marriage

Etymology

The word marriage appeared around 1300 and is borrowed from Old French mariage (12th century), ultimately tracing to the Latin maritātus 'married', past participle of maritāre 'to marry'. The adjective marītus, -a, -um 'matrimonial, nuptial' could also be used, through nominalization, in the masculine form as a noun for 'husband' and in the feminine form for 'wife'. The related word matrimony is borrowed from the Old French word matremoine, which appears around 1300 CE and is in turn ultimately a learned borrowing from Latin mātrimōnium, which is derived from māter 'mother' with the suffix -mōnium for an action, state, or condition.

Definitions

Anthropologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage in an attempt to encompass the wide variety of marital practices observed across cultures. Even within Western culture, "definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between" (as Evan Gerstmann has put it).

Relation recognized by custom or law

In The History of Human Marriage (1891), Edvard Westermarck defined marriage as "a more or less durable connection between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till after the birth of the offspring." In The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization (1936), he rejected his earlier definition, instead provisionally defining marriage as "a relation of one or more men to one or more women that is recognized by custom or law".

Legitimacy of offspring

The anthropological handbook Notes and Queries (1951) defined marriage as "a union between a man and a woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners." In recognition of a practice by the Nuer people of Sudan allowing women to act as a husband in certain circumstances (the ghost marriage), Kathleen Gough suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons."

In an analysis of marriage among the Nayar, a polyandrous society in India, Gough found that the conventional "husband" role was divided between a non-resident "social father" of the woman's children and her lovers. None of these men had legal rights to the woman's child. This forced Gough to disregard sexual access as a key element of marriage and to define it in terms of legitimacy of offspring alone.

Economic anthropologist Duran Bell has criticized the legitimacy-based definition on the basis that some societies do not require marriage for legitimacy. He argued that a legitimacy-based definition of marriage is circular in societies where illegitimacy has no other legal or social implications for a child other than the mother being unmarried.

Collection of rights

Edmund Leach criticized Gough's definition for being too restrictive in terms of recognized legitimate offspring and suggested that marriage be viewed in terms of the different types of rights it serves to establish. In a 1955 article in Man, Leach argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all cultures. He offered a list of ten rights associated with marriage, including sexual monopoly and rights with respect to children, with specific rights differing across cultures. Those rights, according to Leach, included:

"To establish a legal father of a woman's children.

To establish a legal mother of a man's children.

To give the husband a monopoly in the wife's sexuality.

To give the wife a monopoly in the husband's sexuality.

To give the husband partial or monopolistic rights to the wife's domestic and other labor services.

To give the wife partial or monopolistic rights to the husband's domestic and other labor services.

To give the husband partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the wife.

To give the wife partial or total control over property belonging or potentially accruing to the husband.

To establish a joint fund of property – a partnership – for the benefit of the children of the marriage.

To establish a socially significant 'relationship of affinity' between the husband and his wife's brothers."

The monopoly on sexuality generally does not include the right to sexual access, which in many countries is viewed as marital rape.

Types

Monogamy

Monogamy is a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse during their lifetime or at any one time. Monogamy may or may not indicate that the spouses have pledged not to have sexual relationships outside of their marriage.

Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas found a strong correlation between intensive plough agriculture, dowry and monogamy. This pattern was found in a broad swath of Eurasian societies from Japan to Ireland. The majority of Sub-Saharan African societies that practice extensive hoe agriculture, in contrast, show a correlation between "bride price" and polygamy. A further study drawing on the Ethnographic Atlas showed a statistical correlation between increasing size of the society, the belief in "high gods" to support human morality, and monogamy.

In the countries which do not permit polygamy, a person who marries in one of those countries a person while still being lawfully married to another commits the crime of bigamy. In all cases, the second marriage is considered legally null and void. Besides the second and subsequent marriages being void, the bigamist is also liable to other penalties, which also vary between jurisdictions.

Governments that support monogamy may allow easy divorce. Those who remarry after a divorce do so usually no more than three times. Divorce and remarriage can thus result in "serial monogamy", i.e. having multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. This can be interpreted as a form of plural mating, as are those societies dominated by female-headed families in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Brazil where there is frequent rotation of unmarried partners. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the "monogamous" category.

Serial monogamy creates a new kind of relative, the "ex-". The "ex-wife", for example, may remain an active part of her "ex-husband's" or "ex-wife's" life, as they may be tied together by transfers of resources (alimony, child support), or shared child custody.

Polygamy

Polygamy is a marriage which includes more than two spouses. When a man is married to more than one wife at a time, the relationship is called polygyny, and there is no marriage bond between the wives; and when a woman is married to more than one husband at a time, it is called polyandry, and there is no marriage bond between the husbands. If a marriage includes multiple husbands or wives, it can be called group marriage.

A molecular genetic study of global human genetic diversity argued that sexual polygyny was typical of human reproductive patterns until the shift to sedentary farming communities approximately 10,000 to 5,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, and more recently in Africa and the Americas. As noted above, Anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study of marriage around the world utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas found that the majority of Sub-Saharan African societies that practice extensive hoe agriculture show a correlation between "Bride price" and polygamy. A survey of other cross-cultural samples has confirmed that the absence of the plough was the only predictor of polygamy, although other factors such as high male mortality in warfare (in non-state societies) and pathogen stress (in state societies) had some impact.

Marriages are classified according to the number of legal spouses an individual has. The suffix "-gamy" refers specifically to the number of spouses, as in bi-gamy (two spouses, generally illegal in most nations), and poly-gamy (more than one spouse).

