Marriage Institution

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A Marriage Institution is a social institution for long-term intimate relationships between two or more people.



References

2018

  • Is marriage really on the decline because of men's cheap access to sex?
    • … both women and men want to be economically and educationally set before they marry – an ambition increasingly harder for a generational cohort facing crippling debt, poor healthcare and an economy where stable career ladders have been replaced by part-time freelance gigs.

      Watching half of our parents’ generation get divorced was probably not the biggest advertisement for marriage either. But dragging our feet may end up helping us on that front too. If you care about the quality of the marriage you enter into, putting marriage off is good thinking: marrying young heightens the probability of divorce, and the longer people know each other before tying the knot the more likely they are to stay together. ...

2018

  • https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-marriage/2018/06/01/5646e650-6438-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html
    • QUOTE: Marriage is one of the oldest social, economic, religious and legal institutions in the world, and there’s no shortage of opinions on what makes it work. But much of the conventional wisdom is not based on evidence, and some is flat-out wrong. After researching thousands of couples for more than 40 years at the Gottman Institute, these are some of the myths we’ve encountered most often.
      • Myth No. 1 - Common interests keep you together. …

        … A stronger predictor of compatibility than shared interests is the ratio of positive to negative interactions, which should be 20-to-1 in everyday situations, whether a couple is doing something they both enjoy or not.

      • Myth No. 2 - Never go to bed angry. …

        … everyone has their own methods of dealing with disagreements, and research indicates that about two-thirds of recurring issues in marriage are never resolved because of personality differences — you’re unlikely to work out that fight about the dishes no matter how late you stay up.

      • Myth No. 3 - Couples therapy is for fixing a broken marriage. …

      • Myth No. 4 - Affairs are the main cause of divorce. …

      • Myth No. 5 - Marriages benefit from a ‘relationship contract.’ …

2016

  • (Alain de Botton, 2016a) ⇒ Alain de Botton, (2016). “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person.” In: The New York Times, May 28 2016.
    • QUOTE: Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating. … For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself. What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason. But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy. … We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage. Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, … We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for. … We should learn to accommodate ourselves to “wrongness,” striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

2014

  • (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage Retrieved:2014-4-29.
    • Marriage (also called matrimony or wedlock) is a socially or ritually recognized union or legal contract between spouses that establishes rights and obligations between them, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. [1] The definition of marriage varies according to different cultures, but it is principally an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually intimate and sexual, are acknowledged. In some cultures, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing any sexual activity. When defined broadly, marriage is considered a cultural universal. Individuals may marry for several reasons, including legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial, spiritual, and religious purposes. Who they marry may be influenced by socially determined rules of incest, prescriptive marriage rules, parental choice and individual desire. In developing areas of the world arranged marriage, child marriage, polygamy, and sometimes forced marriage, may be practiced as a cultural tradition. Conversely, such practices may be outlawed and penalized in many parts of the world out of concerns for human rights and because of international law. [2] In developed parts of the world, there has been a general trend towards ensuring equal rights within marriage for women and legally recognizing the marriages of interracial, interfaith, and same-gender couples. Oftentimes, these trends have been motivated by a desire to establish equality and uphold human rights. Marriage can be recognized by a state, an organization, a religious authority, a tribal group, a local community or peers. It is often viewed as a contract. Civil marriage is a marriage without religious content carried out by a government institution in accordance with marriage laws of the jurisdiction, and recognised as creating the rights and obligations intrinsic to matrimony. Marriages can be performed in a secular civil ceremony or in a religious setting via a wedding ceremony. The act of marriage usually creates normative or legal obligations between the individuals involved, and any offspring they may produce. In terms of legal recognition, most sovereign states and other jurisdictions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples and a diminishing number of these permit polygyny, child marriages, and forced marriages. Over the twentieth century, a growing number of countries and other jurisdictions have lifted bans on and have established legal recognition for interracial marriage, interfaith marriage and most lately, same-sex marriage. [3] Some cultures allow the dissolution of marriage through divorce or annulment. In some areas, child marriages and polygamy may occur in spite of national laws against the practice. Since the late twentieth century, major social changes in Western countries have led to changes in the demographics of marriage, with the age of first marriage increasing, fewer people marrying, and many couples choosing to cohabit rather than marry. For example, the number of marriages in Europe decreased by 30% from 1975 to 2005. [4]

      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). In Europe, the United States, and a few other places, from the late 19th century throughout the 21st century, marriage has undergone gradual legal changes, aimed at improving the rights of women. These changes included giving wives a legal identity of their own, abolishing the right of husbands to physically discipline their wives, giving wives property rights, liberalizing divorce laws, and requiring a wife's consent when sexual relations occur. These changes have occurred primarily in Western countries. In the 21st century, there continue to be controversies regarding the legal status of married women, legal acceptance 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.

  1. "A nonethnocentric definition of marriage is a culturally sanctioned union between two or more people that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws.
  2. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2008, Vol. 1, p. 1353, US Department of State.
  3. Map: In Legalizing Gay Marriage, England Joins Growing International Community | The Lowdown. Blogs.kqed.org (15 July 2013). Retrieved on 5 September 2013.
  4. Vucheva, Elitsa. (30 July 2013) / Social Affairs / Europeans marry older, less often. Euobserver.com. Retrieved on 5 September 2013.

2012

2004

  • (Cherlin, 2004) ⇒ Andrew J. Cherlin. (2004). “The Deinstitutionalization of American marriage.” In: Journal of Marriage and Family 66, no. 4.
    • QUOTE: This article argues that marriage has undergone a process of deinstitutionalization — a weakening of the social norms that define partners' behavior — over the past few decades. Examples are presented involving the increasing number and complexity of cohabiting unions and the emergence of same-sex marriage. Two transitions in the meaning of marriage that occurred in the United States during the 20th century have created the social context for deinstitutionalization. The first transition, noted by Ernest Burgess, was from the institutional marriage to the companionate marriage. The second transition was to the individualized marriage in which the emphasis on personal choice and self-development expanded. Although the practical importance of marriage has declined, its symbolic significance has remained high and may even have increased. It has become a marker of prestige and personal achievement. Examples of its symbolic significance are presented. The implications for the current state of marriage and its future direction are discussed.

1991

  • (Brown, 1991) ⇒ D. E. Brown. (1991). “Human Universals." McGraw-Hill. ISBN:0-87722-841-8
    • QUOTE: "[Human universals] comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."