I believe that there are two types of inventions, doughnuts and lasers...
Doughnuts are inventions that, imo, will not be invented if the person inventing them was never born. Example? Why the doughnut as a way of avoiding a raw center in your cakes is not the only way to solve that problem.
Lasers are the inventions that would have been invented regardless; penaslin and other cures are most likely an inevetible invention.
For B to marry C they'd also have to request the consent from A before going through with it - so A and B would together marry C and so on.
If A and B cannot agree on marrying together then can always divorce, find another partner to marry C with or just marry C alone.
OK, so we're foreseeing a group marriage, where everybody in the group must be married to every other member of the group; we don't permit A to say "B, you can marry C, but that's between you two; I don't want to marry C."
So now our happy A-B-C triad has D come along. A and B want to marry D; C doesn't. A, B and C sorrowfully agree to part. Do A and B divorce C separately? Does the whole group break up and A and B have to marry D together?
I'm not asking this to be silly; I'm entirely serious. I'm not even getting into the complications of property division. But our current system is not set up for more than couples, and to revamp it we need to do a hell of a lot of thinking about how to get it right. "Oh, just let everybody marry everybody and share stuff" is about as intelligent a solution as "Oh, is there a bug? Just write some more code."
It's the only way I could see it working, allowing people to have several but seperate marriages is just a big head ache whereas a singular group marriage would actually work as a marriage of a group - that is that all parts of the group are married together and any addition to the group requires the consent of each member of the group to avoid the situation where people have several marriage contracts at once as well as combat the potential abusive situations that can arise if group marriages can add new members to the marriage against the minority's will.
In your example A and B would together divorce from C and a third of their combined assets would go over to C (unless they have some form of pre-nuptial in place - which I think would make things easier in group marriage divorces) before they'd be able to marry D together.
I guess you could define the group marriage as it's own entity made up by the sub-entities that desire to stay in the group so whenever there's a dissenting voice that don't agree with the other sub-entities that lone sub-entity would divorce from the remaining sub-entities and thus leave the group intact - so that it doesn't have to dissolve the entire group and divorce everyone from each other before remarrying each time a sub-entity of the group desires to leave the group marriage.
You could even apply this to the already existing marriage system and thus create a catch-all system that applies to everyone whether you are two people who are married or ten married as a group.
The act of marriage is a bond between two or more people that result in the creation of a separate entity hereby called the marriage entity (ME) and the married people are hereby called marriage entity constituents (MECs) and are considered members of the ME. Additional members can join the ME if approved by all MECs. Wealth is shared between all MECs in specific ME and the departure of a MEC will result in an appropriate split up of shared wealth between the departing MEC and the remaining MECs
Really though, legal experts could probably come up with a simpler and more effective system than us lay people.
I'm pretty sure bestiality is not the wave of the future. Also, I don't care how smart my computer thinks it is, I'm not treating it as an equal. The future will probobly be a whole lot more mundane than some people think. Like, most likely technical progress will be centered in media, especially with increasingly more intrusive methods of advertising. Cures for diseases will be found, but promptly stifled in favor of long term medication plans which only lessen the illness, not cure it, as that will make pharmacutical companies more money. Advances in robotics will be focused on functionality for specific tasks, not abstract self enlightenment. Scientist will continue to discover alternative fuel sources, and continue to have their funding cut by politicians in the pockets of oil execs. Resources will continue to be scarce for a large population of the globe. Most people with the means to change the status quo will also be the ones with the most incentives to sustain it.
If there's one thing we can learn from looking at our past and what they predicted for the future then it is that the future is never mundane.
Just look at what people were expecting to see today back in the 40s-80s. Just further improvements of already existing things, such as flying cars as an extension of ground cars, which is more mundane than what we did end up getting which simply had no analogy to the then existing technologies (see the Internet).
I've only met one polyamorous person, and she was a girl.
That said I'm familiar with the concept of polygamy given the fairly large mormon populations in my area. But none of them practice it.
1) Move to the big city. You'll meet lots.
2) Polyamory != fundamentalist polygamy. For one thing, polyamory includes polyandry and same-sex relationships. Try THAT out at Yearning for Zion.
