[silverwasthere]

Marriage is not all its cracked up to be. My divorce 1 year aniversary is this month, after being loyal and faithful for 12 years, I left due to abuse. I am now raising our child alone and I am so much happier now than I ever was while married.

Marriage is societal cancer.

[carlosjobim]

There exists no society at all without marriage. The reason marriage is absolute central in all cultures and civilization is not because it's been forced onto people by bad men or because people think it's better, the reason is that cultures or people who don't practice marriage die out quickly.

[justinclift]

To be clear, are you meaning strictly 1-to-1 "marriage", or are any of the many-to-one marriage types (poly, whatever) included?

Am curious, as the Saudi's seems to be "going ok" (for the males) with their harem approach. Not so much for the females I guess (no idea). That being said, their society seems to have lasted that way for a fair while now.

[metabro]

I know a lot of Saudi’s and also lived in the country. You are referring to a very small minority that practices polygamy. Most Saudi’s are in a monogamous marriage.

[carlosjobim]

Marriage as a woman belongs to only one man and that man in turn has a duty to protect and support her and their children.

[rsaesha]

Which culture died quickly due to not practicing marriage?

[carlosjobim]

All of them. They couldn't establish themselves enough to leave any important traces in history and are effectively erased. Sexual liberation is not a new idea, the reason why it's not traditional is because it is unsustainable and can never grow to a tradition

[krapp]

You do realize people can have sex, procreate and raise families without marriage, right? "Sexual liberation" doesn't negate sex, it only negates the proscription of involuntary sex and gender roles through patriarchy.

Also:

>All of them.

All of whom? Surely you can give us specific examples. Your certainty must based on solid archaeological and anthropological evidence, right?

[flangola7]

We complain about ChatGPT making brazenly false statements with complete confidence, yet we have humans out here saying things like this.

[ahahaidk]

This is a... hard anthropological claim to make. I don't claim to be an expert anthropologist, but I would note that marriage means very many things to different peoples. 'Western' marriage, as it were, is already fraught. One man and a women, sharing property? Well, what about two men, two women, or other genders? Non-cishetnormative understandings complicate this picture quite quickly. And what of property? The capitalist idea of property isn't the only one, and different understandings of property will, historically speaking, lead to different understandings of marriage.

All of this is to say that marriage is a fraught societal construct, not a societal neccessity.

This thread took a bit of a wild turn, but I felt I had to respond :)

[thfuran]

You're using your lack of evidence as evidence not of absence but of presence?