Societies show variable acceptance of polygamy as a cultural ideal and practice. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of 1,231 societies noted, 186 were monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny, and 4 had polyandry. However, as Miriam Zeitzen writes, social tolerance for polygamy is different from the practice of polygamy, since it requires wealth to establish multiple households for multiple wives. The actual prevalence of polygamy in a tolerant society may be low, with the majority of people practicing monogamous marriage. Tracking the occurrence of polygamy is further complicated in jurisdictions where it has been banned, but continues to be practiced (de facto polygamy).

Zeitzen also notes that Western perceptions of African society and marriage patterns are biased by "contradictory concerns of nostalgia for traditional African culture versus critique of polygamy as oppressive to women or detrimental to development." Polygamy has been condemned as being a form of human rights abuse by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, with concerns arising over domestic abuse, forced marriage, and neglect. The vast majority of countries do not permit polygamy.

Child marriage

A child marriage is a marriage where one or both spouses are under the age of 18. It is related to child betrothal and teenage pregnancy.

Child marriage was common throughout history. In 1880 in the United States, the minimum age of consent for marriage ranged from 7 to 12 years old. Today it is condemned by international human rights organizations. Child marriages are often arranged between the families of the future bride and groom, sometimes as soon as the girl is born. However, in the late 1800s in England and the United States, feminist activists began calling for raised age of consent laws, which was eventually handled in the 1920s, having been raised to 16–18. Still, in 2017, over half of the 50 United States have no explicit minimum age to marry and several states set the age as low as 14.

Child marriages can also occur in the context of bride kidnapping.

While child marriage is observed for both boys and girls, the overwhelming majority of child spouses are girls. In many cases, only one marriage-partner is a child, usually the female, due to the importance placed upon female virginity. Causes of child marriage include poverty, bride price, dowry, laws that allow child marriages, religious and social pressures, regional customs, fear of remaining unmarried, and perceived inability of women to work for money.

Today, child marriages are widespread in parts of the world; being most common in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, with more than half of the girls in some countries in those regions being married before 18. The incidence of child marriage has been falling in most parts of the world. In developed countries, child marriage is outlawed or restricted.

Girls who marry before 18 are at greater risk of becoming victims of domestic violence, than those who marry later, especially when they are married to a much older man.

Same-sex and third-gender marriages

Several kinds of same-sex marriages have been documented in Indigenous and lineage-based cultures. In the Americas, We'wha (Zuni), was a lhamana (male individuals who, at least some of the time, dress and live in the roles usually filled by women in that culture); a respected artist, We'wha served as an emissary of the Zuni to Washington, where he met President Grover Cleveland. We'wha had at least one husband who was generally recognized as such.

While it is a relatively new practice to grant same-sex couples the same form of legal marital recognition as commonly granted to mixed-sex couples, there is some history of recorded same-sex unions around the world. Ancient Greek same-sex relationships were like modern companionate marriages, unlike their different-sex marriages in which the spouses had few emotional ties, and the husband had freedom to engage in outside sexual liaisons. The Codex Theodosianus (C. Th. 9.7.3) issued in 438 CE imposed severe penalties or death on same-sex relationships, but the exact intent of the law and its relation to social practice is unclear, as only a few examples of same-sex relationships in that culture exist. Same-sex unions were celebrated in some regions of China, such as Fujian. Possibly the earliest documented same-sex wedding in Latin Christendom occurred in Rome, Italy, at the San Giovanni a Porta Latina basilica in 1581.

Temporary marriages

Examples of temporary marriage include the practices of "walking marriage" among the matrilineal Mosuo people of China, of handfasting among some Germanic peoples during the Middle Ages, and fixed-term marriages in the Muslim world.

Historically, pre-Islamic Arab societies practiced a form of temporary marriage that carries on today in the practice of nikāh mutʿah ("temporary gratification" or "temporary gift"), a fixed-term marriage contract of varying duration (otherwise known as sigheh in Iran and mutʿah in Iraq). The Islamic prophet Muḥammad explicitly sanctioned his followers from engaging in the practice of temporary marriages, which he considered to be a form of zināʾ ("adultery" and/or "fornication"), an umbrella term which specifically refers to unlawful sexual intercourse in the Qurʾān and Islamic law. The practice of zināʾ, which covers any form of illicit sexual relations in the Qurʾān and Islamic jurisprudence, and can provide a legitimizing cover for non-marital sex, prostitution, pimping, and sex workers, is commonly conflated with prostitution under the legal statutes of Muslim-majority countries and is officially prohibited as illegal in all of them, with the only exception of Turkey where prostitution is legalized.

The same forms of temporary marriage have been used in Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran to make the donation of a human ova legal for in vitro fertilisation; a woman cannot, however, use this kind of marriage to obtain a sperm donation. In recent times, societal controversies related to the practice of nikāh mutʿah in Sunnī-majority Muslim countries have resulted in the practice being confined mostly to Shīʿa Muslim communities.

Cohabitation

In some jurisdictions cohabitation, in certain circumstances, may constitute a common-law marriage, an unregistered partnership, or otherwise provide the unmarried partners with various rights and responsibilities; and in some countries, the laws recognize cohabitation in lieu of institutional marriage for taxation and social security benefits. This is the case, for example, in Australia. Cohabitation may be an option pursued as a form of resistance to traditional institutionalized marriage. However, in this context, some nations reserve the right to define the relationship as marital, or otherwise to regulate the relation, even if the relation has not been registered with the state or a religious institution.