I've met a number of people who practice polyamory of one sort or another. But you're typically dealing with an established couple who occasionally have sex with other people, most commonly together but occasionally without the other partner present. However, I have never met anyone IRL who was practicing polygamy.
I think the distinction is that though most people are probably looking for a stable long-term relationship with one partner, many of those people are not looking for permanent monogamy. However, very few people are interested in long-term relationships with more than one person.
The people attracted to polygamy seem to overwhelmingly come from a non-mainstream religious background. The men in such circumstances want to be able to have sex with multiple women, but would not think of doing so outside of marriage. On the other hand, if you aren't worried about religious concepts of sin, you can quite easily order you life in such a way so that you can have multiple sexual partners without getting married.
So, I don't think polygamy will ever really catch on in popularity among most people. If monogamy is not your thing, you can structure your life so as to have multiple sexual partners without the entanglements involved in having multiple spouses.
Modern Man on
Aetian Jupiter - 41 Gunslinger - The Old Republic
Rigorous Scholarship
There are two ways of looking at poly marriage. One way (1) is that a poly marriage is an arrangement that any arbitrary X number of people can enter into with each other. Another way (2) is that marriage is always a 2-person arrangement, however any given person can enter into that arrangement with as many simultaneous partners as he or she wants.
If marriage is like a corporation, in that it is an ontologically extant thing independent of its members, then it is more like scenario (1). If I marry my girlfriend (for the sake of argument, let's call her "Eve"), I'm joining her poly "family" and I become married to everybody else Eve is married to, including Adam and Steve. her three-person marriage is now a four-person marriage.
However, that's not how I see it, and I don't think it necessarily is the case. If I marry Eve, I am not inherently agreeing to marry Adam or Steve. I may also wish to marry Adam, or I may not, but my arrangement with Eve is independent of my arrangements with Adam or Steve. This is more like (2) where marriage is a 2-person arrangement but an arrangement that does not imply exclusivity.
If the impetus for allowing poly marriage is to offer people flexibility to enter into whatever arrangements they want, then scenario (2) is more desirable than scenario (1), in which case there is no umbrella entity of marriage covering more than any two partners. Rather there is a network of separate simultaneous marriages, each of which may be individually dissolved without directly affecting the others.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I'll point out here that the way I practice polyamory, and the way most poly people I know practice it, looks a lot more like (2).
I have a sexual & romantic relationship with my partners. Ideally, I'll also generally have a close friendly/family relationship with my partners' partners. But I don't really want to be legally tied to my partners' partners, and I certainly don't want to be tied to more distant poly relations.
In other words, if I'm dating Alice, I might want to marry Alice. If Alice is dating Brandon, I'm (personally) probably going to be fine having a legal family connection to Brandon. If Brandon is dating Candice, the chances of me having more than a passing acquaintanceship with Candice is pretty low. If Candice is dating David, I might not even know David, I may never have met the man, and I certainly wouldn't want to be legally involved with him. I certainly don't want to be responsible for Candice or David's debt, and I don't want them having medical power of attorney over me if I'm incapacitated. If Alice and I have kids, and we're unable to care for them for whatever reason, I might be okay if Brandon and Candice gain custody, but not if Candice and David do. I'd rather custody go back to a blood relation in that point.
Some people do form group-fidelity relationships, where you have three or four people who live together and date/fuck only each other, and do not stray outside of that arrangement. I guess these people would probably want group marriages, but I've never met very many people like that. It could be an age thing, too - I have noticed that poly arrangements tend to get more stable with older participants (like any relationship style, I suppose).
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I'll point out here that the way I practice polyamory, and the way most poly people I know practice it, looks a lot more like (2).
I have a sexual & romantic relationship with my partners. Ideally, I'll also generally have a close friendly/family relationship with my partners' partners. But I don't really want to be legally tied to my partners' partners, and I certainly don't want to be tied to more distant poly relations.
In other words, if I'm dating Alice, I might want to marry Alice. If Alice is dating Brandon, I'm (personally) probably going to be fine having a legal family connection to Brandon. If Brandon is dating Candice, the chances of me having more than a passing acquaintanceship with Candice is pretty low. If Candice is dating David, I might not even know David, I may never have met the man, and I certainly wouldn't want to be legally involved with him. I certainly don't want to be responsible for Candice or David's debt, and I don't want them having medical power of attorney over me if I'm incapacitated. If Alice and I have kids, and we're unable to care for them for whatever reason, I might be okay if Brandon and Candice gain custody, but not if Candice and David do. I'd rather custody go back to a blood relation in that point.
