Marriage until recently did have real importance to me.

It was an open & public commitment by 2 people to exclusively share their lives in a monogamous relationship, & was one people should make, before bringing children into their lives, or the world.

Unfortunately modern marriage for the majority today is nothing more than justifying serial monogamy, until they are sick of each other or one of them finds something more exciting. With over half ending in diverse, there is little long term commitment today.

It is now so cheapened that many believe that poofters & lesbians have some right to partake in it. It has become a cross between a joke, & a political plaything. It is only to help them with inheritance that they even bother, despite their grandiose rhetoric.

There really is so little left of the original concept, I would not bother with it today.

Dear Hassie,

You would I'm sure if you were to find the
right person.

Unfortunately not everyone does.

Perhaps, not every one is meant to?

People are staying single longer, others are
not marrying at all - preferring other life-styles
such as no children or a career or travel, et cetera.

Foxy you said "t is important to recognise,
therefore, that there is an immense range in
marriage, family, and kinship patterns. The
marriage and family patterns of other cultures
challenge many of our assumptions about the
nature of marriage, family, and kinship."

Would you outline these patterns as you call them, as I see it there is no pattern more beneficial to society than a man and a woman committing to a life together to raise a family.

What is your immense range of cultural marriages? Or is this an unknown generalization?

I agree, Hasbeen.

Marriage was once about trading daughters for livestock and forming alliances between powerful families. Now it’s just about love and commitment. If that’s what it’s been reduced to, then the poofs ‘n’ lezzos can ‘ave it. We’ve ‘ad no good flamin’ reason for denyin' 'em the privilege of it for donkey’s, at least now we ‘ave a reason to give it to the bastards.

Whaddya reckon ya flamin’ yobbo? Sound like a plan?

Dear Josephus,

Every society has an incest taboo, a powerful
moral prohibition against sexual contact
in between certain categories of relatives.
But although no society allows people to mate
with anyone they choose, different societies
have quite different ideas about who might be
a prohibited marriage partner.

Many countries prohibit marriage
between a person and his or her parent,
grandparent, uncle or aunt, brother or sister,
and niece or nephew.

Many societies, however, do not make any
distinction between siblings (brothers and sisters)
and cousins. In these societies there are usually
no separate words for "brother" and "sister"
they are regarded as the same kind of relative, and the
incest taboo is therefore extended to first, second,
third and even more distant cousins as well.

Some cultures, on the other hand,
are very specific about
whom people may or should marry

In modern, industrialised societies it is generally
assumed that marriage is founded on romantic love between
partners and that the choice of a mate should be left to the
individual.

But this concept of romantic
love is entirely unknown in many societies
and is considered laughable or tragic in many
others. In most traditional societies marriage is regarded
as a practical economic arrangement or a matter of family
alliances, not a love match.

Throughout history, in fact, alliances between entire
societies have been sealed by marrying a prince of one royal
family to a princess of another.

Earlier in the last century for example Ilbn Saud, a local
Arabian chieftan, married over 300 women from various
tribes binding these groups into the country now called
Saudi Arabia. In many traditional societies, therefore
marriage is negotiated by the parents of the partners, often
with little or no consideration of their children's wishes.
If love is a feature of these marriages at all, it is
expected to be a result and not a cause of the union.

There are many other examples in family patterns ranging
from number of partners, partner preference, residence
patterns, authority relationships, family forms
(extended family, nuclear family) and so on.

cont'd ...

Marriage and the family is one of the most basic and
ancient of all institutions, and it remains the
fundamental social unit. Yet there are many people
today who predict the end of the family and
marriage system as we know it. Our system, it is
contended, is breaking down, the victim of moral
decay, sexual permissiveness, changing gender roles,
or irresistible socia forces.

Such predictions are heard in industrial societies.
Especially the world's leading post-industrial
ones like the United States -being under the most
pressure. Where the great majority of both men and
women begin sexual activity before marriage.

Statistics indicate that one in every American
births is to an unmarried mother, usually a teenager.
One in every four pregnancies ends in abortion.
The number of married couples living together has
increased greatly in less than two decades.
People are staying single longer, and more than one
adult in five now lives alone. Many marriages are
expected to end in divorce.

New alternatives to traditional marriage, such as
single-parent household, are becoming steadily more
common. And to complicate matters further children can
now be conceived through artificial means.

What does it all mean?
Is marriage and the family threatened with collapse,
or can it thrive under the changing social conditions
of the modern world?

I feel that our ideas on the subject may tend to be
ethnocentric, for they're often based on the
middle-class "ideal" family and marriage so relentlessly
portrayed in TV commercials, one that consists of a
husband, a wife, their dependent children.

This particular pattern, however is far from typical.
A more accurate conception of marriage and the family
must take into account the many different marriage
and family forms that have existed or still exist
not only in our society but in other cultures as well.