Conversely, institutionalized marriages may not involve cohabitation. In some cases, couples living together do not wish to be recognized as married. This may occur because pension or alimony rights are adversely affected; because of taxation considerations; because of immigration issues, or for other reasons. Such marriages have also been increasingly common in Beijing. Guo Jianmei, director of the center for women's studies at Beijing University, told a Newsday correspondent, "Walking marriages reflect sweeping changes in Chinese society." A "walking marriage" refers to a type of temporary marriage formed by the Mosuo of China, in which male partners live elsewhere and make nightly visits. A similar arrangement in Saudi Arabia, called misyar marriage, also involves the husband and wife living separately but meeting regularly.

Partner selection

There is wide cross-cultural variation in the social rules governing the selection of a partner for marriage. There is variation in the degree to which partner selection is an individual decision by the partners or a collective decision by the partners' kin groups, and there is variation in the rules regulating which partners are valid choices.

The United Nations World Fertility Report of 2003 reports that 89% of all people get married before age forty-nine. The percent of women and men who marry before age forty-nine drops to nearly 50% in some nations and reaches near 100% in other nations.

In other cultures with less strict rules governing the groups from which a partner can be chosen the selection of a marriage partner may involve either the couple going through a selection process of courtship or the marriage may be arranged by the couple's parents or an outside party, a matchmaker. The period between a marriage proposal and marriage is also called engagement.

Age difference

Some people want to marry a person that is older or younger than they. This may impact marital stability and partners with more than a 10-year age gap tend to experience social disapproval. In addition, older women (older than 35) have increased health risks when getting pregnant.

Social status and wealth

Some people want to marry a person with higher or lower status than them. Others want to marry people who have similar status. In many societies, women marry men who are of higher social status. There are marriages where each party has sought a partner of similar status.

Some persons also wish to engage in transactional relationship for money (thus a type of marriage of convenience). Such people are sometimes referred to as gold diggers. Separate property systems can however be used to prevent property of being passed on to partners after divorce or death.

Higher income men are more likely to marry and less likely to divorce. High income women are more likely to divorce.

Incest taboo, exogamy, and endogamy

Societies have often placed restrictions on marriage to relatives, though the degree of prohibited relationship varies widely. Marriages between parents and children, or between full siblings, with few exceptions, have been considered incest and forbidden. However, marriages between more distant relatives have been much more common, with one estimate being that 80% of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer. This proportion has fallen dramatically, but still, more than 10% of all marriages are believed to be between people who are second cousins or more closely related. In the United States, such marriages are now highly stigmatized, and laws ban most or all first-cousin marriage in 30 states. In South Korea, historically it was illegal to marry someone with the same last name and same ancestral line.

An Avunculate marriage is a marriage that occurs between an uncle and his niece or between an aunt and her nephew. Such marriages are illegal in most countries due to incest restrictions. However, a small number of countries have legalized it, including Argentina, Australia, Austria, Malaysia, and Russia.

In various societies, the choice of partner is often limited to suitable persons from specific social groups. In some societies the rule is that a partner is selected from an individual's own social group – endogamy, this is often the case in class- and caste-based societies. But in other societies a partner must be chosen from a different group than one's own – exogamy, this may be the case in societies practicing totemic religion where society is divided into several exogamous totemic clans, such as most Aboriginal Australian societies. In other societies a person is expected to marry their cross-cousin, a woman must marry her father's sister's son and a man must marry his mother's brother's daughter – this is often the case if either a society has a rule of tracing kinship exclusively through patrilineal or matrilineal descent groups as among the Akan people of West Africa. Another kind of marriage selection is the levirate marriage in which widows are obligated to marry their husband's brother, mostly found in societies where kinship is based on endogamous clan groups.

Religion has commonly weighed in on the matter of which relatives, if any, are allowed to marry. Relations may be by consanguinity or affinity, meaning by blood or by marriage. On the marriage of cousins, Catholic policy has evolved from initial acceptance, through a long period of general prohibition, to the contemporary requirement for a dispensation. Islam has always allowed it, while Hindu texts vary widely.

Prescriptive marriage

In a wide array of lineage-based societies with a classificatory kinship system, potential spouses are sought from a specific class of relative as determined by a prescriptive marriage rule. This rule may be expressed by anthropologists using a "descriptive" kinship term, such as a "man's mother's brother's daughter" (also known as a "cross-cousin"). Such descriptive rules mask the participant's perspective: a man should marry a woman from his mother's lineage. Within the society's kinship terminology, such relatives are usually indicated by a specific term which sets them apart as potentially marriageable. Pierre Bourdieu notes, however, that very few marriages ever follow the rule, and that when they do so, it is for "practical kinship" reasons such as the preservation of family property, rather than the "official kinship" ideology.

Insofar as regular marriages following prescriptive rules occur, lineages are linked together in fixed relationships; these ties between lineages may form political alliances in kinship dominated societies. French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss developed alliance theory to account for the "elementary" kinship structures created by the limited number of prescriptive marriage rules possible.

A pragmatic (or 'arranged') marriage is made easier by formal procedures of family or group politics. A responsible authority sets up or encourages the marriage; they may, indeed, engage a professional matchmaker to find a suitable spouse for an unmarried person. The authority figure could be parents, family, a religious official, or a group consensus.

