re: #77 The Ghost of a Flea

The whole reason for marriage isn’t to create children—that just requires functioning junk and a will to apply it—it’s to formalize issues of social and economic alliance between individuals and/or family groups.

If marriage were really just about procreation, then there wouldn’t be any variants like polyandry or polygyny, nor societies in which marriages is a temporary and/or renewable contract, nor societies that conduct marriage rituals between individuals incapable of reproducing.

If I remember my Anthropological History right, marriage started as a “breeding rights” contract between clans. My Anthropology professor distinctly outlined the social-economic need for keeping bloodlines properly mixed so that there wasn’t too much inbreeding and warfare between neighboring tribes and clans in ancient times when traveling was much more difficult and food hard to come-by. Thus the practice of “Purchasing a bride” which is still practiced in some parts of the world.
You remember the dowry chest or hope chest which our grandmothers used to have started for them as children? Uh huh. That was to make sure she went into the marriage with some property of her own, so she would have status within his family. My mother still has her grandmothers dowry chest!