latter type and those of the former would not likely have been seriously recognized by the outward society. There isn't a strong record of that anyways.

[ekianjo]

Did Buddhist cultures allow same sex marriages in ancient times?

[goatinaboat]

No Christian cultures, obviously.

Interestingly, the vast majority of countries that now permit gay marriage have Christian histories.