Forced marriage

A forced marriage is a marriage in which one or both of the parties is married against their will. Forced marriages continue to be practiced in parts of the world, especially in South Asia and Africa. The line between forced marriage and consensual marriage may become blurred, because the social norms of these cultures dictate that one should never oppose the desire of one's parents/relatives in regard to the choice of a spouse; in such cultures, it is not necessary for violence, threats, intimidation etc. to occur, the person simply "consents" to the marriage even if they do not want it, out of the implied social pressure and duty. The customs of bride price and dowry, that exist in parts of the world, can lead to bride buying and selling people into marriage.

In some societies, ranging from Central Asia to the Caucasus to Africa, the custom of bride kidnapping still exists, in which a woman is captured by a man and his friends. Sometimes this covers an elopement, but sometimes it depends on sexual violence. In previous times, raptio was a larger-scale version of this, with groups of women captured by groups of men, sometimes in war; the most famous example is The Rape of the Sabine Women, which provided the first citizens of Rome with their wives.

Other marriage partners are more or less imposed on an individual. For example, widow inheritance provides a widow with another man from her late husband's brothers.

In rural areas of India, child marriage is practiced, with parents often arranging the wedding, sometimes even before the child is born. This practice was made illegal under the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929.

Economic considerations

The financial aspects of marriage vary between cultures and have changed over time.

In some cultures, dowries and bride wealth continue to be required today. In both cases, the financial arrangements are usually made between the groom (or his family) and the bride's family; with the bride often not being involved in the negotiations, and often not having a choice in whether to participate in the marriage.

In early modern Britain, the social status of the couple was supposed to be equal. After the marriage, all the property (called "fortune") and expected inheritances of the wife belonged to the husband.

Dowry

A dowry is a process whereby parental property is distributed to a daughter at her marriage (i.e. inter vivos) rather than at the holder's death (mortis causa)… A dowry establishes some variety of conjugal fund, the nature of which may vary widely. This fund ensures her support (or endowment) in widowhood and eventually goes to provide for her sons and daughters.

In some cultures, especially in countries such as Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Morocco, and Nepal, dowries continue to be expected. In India, thousands of dowry-related deaths have taken place on yearly basis, to counter this problem, several jurisdictions have enacted laws restricting or banning dowry (see Dowry law in India). In Nepal, dowry was made illegal in 2009. Some authors believe that the giving and receiving of dowry reflects the status and even the effort to climb high in social hierarchy.

Dower

Direct Dowry contrasts with bride wealth, which is paid by the groom or his family to the bride's parents, and with indirect dowry (or dower), which is property given to the bride herself by the groom at the time of marriage and which remains under her ownership and control.

In the Jewish tradition, the rabbis in ancient times insisted on the marriage couple entering into a prenuptial agreement, called a ketubah. Besides other things, the ketubah provided for an amount to be paid by the husband in the event of a divorce or his estate in the event of his death. This amount was a replacement of the biblical dower or bride price, which was payable at the time of the marriage by the groom to the father of the bride, because many young prospective husbands could not raise the bride price at the time when they would normally be expected to marry. It is the predecessor to the wife's present-day entitlement to maintenance in the event of the breakup of marriage, and family maintenance in the event of the husband not providing adequately for the wife in his will. Another function performed by the ketubah amount was to provide a disincentive for the husband contemplating divorcing his wife.

Morning gifts, which might also be arranged by the bride's father rather than the bride, are given to the bride herself; the name derives from the Germanic tribal custom of giving them the morning after the wedding night. She might have control of this morning gift during the lifetime of her husband, but is entitled to it when widowed. If the amount of her inheritance is settled by law rather than agreement, it may be called dower. Depending on legal systems and the exact arrangement, she may not be entitled to dispose of it after her death, and may lose the property if she remarries. Morning gifts were preserved for centuries in morganatic marriage, a union where the wife's inferior social status was held to prohibit her children from inheriting a noble's titles or estates. In this case, the morning gift would support the wife and children. Another legal provision for widowhood was jointure, in which property, often land, would be held in joint tenancy, so that it would automatically go to the widow on her husband's death.

Islamic tradition has similar practices. A 'mahr', either immediate or deferred, is the woman's portion of the groom's wealth (divorce) or estate (death). These amounts are usually set on the basis of the groom's own and family wealth and incomes, but in some parts these are set very high so as to provide a disincentive for the groom exercising the divorce, or the husband's family 'inheriting' a large portion of the estate, especially if there are no male offspring from the marriage. In some countries, including Iran, the mahr or alimony can amount to more than a man can ever hope to earn, sometimes up to US$1,000,000 (4000 official Iranian gold coins). If the husband cannot pay the mahr, either in case of a divorce or on demand, according to the current laws in Iran, he will have to pay it by installments. Failure to pay the mahr might even lead to imprisonment.

Bridewealth

Bridewealth is a common practice in parts of Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia), parts of Central Asia, and in much of sub-Saharan Africa. It is also known as brideprice although this has fallen in disfavor as it implies the purchase of the bride. Bridewealth is the amount of money or property or wealth paid by the groom or his family to the parents of a woman upon the marriage of their daughter to the groom. In anthropological literature, bride price has often been explained as payment made to compensate the bride's family for the loss of her labor and fertility. In some cases, bridewealth is a means by which the groom's family's ties to the children of the union are recognized.

Taxation

In some countries a married person or couple benefits from various taxation advantages not available to a single person. For example, spouses may be allowed to average their combined incomes. This is advantageous to a married couple with disparate incomes. To compensate for this, countries may provide a higher tax bracket for the averaged income of a married couple. While income averaging might still benefit a married couple with a stay-at-home spouse, such averaging would cause a married couple with roughly equal personal incomes to pay more total tax than they would as two single persons. In the United States, this is called the marriage penalty.