Some people do form group-fidelity relationships, where you have three or four people who live together and date/fuck only each other, and do not stray outside of that arrangement. I guess these people would probably want group marriages, but I've never met very many people like that. It could be an age thing, too - I have noticed that poly arrangements tend to get more stable with older participants (like any relationship style, I suppose).
First off, polyamory as a lifestyle is waaaaaay different than polygamy as a government recognized legal construct.
I mean, it's great that you don't want to assume the debt obligations of some random guy who is married to the person you're married to, or whatever. But how does that work legally? In a standard married couple, pretty much everything is shared. If my wife opens up a credit card, it suddenly becomes my financial obligation. I don't get to say "Oh, yeah, I don't want that obligation any more" and suddenly it's gone - it is there, and it is my responsibility. Currently, pretty much any income or debt is shared equally by both parties of a marriage.
So let's go back to that credit card. I want a new spouse now, and my now spouse says she doesn't want to assume the burdens of my current wife. Well, fine, but that credit card is already my burden; does it thus become my new wife's burden, as well? Now let's add a couple more people into the mix. Awesome, now we need a flowchart and a PhD in set theory to figure out who owns the china.
When you're married, all this stuff gets intermingled. I'm not sure that a viable system can be created where "no backsies!" is a legitimate legal construct. Practically, I'd say the only really workable system is that either everyone shares everything, or nobody shares anything. (And in the former case, I use "workable" extremely loosely.) But if we go with the latter, we suddenly eliminate one of the main benefits of legal marriage, which is stability and a government-recognized support structure.
Right now, one of the chief benefits of marriage is the safety net it creates. One person laid off? Well, you still have an income in there to subsist off of. And you can share health benefits. And so on.
Basically, marriage is recognized because it provides a net social good. I really don't see any net social good associated with polygamy, simply because you'd need to remove or alter every current benefit of marriage in order to make it feasible.
At the end of the day, if you want to have five sex partners and consider yourself inexorably tied to them in some emotional capacity, that's cool. You can all live together in a big mansion and do what you will. Just don't expect the government to step and endorse your game of Lifepartner Twister.
ElJeffe on
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Honestly, I think lots of people getting married to one another is the easy part. The catch is when all those people decide to start getting divorces.
You have any idea how much hassle it is to divvy up possessions when two people are separating, and you have to figure out who gets what, often with legal counsel involved because people don't want to give things up, and then you get to figure out child custody and whatnot? Okay, now assume that this thing happens every few years amongst half a dozen people.
Why couldn't you just determine child support through genetic origin the way it is now?
Stepparents often adopt their stepchildren, which gives them the legal rights of a biological parent.
ElJeffe on
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
Posts
Doughnuts are inventions that, imo, will not be invented if the person inventing them was never born. Example? Why the doughnut as a way of avoiding a raw center in your cakes is not the only way to solve that problem.
Lasers are the inventions that would have been invented regardless; penaslin and other cures are most likely an inevetible invention.
It's the only way I could see it working, allowing people to have several but seperate marriages is just a big head ache whereas a singular group marriage would actually work as a marriage of a group - that is that all parts of the group are married together and any addition to the group requires the consent of each member of the group to avoid the situation where people have several marriage contracts at once as well as combat the potential abusive situations that can arise if group marriages can add new members to the marriage against the minority's will.
In your example A and B would together divorce from C and a third of their combined assets would go over to C (unless they have some form of pre-nuptial in place - which I think would make things easier in group marriage divorces) before they'd be able to marry D together.
I guess you could define the group marriage as it's own entity made up by the sub-entities that desire to stay in the group so whenever there's a dissenting voice that don't agree with the other sub-entities that lone sub-entity would divorce from the remaining sub-entities and thus leave the group intact - so that it doesn't have to dissolve the entire group and divorce everyone from each other before remarrying each time a sub-entity of the group desires to leave the group marriage.
