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dsrtao(Note for random readers: I'm mono, married, and happy.)
All the strictly economic arguments in favor of marriage apply at least as well to triads and quartets. Larger numbers are probably socially infeasible without significant special legal accomodations.
Consider the non-romantic, non-sexual basis for marriage: in brief, forming a partnership can decrease living expenses, increase capabilities, and provide long term stability for capital-intensive activities including businesses, child-rearing and general wealth-building. Adding one or two additional committed partners adds value to all of these propositions. Just as a two-parent family has the options:
- one parent works outside the home, one inside
- both parents work outside the home
so a triad has the options:
- one parent works outside the home, two inside (good for families intending to raise large numbers of children)
- two parents work outside the home, one inside (good for families intending to raise a few children)
- three partners work outside the home (good for childless families)
and a similar expansion is available for quartets.
Depending on current housing conditions, it is almost always cheaper to purchase a slightly larger house to fill the needs of three or four adults than it is to house them separately. This is a major economic incentive in urban and high-end suburban areas. Arranging this via a permanent contract (i.e. marriage) is much less economically risky than speculating on rental property or taking in boarders.
Child-care is significantly eased by the presence of multiple adults in the house. Whereas older members of extended families handled this role in previous generations, many children grow up isolated from adult contact because of the necessity of having two wage-earners to support the family. Not only is a triad or quartet more likely to be able to afford to dedicate one partner to household support, but the other partners can more flexibly relieve the main household partner.
The only real counterargument is the increased complexity of divorce proceedings. However, many divorces are already more-or-less disastrous, and the divorce of one partner of a triad or quartet is potentially less economically unsettling than the split of a two-person couple.
All the strictly economic arguments in favor of marriage apply at least as well to triads and quartets. Larger numbers are probably socially infeasible without significant special legal accomodations.
Consider the non-romantic, non-sexual basis for marriage: in brief, forming a partnership can decrease living expenses, increase capabilities, and provide long term stability for capital-intensive activities including businesses, child-rearing and general wealth-building. Adding one or two additional committed partners adds value to all of these propositions. Just as a two-parent family has the options:
- one parent works outside the home, one inside
- both parents work outside the home
so a triad has the options:
- one parent works outside the home, two inside (good for families intending to raise large numbers of children)
- two parents work outside the home, one inside (good for families intending to raise a few children)
- three partners work outside the home (good for childless families)
and a similar expansion is available for quartets.
Depending on current housing conditions, it is almost always cheaper to purchase a slightly larger house to fill the needs of three or four adults than it is to house them separately. This is a major economic incentive in urban and high-end suburban areas. Arranging this via a permanent contract (i.e. marriage) is much less economically risky than speculating on rental property or taking in boarders.
Child-care is significantly eased by the presence of multiple adults in the house. Whereas older members of extended families handled this role in previous generations, many children grow up isolated from adult contact because of the necessity of having two wage-earners to support the family. Not only is a triad or quartet more likely to be able to afford to dedicate one partner to household support, but the other partners can more flexibly relieve the main household partner.
The only real counterargument is the increased complexity of divorce proceedings. However, many divorces are already more-or-less disastrous, and the divorce of one partner of a triad or quartet is potentially less economically unsettling than the split of a two-person couple.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-01 03:47 pm (UTC)I've opined that there is resistance to group marriages because of the perceived unfair economic advantage to large groups; if group marriages were legal, an entire company could inter-marry, claim each other as spouses, share secrets and money more freely, and get all sorts of tax exemptions. This says more about the broken state of the tax codes than about what marriage "should" be, of course. And there's the homo problem -- "If I'm married to a girl and she's married to a guy, then -- am I married to a guy? EEW!"
But other than silly things like that, communal living makes a good deal of sense *provided* there are no problems. Ha. Heinlein's hopelessly optimistic view of psychodrama in line marriages ("we've never had a problem. Everyone agrees. And if they didn't, we spaced them. Da.") reveals the reason why large-group relationships break down, with rare exception: people are people, and nothing you say can change that, and as you add more people the random chance you approach psychodrama goes as n^2 (or possibly 2^n, if subgroups act differently than their members would individually).
It's not just divorce; it's petty things like "I took care of *your* kid from 2-6 pm, why aren't you taking care of mine from 10-2am?" and "who didn't load the dishwasher?" and "you had kids first with him, so your kids ate more of the house food so you should buy me and her a new car" -- all with perfectly sensible solutions, if only people were sensible.
I have high hopes that the n>2 adults co-habit scheme will regain its vogue; raising kids with only two people strikes me as downright silly, if not needlessly self-destructive. But there sure are some issues to work out, and NP-hard scheduling (though fun to poke fun at) is only one of them...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-01 04:04 pm (UTC)I think I'm confused on this. I've never thought that there was anything besides the officially announced pairings going on in House of Weird... did I miss something?
---
There's a difference between a group house, or a dorm, or even a commune, and a marriage: a marriage is thought to be an approximately permanent relationship among all partners. I'm suggesting that an expansion from 2 to 3 or 4 partners would be economically less risky and potentially more profitable, that's all. I specifically note that larger numbers are more likely to be socially unstable, for many of the reasons you identified... and, finally, I think that attempts to defraud such as the family=company scenario you set up are, in fact, attempts to defraud and should be recognized as such.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-01 04:26 pm (UTC)I was having difficulty coming up with a descriptive noun when talking to you; the problem was on my side, not yours. It reminded me that there was no easy way to describe it, which said to me it was a blind spot in our culture.
There's definitely a difference between co-habitation and long-term commitment, and in my rambling I stepped on it. But actually I wanted to draw the line between commitment and sexual relation -- it definitely feels like if there is a long-term commitment between people, everyone assumes it is marriage (and therefore somehow sexual) or contractual (and therefore emotionless business), which is an odd conflation. It'd be great to separate like, love, does business with, godparenting, etc...
(But then I've occasionally had the bizarre thought of a "marriage" that was actually a contract with checkboxes: "I promise to (x) love (x) honor ( ) obey ( ) live with (x) support" etc.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-01 07:13 pm (UTC)In Heinlein's defense-- Woah. Now, there's a sentence which I never expected to say. --he does seem to get it, at least a bit, in his depiction of the evil drama in the protagonist's group marriage (from which she is unilaterally and pre-emptorily divorced) at the beginning of his novel Friday.