this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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The problem with bigamy is that most historic implementations of it involved a series of 1v1 marriages to one person who could marry others and the rest that couldn't. To prevent chains of marriage, only one gender was allowed to marry, usually male.
If you remove gender from marriage, you can get much messier marriages and there is no legal understanding of what happens in those cases.
Yeah it would be fascinating complex in any system that doesn't view women as property and gives everyone equal rights, especially with bisexuals included... It's actually fascinating to try and picture how it would go down.
Imagine you meet a woman and fall in love, she's already married to me and another guy, he's got three wives and I'm married to two guys and one of the women he's married to, they all have multiple husbands and wives in complex chains that double back on themselves and intertwine.
It opens up so many new and difficult questions, obviously you can't all live together and can't all do things together so who is spending Christmas with who? Who is coming on the family vacation? What do I do if I love my wife and my husband but they both also love people who hate each other? What if my wife has A wife that's married to someone a bit right wing and his other wives are all married to more extreme right wingers who are married to q crazies...
Secrets is a good example, I tell my wife pretty much everything because I love and trust her but if we're all married then secrets will spread like wildfire or new rules need to be invented which dilute what it means to be married, same with organizating things - normally you organise everything with your partner and do things together but when everyone is linked through winding chains of marriage that's not possible, shared bank accounts aren't possible for a start or buying a house together as everyone will want to do it with all their partners so again either a house big enough to fit the whole country or some marriages are more significant than others.
That's the real issue I see developing, almost a caste system, or worse almost a hive structure - maybe I'm not as popular as you with our wife, by default I'm not in the group going to her parents for Christmas for example so instead I have Christmas with some of the other reject spouses, what do I do when my wife needs my help with something? I help, right? And if the thing she needs help with is helping her husband to get a gift for his more favoured wife to give to her favourite husband... Chains of importance spinning of in every direction, celebrity spouse's that everyone fawns over getting gifts and resources chained right up from the bottom of the barrel plebs like me...
And this is all without even thinking of kids or how they're made! Wouldn't it be great to enjoy valentine's day in bed with your wives? Well your wives think the same so now me and Fred are there and I brought Tim, Thomas, and Tiffany...
Of course the answers are all 'well do it on a case by case basis' type thing but if you're keeping your money personal, organising things based on availability and preference then it's basically the same as not being married at all but a lot more complex.
I just find it fascinating thinking of the implications of that becoming as common as monogamy is. Honestly I'm fairly ambivalent about which I think would be better, it's not like there aren't endless issues with the current system.