When the rates applied by the tax code are not based income averaging, but rather on the sum of individuals' incomes, higher rates will usually apply to each individual in a two-earner households in a progressive tax systems. This is most often the case with high-income taxpayers and is another situation called a marriage penalty.

Conversely, when progressive tax is levied on the individual with no consideration for the partnership, dual-income couples fare much better than single-income couples with similar household incomes. The effect can be increased when the welfare system treats the same income as a shared income thereby denying welfare access to the non-earning spouse. Such systems apply in Australia and Canada, for example.

Post-marital residence

In many Western cultures, marriage usually leads to the formation of a new household comprising the married couple, with the married couple living together in the same home, often sharing the same bed, but in some other cultures this is not the tradition. Among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, residency after marriage is matrilocal, with the husband moving into the household of his wife's mother. Residency after marriage can also be patrilocal or avunculocal. In these cases, married couples may not form an independent household, but remain part of an extended family household.

Early theories explaining the determinants of postmarital residence connected it with the sexual division of labor. However, to date, cross-cultural tests of this hypothesis using worldwide samples have failed to find any significant relationship between these two variables. However, Korotayev's tests show that the female contribution to subsistence does correlate significantly with matrilocal residence in general. However, this correlation is masked by a general polygyny factor.

Although, in different-sex marriages, an increase in the female contribution to subsistence tends to lead to matrilocal residence, it also tends simultaneously to lead to general non-sororal polygyny which effectively destroys matrilocality. If this polygyny factor is controlled (e.g., through a multiple regression model), division of labor turns out to be a significant predictor of postmarital residence. Thus, Murdock's hypotheses regarding the relationships between the sexual division of labor and postmarital residence were basically correct, though the actual relationships between those two groups of variables are more complicated than he expected.

There has been a trend toward the neolocal residence in western societies.

Law

Marriage laws refer to the legal requirements which determine the validity of a marriage, which vary considerably between countries. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that:

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Rights and obligations

A marriage bestows rights and obligations on the married parties, and sometimes on relatives as well, being the sole mechanism for the creation of affinal ties (in-laws). These may include, depending on jurisdiction:

Giving one spouse or his/her family control over the other spouse's sexual services, labor, and property.

Giving one spouse responsibility for the other's debts.

Giving one spouse visitation rights when the other is incarcerated or hospitalized.

Giving one spouse control over the other's affairs when the other is incapacitated.

Establishing the second legal guardian of a parent's child.

Establishing a joint fund of property for the benefit of children.

Establishing a relationship between the families of the spouses.

These rights and obligations vary considerably between societies, and between groups within society. These might include arranged marriages, family obligations, the legal establishment of a nuclear family unit, the legal protection of children and public declaration of commitment.

Property regime

In many countries today, each marriage partner has the choice of keeping his or her property separate or combining properties. In the latter case, called community property, when the marriage ends by divorce each owns half. In lieu of a will or trust, property owned by the deceased generally is inherited by the surviving spouse.

In some legal systems, the partners in a marriage are "jointly liable" for the debts of the marriage. This has a basis in a traditional legal notion called the "Doctrine of Necessities" whereby, in a heterosexual marriage, a husband was responsible to provide necessary things for his wife. Where this is the case, one partner may be sued to collect a debt for which they did not expressly contract. Critics of this practice note that debt collection agencies can abuse this by claiming an unreasonably wide range of debts to be expenses of the marriage. The cost of defense and the burden of proof is then placed on the non-contracting party to prove that the expense is not a debt of the family. The respective maintenance obligations, both during and eventually after a marriage, are regulated in most jurisdictions; alimony is one such method.

Restrictions

Marriage is an institution that is historically filled with restrictions. From age, to race, to social status, to consanguinity, to gender, restrictions are placed on marriage by society for reasons of benefiting the children, passing on healthy genes, maintaining cultural values, or because of prejudice and fear. Almost all cultures that recognize marriage also recognize adultery as a violation of the terms of marriage.

Most jurisdictions set a minimum age for marriage; that is, a person must attain a certain age to be legally allowed to marry. This age may depend on circumstances, for instance exceptions from the general rule may be permitted if the parents of a young person express their consent and/or if a court decides that said marriage is in the best interest of the young person (often this applies in cases where a girl is pregnant). Although most age restrictions are in place in order to prevent children from being forced into marriages, especially to much older partners – marriages which can have negative education and health related consequences, and lead to child sexual abuse and other forms of violence – such child marriages remain common in parts of the world. According to the UN, child marriages are most common in rural sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The ten countries with the highest rates of child marriage are: Niger (75%), Chad, Central African Republic, Bangladesh, Guinea, Mozambique, Mali, Burkina Faso, South Sudan, and Malawi.

To prohibit incest and eugenic reasons, marriage laws have set restrictions for relatives to marry. Direct blood relatives are usually prohibited to marry, while for branch line relatives, laws are wary.

Kinship relations through marriage is also called "affinity", relationships that arise in one's group of origin, can also be called one's descent group. Some cultures in kinship relationships may be considered to extend out to those who they have economic or political relationships with; or other forms of social connections. Within some cultures they may lead you back to gods or animal ancestors (totems). This can be conceived of on a more or less literal basis.

Laws banning "race-mixing" were enforced in certain North American jurisdictions from 1691 until 1967, in Nazi Germany (the Nuremberg Laws) from 1935 until 1945, and in South Africa during most part of the apartheid era (1949–1985). All these laws primarily banned marriage between persons of different racially or ethnically defined groups, which was termed "amalgamation" or "miscegenation" in the U.S. The laws in Nazi Germany and many of the U.S. states, as well as South Africa, also banned sexual relations between such individuals.

