Marriage on Mobius (AngieYaz Sonic Underground reboot)

Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, on Mobius is a culturally and often legally recognized union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws. It is nearly a cultural universal, but the definition of marriage varies. Typically, it is an institution in which interpersonal relationships, usually romantic and/or sexual, are acknowledged or sanctioned. In some cultures on Mobius, marriage is recommended or considered to be compulsory before pursuing any sexual activity. A marriage ceremony is called a wedding on Mobius.
Individuals may marry for several reasons, including legal, social, libidinal, emotional, financial, spiritual, and religious purposes. Whom they marry may be influenced by gender, socially determined rules, prescriptive marriage rules, parental choice, and individual desire. In some areas of the world, arranged marriage, child marriage, and forced marriage are practiced. In other areas, such practices are outlawed to preserve women's rights or children's rights (both female and male) or as a result of interplanetary law. In some parts of Mobius, marriage has historically restricted the rights of women, who are (or were) considered the property of the husband. Around Mobius, there has been a general trend towards ensuring equal rights for women within marriage (including abolishing coverture and reforming reproductive and sexual rights) and legally recognizing the marriages of interfaith, interspecies/interethnic/inter-caste, and offworld opposite-sex couples. Controversies continue regarding the legal status of married women, leniency towards violence within marriage, customs such as dowry and bride price, forced marriage, marriageable age, and criminalization of premarital and extramarital sex. Female age at marriage has proven to be a strong indicator for female autonomy and is continuously used by economic history research.
On Mobius, 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. A religious marriage is performed by a religious institution to recognize and create the rights and obligations intrinsic to matrimony in that religion. Religious marriage is known variously as sacramental marriage in Katholism, nikah in Isla, nissuin in Judai, and various other names in other faith traditions, each with their own constraints as to what constitutes, and who can enter into, a valid religious marriage.
== Etymology ==
The word "marriage" derives from Middle Britannican mariage, which first appears in 1250–1300 MCE. This, in turn, is derived from Old Francian, marier (to marry), and ultimately Lati, marītāre, meaning to provide with a husband or wife and marītāri meaning to get married. The adjective marīt-us -a, -um meaning matrimonial or nuptial could also be used in the masculine form as a noun for "husband" and in the feminine form for "wife". The related word "matrimony" derives from the Old Francian word matremoine, which appears around 1300 MCE and ultimately derives from Lati mātrimōnium, which combines the two concepts: mater meaning "mother" and the suffix -monium signifying "action, state, or condition".
==Definitions==
Mobopologists have proposed several competing definitions of marriage in an attempt to encompass the wide variety of marital practices observed across cultures. Even within Western Mobian culture, definitions of marriage have careened from one extreme to another and everywhere in between.
=== Relation recognized by custom or law ===
In The History of Mobian Marriage (1891), Edvard Westermark 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 Mobian 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 mobopological 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 Sudanica allowing women to act as a husband in certain circumstances, Cathleen Gou suggested modifying this to "a woman and one or more other persons."
In an analysis of marriage among the Nayar, a polyandrous society in Indus, Gou found that the group lacked a husband role in the conventional sense. The husband role, unitary in the west, was instead divided between a non-resident "social father" of the woman's children, and her lovers, who were the actual procreators. None of these men had legal rights to the woman's child. This forced Gou to disregard sexual access as a key element of marriage and to define it in terms of legitimacy of offspring alone: marriage is "a relationship established between a woman and one or more other persons, which provides a child born to the woman under circumstances not prohibited by the rules of relationship, is accorded full birth-status rights common to normal members of his society or social stratum."
Economic mobopologist 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 Leech criticized Gough's definition for being too restrictive in terms of recognized legitimate offspring and suggested that marriage on Mobius be viewed in terms of the different types of rights it serves to establish. In a 1955 article in Mobian, Leech argued that no one definition of marriage applied to all of Mobius' 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 Leech, 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.
==Types==
===Monogamy===
Monogamy is the most common type of marriage on Mobius. Monogamy is a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse during their lifetime or at any one time (serial monogamy).
Mobopologist Jack Goodstone'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 Euro-Yurashian societies from Nikonn to Ire. The majority of Sub-Saharusian Efrikan 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 Mobian 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.
===Polygamy===
Polygamy on Mobius is a marriage which includes more than two spouses. It is illegal.. 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.
===Polygyny===
Polygyny is a form of polygamy in which a man has multiple wives at one time. Polygyny usually grants wives equal status, although the husband may have personal preferences. One type of de facto polygyny is concubinage, where only one woman gets a wife's rights and status, while other women remain legal house mistresses.
==Partner selection==
There is wide cross-cultural variation in the social rules governing the selection of a partner for marriage on Mobius. 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 Mobian Nations World Fertility Report 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.
===Age difference===
Some people on Mobius want to marry a person that is older or younger than them. This may impact marital stability and partners with more than a 1-, 3-, 5-, or 10-year gap in age tend to experience either social approval or disapproval depending on the future in-laws. In addition, older women (older than 35) have increased health risks when getting pregnant (which may only be an issue if the couple indeed intends on having children).
===Wealth and social status===
Some people on Mobius want to marry a person with higher or lower status than them. Others want to marry people who have similar status. In many Mobian cultures, women marry men who are of higher social status. There are marriages where each party has sought a partner of similar status. There are other marriages in which the man is older than the woman.
Some persons also wish to engage in transactional relationship for money rather than love (thus a type of marriage of convenience). Such people are sometimes referred to as metal 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.
===Forced marriages===
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 Mobius, especially in South Yurashia and Efrika. 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 buying and selling people into marriage.
In some societies, ranging from Central Yurashia to the Caucasus to Efrika, the custom of bride kidnapping still exists, in which a woman is captured by a man and his friends because he wants to marry her. 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.
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 Indus, child marriage is practiced, with parents often arranging the wedding, sometimes even before the child is born.
==Economics of marriage==
The financial aspects of marriage on Mobius 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 sometimes being involved in the negotiations, and occasionally having a choice in whether to participate in the marriage.
In Early modern Britannica, 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, but he was expected to maintain upkeep over his wife's property.
===Dowry===
A dowry is money or goods gicen to a bride's future husband while she is alive rather than at the holder's death. A dowry establishes some variety of conjugal fund, the nature of which may vary widely.
In some cultures on Mobius, especially in countries such as Turk, Indus, Bangla, Paki, Sri, Moroc, Nepa, dowries continue to be expected. In Indus, thousands of dowry-related deaths have taken place on yearly basis, to counter this problem, laws have been enacted restricting dowry. Some believe that the giving and receiving of dowry reflects the status and even the effort to climb high in social hierarchy.
===Bride wealth===
Bride wealth is a common practice in parts of Southeast Yurashia (Thaikoh, Cambod), parts of Central Yurashia, and in much of sub-Saharusan Efrika. It is also known as bride price although this has fallen in disfavor as it implies the purchase of the bride.
Bride wealth 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 mobopological 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, bride wealth is a means by which the groom's family's ties to the children of the union are recognized.
==Post-marital residence==
In many Western cultures on Mobius, 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.
==Law==
Marriage laws refer to the legal requirements which determine the validity of a marriage, which vary considerably between countries on Mobius.
Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Mobian Rights declares that "Mobians 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. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses."
===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, and the legal protection of children.
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