Sir Xsarus wrote:
Honestly Gbaji? Marriage evolved due to property rights.
Yes. But what aspect of property rights?
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Men wanted to ensure that they had sole ownership of the women they married. There is also a strong component of social obligation and support, which is played out in the duty of a brother to marry his dead brothers wife. Children were always the property of the man, the marriage had nothing to do with it.
You wrote this and you still don't get how children matter to the equation? How can a child be the "property" of the man if the child is born by the woman? How do you determine who the father of the child is if you don't have something like marriage? Marriage forces the man to take care of the woman and any children she bears. In return he gets to pass on his name and property to "his child".
Without the need to connect fathers to children, marriage would not exist as a social concept. There would simply be no reason for anyone to have ever come up with it. If you're confused as to why this is necessary once societies grow beyond simple family clans and tribes, I'll do it, but it should be "obvious".
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Kids were often also raised by the entire extended family and friends. The nuclear family is a fairly new concept.
You're blending concepts here. Families often stayed closer together than they do today. That's a different social force at work.
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At some point the rich people who controlled everything saw that if they "payed" their wife part of their salary then they could end up paying less taxes. Being in control they used their power to make this the standard.
Which has nothing at all to do with why marriage exists as a social concept, much less why society choose to grant various benefits to those who marry. You get that the reasons one might want a benefit might not be the same as the reasons why others might choose to grant it to them, right?
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As woman's rights evolved, a lot of tweaks were added to the system to make it less one sided.
This is debatable. But it's not super relevant to the topic at hand, so whatever.
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The evolution of unions also played a role in this. I'm sure you could trace back a lot of changes to codified marriage and find a lot of different reasons. You could also review different religions and their significant impact on marriage.
Sure. Other stuff has been lumped in along the way. But that stuff should not change the core reason for marriage existing in the first place. People put decorations on their cars, but we would never say that cars exist as a thing to put decorations on. I hope you understand the difference.
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No one is disagreeing that a stable family is a good place to raise children, but saying it's somehow the sole meaningful reason for marriage evolving is absurd.
Answer the thought experiment. If there was no need to raise children, would marriage need to exist? Would we place as much weight on it as we do? Would society have some reason to encourage people to enter into it?
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Stable households being better for society is sufficient reason for me to provide the benefits we do. It's more then just living together, you're bound to support one another in bad times. The cost of breaking said bond is not insignificant.
That's debatable as well. But it's connected to the whole womans rights thing, and I really don't want to get into it. Let's just say that it's a hell of a lot easier to dissolve a marriage today than it was say 100 years ago. Can we agree on that?
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It's amazing you can't see it, when it's so obvious.
I see it just fine. And it is obvious. Obviously irrelevant and/or wrong.