State recognition

When a marriage is performed and carried out by a government institution in accordance with the marriage laws of the jurisdiction, without religious content, it is a civil marriage. Civil marriage recognizes and creates the rights and obligations intrinsic to matrimony in the eyes of the state. Some countries do not recognize locally performed religious marriage on its own, and require a separate civil marriage for official purposes. Conversely, civil marriage does not exist in some countries governed by a religious legal system, such as Saudi Arabia, where marriages contracted abroad might not be recognized if they were contracted contrary to Saudi interpretations of Islamic religious law. In countries governed by a mixed secular-religious legal system, such as Lebanon and Israel, locally performed civil marriage does not exist within the country, which prevents interfaith and various other marriages that contradict religious laws from being entered into in the country; however, civil marriages performed abroad may be recognized by the state even if they conflict with religious laws. For example, in the case of recognition of marriage in Israel, this includes recognition of not only interfaith civil marriages performed abroad, but also overseas same-sex civil marriages.

In various jurisdictions, a civil marriage may take place as part of the religious marriage ceremony, although they are theoretically distinct. Some jurisdictions allow civil marriages in circumstances which are notably not allowed by particular religions, such as same-sex marriages or civil unions. It is possible for two people to be recognized as married by a religious or other institution, but not by the state, and hence without the legal rights and obligations of marriage; or to have a civil marriage deemed invalid and sinful by a religion. Similarly, a couple may remain married in religious eyes after a civil divorce.

Most sovereign states and other jurisdictions limit legally recognized marriage to opposite-sex couples and a diminishing number of these permit polygyny marriage, polyandry marriage, group marriage, coverture marriage, arranged marriages, forced marriages, child marriages, cousin marriages, sibling marriages, teenage marriages, avunculate marriages, incestuous marriages, and bestiality marriages. In modern times, a growing number of countries, primarily developed democracies, have lifted bans on, and have established legal recognition for, equal rights for women and the marriages of interethnic, interracial, interfaith, interdenominational, interclass, intercommunity, transnational, and same-sex couples as well as immigrant couples, couples with an immigrant spouse, and other minority couples. In some areas, child marriages and polygamy may occur in spite of national laws against the practice.

Religion

Religions develop in specific geographic and social milieux, each with their own constraints as to what constitutes, and who can enter into, a valid religious marriage. Religious attitudes and practices relating to marriage vary, but have many similarities.

Abrahamic religions

The Baháʼí Faith encourages marriage and views it as a mutually strengthening bond. A Baháʼí marriage is contingent on the consent of all living parents.

Bahá’í scripture also states that marriage is conditioned on the consent of both parties and is not permissible before the age of maturity, which is fixed at 15.

Christianity bases its views on marriage upon the teachings of Jesus and Paul the Apostle. Many Christian denominations regard marriage as a sacrament, sacred institution, or covenant. Since the 16th century, five competing models have shaped marriage in the Western tradition, as described by John Witte Jr.:

Marriage as Sacrament in the Roman Catholic Tradition

Marriage as Social Estate in the Lutheran Reformation

Marriage as Covenant in the Reformed (and Methodist) Traditions

Marriage as Commonwealth in the Anglican Tradition

Marriage as Contract in the Enlightenment Tradition

The first known decrees on marriage were during the Catholic Council of Trent (1563), decrees that made the validity of marriage dependent on the wedding occurring in the presence of a priest and two witnesses. The absence of a requirement of parental consent ended a debate from the 12th century. In the case of a civil divorce, the innocent spouse has no right to marry again until the death of the other spouse terminates the still valid marriage, even if the other spouse was guilty of adultery.

The Christian Church performed marriages in the narthex of the church prior to the 16th century, when the emphasis was on the marital contract and betrothal. Subsequently, the ceremony moved inside the sacristy of the church.

Hinduism

Hinduism regards Vivāha or Biye (marriage) to be a sacred duty that entails both religious and social obligations. It is regarded to be an important samskara, or a rite of passage. Hindu texts describe four purusharthas (goals of existence): dharma (righteousness), artha (wealth), kama (desire), and moksha (liberation). The purpose of the marriage samskara is to fulfill the goal of kama, allowing an adherent to gradually advance towards the attainment of moksha. The Manusmriti describes many different types of marriages and their categorisation, ranging from the gandharva vivaha (a consensual marriage of love between a man and a woman without the performance of rituals or witnesses) to the rakshasa vivaha (a "demoniac" marriage, performed by abduction of one participant by the other participant, usually, but not always, with the help of other persons). In the Indian subcontinent, arranged marriages, in which the spouse's parents or an older family member choose the partner, are still predominant in comparison with love marriages in the contemporary period. The Hindu Widow's Remarriage Act 1856 empowers a Hindu widow to remarry.

Buddhism

The Buddhist view of marriage considers marriage a secular affair and thus not a sacrament. Buddhists are expected to follow the civil laws regarding marriage laid out by their respective governments. Gautama Buddha, being a kshatriya was required by Shakyan tradition to pass a series of tests to prove himself as a warrior, before he was allowed to marry.

Sikhism

In a Sikh marriage, the couple walks around the Guru Granth Sahib holy book four times, and a holy man recites from it in the kirtan style. The ceremony is known as 'Anand Karaj' and represents the holy union of two souls united as one.