You could even apply this to the already existing marriage system and thus create a catch-all system that applies to everyone whether you are two people who are married or ten married as a group.
Really though, legal experts could probably come up with a simpler and more effective system than us lay people.
Just look at what people were expecting to see today back in the 40s-80s. Just further improvements of already existing things, such as flying cars as an extension of ground cars, which is more mundane than what we did end up getting which simply had no analogy to the then existing technologies (see the Internet).
I think the distinction is that though most people are probably looking for a stable long-term relationship with one partner, many of those people are not looking for permanent monogamy. However, very few people are interested in long-term relationships with more than one person.
The people attracted to polygamy seem to overwhelmingly come from a non-mainstream religious background. The men in such circumstances want to be able to have sex with multiple women, but would not think of doing so outside of marriage. On the other hand, if you aren't worried about religious concepts of sin, you can quite easily order you life in such a way so that you can have multiple sexual partners without getting married.
So, I don't think polygamy will ever really catch on in popularity among most people. If monogamy is not your thing, you can structure your life so as to have multiple sexual partners without the entanglements involved in having multiple spouses.
Rigorous Scholarship
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I have a sexual & romantic relationship with my partners. Ideally, I'll also generally have a close friendly/family relationship with my partners' partners. But I don't really want to be legally tied to my partners' partners, and I certainly don't want to be tied to more distant poly relations.
In other words, if I'm dating Alice, I might want to marry Alice. If Alice is dating Brandon, I'm (personally) probably going to be fine having a legal family connection to Brandon. If Brandon is dating Candice, the chances of me having more than a passing acquaintanceship with Candice is pretty low. If Candice is dating David, I might not even know David, I may never have met the man, and I certainly wouldn't want to be legally involved with him. I certainly don't want to be responsible for Candice or David's debt, and I don't want them having medical power of attorney over me if I'm incapacitated. If Alice and I have kids, and we're unable to care for them for whatever reason, I might be okay if Brandon and Candice gain custody, but not if Candice and David do. I'd rather custody go back to a blood relation in that point.
Some people do form group-fidelity relationships, where you have three or four people who live together and date/fuck only each other, and do not stray outside of that arrangement. I guess these people would probably want group marriages, but I've never met very many people like that. It could be an age thing, too - I have noticed that poly arrangements tend to get more stable with older participants (like any relationship style, I suppose).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
First off, polyamory as a lifestyle is waaaaaay different than polygamy as a government recognized legal construct.
I mean, it's great that you don't want to assume the debt obligations of some random guy who is married to the person you're married to, or whatever. But how does that work legally? In a standard married couple, pretty much everything is shared. If my wife opens up a credit card, it suddenly becomes my financial obligation. I don't get to say "Oh, yeah, I don't want that obligation any more" and suddenly it's gone - it is there, and it is my responsibility. Currently, pretty much any income or debt is shared equally by both parties of a marriage.
So let's go back to that credit card. I want a new spouse now, and my now spouse says she doesn't want to assume the burdens of my current wife. Well, fine, but that credit card is already my burden; does it thus become my new wife's burden, as well? Now let's add a couple more people into the mix. Awesome, now we need a flowchart and a PhD in set theory to figure out who owns the china.
When you're married, all this stuff gets intermingled. I'm not sure that a viable system can be created where "no backsies!" is a legitimate legal construct. Practically, I'd say the only really workable system is that either everyone shares everything, or nobody shares anything. (And in the former case, I use "workable" extremely loosely.) But if we go with the latter, we suddenly eliminate one of the main benefits of legal marriage, which is stability and a government-recognized support structure.
Right now, one of the chief benefits of marriage is the safety net it creates. One person laid off? Well, you still have an income in there to subsist off of. And you can share health benefits. And so on.
Basically, marriage is recognized because it provides a net social good. I really don't see any net social good associated with polygamy, simply because you'd need to remove or alter every current benefit of marriage in order to make it feasible.
At the end of the day, if you want to have five sex partners and consider yourself inexorably tied to them in some emotional capacity, that's cool. You can all live together in a big mansion and do what you will. Just don't expect the government to step and endorse your game of Lifepartner Twister.
Stepparents often adopt their stepchildren, which gives them the legal rights of a biological parent.