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Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: when will ‘marriage’ become unfashionable? It has outlived its usefulness. We can test paternity..women are financially independent and shared dna can claim shared costs. You can store genetic material.

There is literally no reason for marriage ..an archaic social institution..to exist.

I can only see two (arguably questionable) purposes for legal union, health insurance(in America) and filing taxes jointly.

ETA: Ok. One more. Immigration.

Change my mind.

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Only reason you need: It exists in most places and is so ubiquitous that you will probably never get rid of the concept of marriage no matter how hard you try, so you might as well live with it and work around it. Maybe it's useless to you, but a lot of people like to do it. It's like asking why some cultures still eat really unhealthy(but hella delicious) stuff when they have access to organic cow-fed vegetables. Because it's their culture they always had, and it's just really delicious.

That sounds defeatist. We don’t have to accept anything we don’t reasonate with..I would like to believe that we have at least come that far..

I agree that people can do whatever they want but like I said earlier, it restricts people. I beckon the same examples...immigration, taxation, insurance etc.

Why can’t I include my elderly neighbour in my health insurance? If my parents visit me and they are not citizens, I have to purchase a tourist health policy for them and they are family..why should only my spouse and children be considered family.

If I have a partner I love and would like to travel to another country to live for a few years, I can’t do it unless they are a spouse. Etc.

I don’t want to touch taxation. But you get the idea.

We reward legal and religious marriages while unions and friendships or other relationships are not equitable. Why?

The state subsidizes marriage primarily for the purpose of subsidizing child-rearing. This has been obfuscated in recent times, but there is little other reason for these subsidies to exist and your confusion is warranted.

Have you ever been in love?

Yes.

What does love have to do with the utility function of state and church/religion approved legal union?

Marriage is an ancient tradition centered around the realities of human pair-bonding, which transcend Church and State. The social institution is built around our nature, and its congruency is apparent to any neurotypical human who's ever been in love. Atypical people might benefit from alternate arrangements but they comprise a very small minority of humans at this point in evolution.

It’s not that ancient.

I remain unconvinced. Change my mind.

https://theweek.com/articles/528746/origins-marriage

[..]The best available evidence suggests that it’s about 4,350 years old. For thousands of years before that, most anthropologists believe, families consisted of loosely organized groups of as many as 30 people, with several male leaders, multiple women shared by them, and children. As hunter-gatherers settled down into agrarian civilizations, society had a need for more stable arrangements. The first recorded evidence of marriage ceremonies uniting one woman and one man dates from about 2350 B.C., in Mesopotamia. Over the next several hundred years, marriage evolved into a widespread institution embraced by the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. But back then, marriage had little to do with love or with religion.[..]

If you don't feel called to marriage, that's absolutely fine. It's not for everybody. Priests take vows of celibacy, and that is a high calling, to give one example.

As an aside, I see you have a very deep view into the past and are unmoved by mere thousands of years of culture and tradition. You might find Dr. Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future interesting and enjoyable.

I don’t know why you are making this personal.

I am questioning the system and the foundation of the system. I am claiming that it has outlived its usefulness and we can build another social construct that doesn’t have to be defined by old thought patterns and ossified concepts.

We keep changing..don’t we? And shouldn’t our way of life change too?

You've directly asked me to change your mind, and I'm saying it doesn't necessarily have to be changed. If you're just interested as a matter of public policy, I can tell you that you're going to have a tremendously hard time getting people to raise children properly through other arrangements.

> We keep changing..don’t we? And shouldn’t our way of life change too?

We haven't really changed much at all. This is actually covered very adeptly in Dr. Kacyznski's work cited above.

> Marriage is an ancient tradition centered around the realities of human pair-bonding

If it's based around “realities of human pair-bonding”, why is polygyny a historically common mode of socially accepted marriage?

Why is rape a historically common mode of sexual relation? Because feral man likes sex and doesn't care about the people he's having it with. When man begins to care about the multitude of his progeny, he gets polygyny. When he cares further about the woman, marriage.

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