Wicca

Wiccan marriages are commonly known as handfastings and are a celebration held by Wiccans. Handfasting was originally a medieval ritual and has been revived by contemporary Pagans. In the ritual, the couple's wrists are tied together to symbolize the binding of two lives. It is commonly used in Wicca and Pagan ceremonies, but it has become more mainstream and comes up in both religious and secular vows and readings. Although handfastings vary for each Wiccan they often involve honoring Wiccan deities. Some Wiccan traditions have a marriage vow "for as long as love lasts" instead of the traditional Christian "till death do us part". The first Wiccan wedding took place in 1960, between Frederic Lamond and his wife, Gillian. Most Wiccan traditions will celebrate same-sex and different-sex handfastings. The length of commitment varies from a year and a day (after which the vows may be renewed), "as long as love shall last", for a lifetime, or for future incarnations.

Consensual sex is considered sacred for Wiccans. Some traditions perform the Great Rite, in which a High Priest and High Priestess invoke the God and Goddess on each other before making love. It can be used to raise magical energy for the use of spell work. It can also be performed symbolically, using the athame to symbolize masculine energy and the chalice to symbolize feminine energy.

Health

Marriage, like other close relationships, exerts considerable influence on health. Married people experience lower morbidity and mortality across such diverse health threats as cancer, heart attacks, and surgery. Research on marriage and health is part of the broader study of the benefits of social relationships.

Social ties provide people with a sense of identity, purpose, belonging, and support. Simply being married, as well as the quality of one's marriage, have been linked to diverse measures of health.

The health-protective effect of marriage is stronger for men than women. Marital status—the simple fact of being married—confers more health benefits to men than women.

Women's health is more strongly impacted than men's by marital conflict or satisfaction, such that unhappily married women do not enjoy better health relative to their single counterparts. Most research on marriage and health has focused on heterosexual couples; more work is needed to clarify the health impacts of same-sex marriage.

Divorce and annulment

In most societies, the death of one of the partners terminates the marriage, and in monogamous societies, this allows the other partner to remarry, though sometimes after a waiting or mourning period.

In some societies, a marriage can be annulled, when an authority declares that a marriage never happened. Jurisdictions often have provisions for void marriages or voidable marriages.

A marriage may also be terminated through divorce. Countries that have relatively recently legalized divorce are Italy (1970), Portugal (1975), Brazil (1977), Spain (1981), Argentina (1987), Paraguay (1991), Colombia (1991), Ireland (1996), Chile (2004) and Malta (2011). The Philippines and the Vatican City are the only jurisdictions which do not allow divorce. After divorce, one spouse may have to pay alimony. Laws concerning divorce and the ease with which a divorce can be obtained vary widely around the world. After a divorce or an annulment, the people concerned are free to remarry (or marry).

A statutory right of two married partners to mutually consent to divorce was enacted in western nations in the mid-20th century. In the United States, no-fault divorce was first enacted in California in 1969 and the final state to legalize it was New York in 1989.

About 45% of marriages in Britain and, according to a 2009 study, 46% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.

History

Right of sexual access

Duran Bell described historical marriage as "a relationship between one or more men (male or female) in severalty to one or more women that provides those men with a demand-right of sexual access within a domestic group and identifies women who bear the obligation of yielding to the demands of those specific men." Currently in many countries the right of sexual access is not legally recognized and instead viewed as marital rape.

Ancient world

Many cultures have legends concerning the origins of marriage. The way in which a marriage is conducted and its rules and ramifications have changed over time, as has the institution itself, depending on the culture or demographic of the time.

The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting a man and a woman dates back to approximately 2350 BC, in ancient Mesopotamia. Wedding ceremonies, as well as dowry and divorce, can be traced back to Mesopotamia and Babylonia.

According to ancient Hebrew tradition, a wife was seen as being property of high value and was, therefore, usually, carefully looked after. Early nomadic communities in the Middle East practiced a form of marriage known as beena, in which a wife would own a tent of her own, within which she retains complete independence from her husband. The Covenant Code orders "If he take him another; her food, her clothing, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish (or lessen)". The Talmud interprets this as a requirement for a man to provide food and clothing to, and have sex with, each of his wives. However, "duty of marriage" is also interpreted as whatever one does as a married couple, which is more than just sexual activity. And the term diminish, which means to lessen, shows the man must treat her as if he was not married to another.

As a polygynous society, the Israelites did not have any laws that imposed marital fidelity on men. Adulterous married women, adulterous betrothed women, and the men who slept with them, however, were subject to the death penalty by the biblical laws against adultery. The literary prophets indicate that adultery was a frequent occurrence, despite these legal restrictions.

In ancient Greece, no specific civil ceremony was required for the creation of a heterosexual marriage – only mutual agreement and the fact that the couple must regard each other as husband and wife accordingly. Men usually married when they were in their 20s and women in their teens. It has been suggested that these ages made sense for the Greeks because men were generally done with military service or financially established by their late 20s, and marrying a teenage girl ensured ample time for her to bear children, as life expectancies were significantly lower. Married Greek women had few rights in ancient Greek society and were expected to take care of the house and children. Time was an important factor in Greek marriage. For example, there were superstitions that being married during a full moon was good luck and Greeks married in the winter in honor of Hera. Inheritance was more important than feelings: a woman whose father dies without male heirs could be forced to marry her nearest male relative – even if she had to divorce her husband first.

Europe

From the early Christian era (30 to 325 CE), marriage was thought of as primarily a private matter, with no uniform religious or other ceremony being required. However, bishop Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 110, exhorts, "[I]t becomes both men and women who marry, to form their union with the approval of the bishop, that their marriage may be according to God, and not after their own lust."

In 12th-century Europe, women took the surname of their husbands and starting in the second half of the 16th century parental consent along with the church's consent was required for marriage.

With few local exceptions, until 1545, Christian marriages in Europe were by mutual consent, declaration of intention to marry and upon the subsequent physical union of the parties. The couple would promise verbally to each other that they would be married to each other; the presence of a priest or witnesses was not required. This promise was known as the "verbum." If freely given and made in the present tense (e.g., "I marry you"), it was unquestionably binding; if made in the future tense ("I will marry you"), it would constitute a betrothal.

One of the functions of churches from the Middle Ages was to register marriages, which was not obligatory. There was no state involvement in marriage and personal status, with these issues being adjudicated in ecclesiastical courts. During the Middle Ages marriages were arranged, sometimes as early as birth, and these early pledges to marry were often used to ensure treaties between different royal families, nobles, and heirs of fiefdoms. The church resisted these imposed unions, and increased the number of causes for nullification of these arrangements. As Christianity spread during the Roman period and the Middle Ages, the idea of free choice in selecting marriage partners increased and spread with it. In 1563 the Council of Trent, twenty-fourth session, required that a valid marriage must be performed by a priest before two witnesses.

In medieval Western Europe, later marriage and higher rates of definitive celibacy (the so-called "European marriage pattern") helped to constrain patriarchy at its most extreme level. For example, Medieval England saw marriage age as variable depending on economic circumstances, with couples delaying marriage until the early twenties when times were bad and falling to the late teens after the Black Death, when there were labor shortages; by appearances, marriage of adolescents was not the norm in England. Where the strong influence of classical Celtic and Germanic cultures (which were not rigidly patriarchal) helped to offset the Judaeo-Roman patriarchal influence, in Eastern Europe the tradition of early and universal marriage (often in early adolescence), as well as traditional Slavic patrilocal custom, led to a greatly inferior status of women at all levels of society.

China

The mythological origin of Chinese marriage is a story about Nüwa and Fu Xi who invented proper marriage procedures after becoming married. In ancient Chinese society, people of the same surname are supposed to consult with their family trees prior to marriage to reduce the potential risk of unintentional incest. Marrying one's maternal relatives was generally not thought of as incest. Families sometimes intermarried from one generation to another. Over time, Chinese people became more geographically mobile. Individuals remained members of their biological families. When a couple died, the husband and the wife were buried separately in the respective clan's graveyard. In a maternal marriage, a male would become a son-in-law who lived in the wife's home.

The New Marriage Law of 1950 radically changed Chinese marriage traditions, enforcing monogamy, equality of men and women, and choice in marriage; arranged marriages were the most common type of marriage in China until then. Starting October 2003, it became legal to marry or divorce without authorization from the couple's work units. Although people with infectious diseases such as AIDS may now marry, marriage is still illegal for the mentally ill.

Korea

The practice of matrilocality in Korea started in the Goguryeo period and ended in the early Joseon period. The Korean saying that when a man gets married, he is "entering jangga" (the house of his father-in-law), stems from the Goguryeo period.

Criticism of marriage

People have proposed arguments against marriage for reasons that include political, philosophical and religious criticisms; concerns about the divorce rate; individual liberty and gender equality; questioning the necessity of having a personal relationship sanctioned by government or religious authorities; or the promotion of celibacy for religious or philosophical reasons. Research has found that unhappily married couples are at 3–25 times the risk of developing clinical depression. Opinion polls show the importance of marriage varies by country and culture.

Historically, in most cultures, married women had very few rights of their own, being considered, along with the family's children, the property of the husband; as such, they could not own or inherit property, or represent themselves legally (see, for example, coverture). Since the late 19th century, in some (primarily Western) countries, marriage has undergone gradual legal changes, aimed at improving the rights of the wife. These changes included giving wives legal identities of their own, abolishing the right of husbands to physically discipline their wives, giving wives property rights, liberalizing divorce laws, providing wives with reproductive rights of their own, and requiring a wife's consent when sexual relations occur. In the 21st century, there continue to be controversies regarding the legal status of married women, legal acceptance of or leniency towards violence within marriage (especially sexual violence), traditional marriage customs such as dowry and bride price, forced marriage, marriageable age, and criminalization of consensual behaviors such as premarital and extramarital sex.

Feminist theory approaches opposite-sex marriage as an institution traditionally rooted in patriarchy that promotes male superiority and power over women. This power dynamic conceptualizes men as "the provider operating in the public sphere" and women as "the caregivers operating within the private sphere". "Theoretically, women ... [were] defined as the property of their husbands .... The adultery of a woman was always treated with more severity than that of a man." "[F]eminist demands for a wife's control over her own property were not met [in parts of Britain] until ... [laws were passed in the late 19th century]."

Traditional heterosexual marriage imposed an obligation of the wife to be sexually available for her husband and an obligation of the husband to provide material/financial support for the wife. Numerous philosophers, feminists and other academic figures have commented on this throughout history, condemning the hypocrisy of legal and religious authorities in regard to sexual issues; pointing to the lack of choice of a woman in regard to controlling her own sexuality; and drawing parallels between marriage, an institution promoted as sacred, and prostitution, widely condemned and vilified (though often tolerated as a "necessary evil"). Mary Wollstonecraft, in the 18th century, described marriage as "legal prostitution". Bertrand Russell in his book Marriage and Morals wrote that: "Marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution." Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus wrote: "What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?"