Aaaaah, natuurlijk! Bedankt xp
Dat zei je inderdaad, maar ik wilde het toch weten uit nieuwsgierigheid xp Ik ben het ook al in boeken tegengekomen though, niet vaak ofzo, maar zeker wel! Misschien eerder in komische situaties, waarin iemand overdreven formeel praat ofzo…
Same and I agree 100%, it’s so elegant ~
edit: remembered another one: ‘wederhelft’ x3
Can’t 100 wives give birth to the same number of kids regardless of whether they’re married to 1000 husbands or just 1?
It’s the nine months between babies that set the theoretical upper limit here, right? Not the number of people you’ve got available to make the babies with…
Basically, in order to generate “as much offspring as possible”, all that’s required is that every possible woman has at least one person to make babies with…
EDIT: OK I think I actually realized that what I just said means that if every woman was allowed to have multiple husbands, some would have to go without whereas the other way around you don’t run into that issue… so it does indeed seem to hold up mathematically even if I don’t agree with it morally 
I’ve got friends that are poly and they seem to handle it well enough (though one of them went through a dark period where he got sort of dumped for the second boyfriend, they seem to have straightened things out now with all of them having multiple partners).
So I don’t want to use what science tells us happens in general to govern what kind of relationship is and isn’t allowed for individuals. The government should stay as much out of people’s bedrooms as possible.
Though I think, of course, that it should be equal-opportunity, men should be legally allowed to have multiple partners, and so should women.
Polygamy means means multiple spouses. There are separate words for the different situations; polygyny (multiple wives) and polyandry (multiple husbands) at least in English.
Ah okay, so I misunderstood that word!
I haven’t come across it myself. Does anyone know of a particular religion/culture where it is commonish to have a woman with multiple males bound by marriage or a similar social construct?
I’d be curious for both past and present.
Agreed. it’s not illegal to live in a polyamorous relationship as such. It’s just illegal to marry. The legal implications are much more difficult to navigate, especially if children end up getting involved as a result of that relationship - thus it being illegal to marry.
I don’t care what adults do as long as they’re responsible when doing so - treating others well.
But, there’s historic precedent of women being abused and used by entering into these sorts of relationships. And even today, that is still an issue.
There’s also the principle issue of equality - and I’m not enough of an idealist to believe that it’s truly possible to get that through poly-marriage.
A quick search showed the Musuo people in the Yunnan Province of China having a matriarchal (sort of) polyandrous society. There are no defined partnerships, rather using a “walking marriage” system. The mother and father of a child will never live in the same household, and the mother’s house takes all of the children. Both mother and father are free to have sexual relations with other people as well.
It seems we’re largely in agreement, and I think legally it’s likely to become very chaotic when both parties can have multiple spouses since you might end up with hundreds of people potentially connected through marriage…
I was mostly arguing against the point that it should be illegal because it is psychologically harmful to women.
I think adults should be allowed to decide for themselves, but on that point it seemed like we mostly agreed anyway.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by this though.
I think it’s certainly possible, just much more difficult. You’re adding 2 more relationship dynamics into the equation, if you have 3 people. 2+x for every added person after. So it is more unlikely that all dynamics will work well together, be perfectly equal, etc. Plus it can be harder to split romantic time between multiple people without feeling like you’re neglecting another. It can certainly work, just requires more effort on everyone’s part, and for them all to like each other both as people and as romantic interests.
No. It’s not really common, and where it can happen, it is usually frowned upon.
In my country, South Africa, I know of at least 2 popular male figures that have multiple wives. One of these figures is our ex-president, who, a year or so ago, married another woman in her 20s, he is 78. She’s his 7th wife. There were memes about it, but everyone just moved on with their lives. They’re grown adults after all.
I think I understand the statement better now.
Interestingly, the couple (or tuple I guess… they’re more than two after all) I mentioned solved their issues by establishing a clear “relationship hierarchy” I remember. Basically the way they explained it to me was that if they were to move abroad they’d consult with the main partner and inform the other(s).
So from that point of view I guess it’d make sense to marry your “main” partner and just keep the others as-is.
Though I suppose you could still have varying levels of marriage as well, as long as everyone consented to it, but I don’t know how useful that would be…
Yes, that’s basically what I meant. For women the constraint is the nine moths of pregnancy, which means that in order to pass on your genes as much as possible, you would want to take care of your children as much as possible, while for men with the same goal, it is much more promising to just father as many children as possible (which then requires a lot of women).
While this most certainly does not comply with modern moral standard, it seems to be very obvious why this word is constructed with the kanji at hand, as it is a concept more prevalent in earlier epochs. It was just invented to describe a factual situation, without being judgemental about the morals.
(Well, that probably depends on how polygamy was seen back then, but I guess it was not seen as something bad per se. Usually only nobility was financially capable of sustaining such a household, and they were too disconnected from the commoners to make it something worth discussing for the majority).
I was asking about a woman who is married to multiple men.
I don’t think I’ve come across a discussion of the term 夫妻 in particular. The news articles discussing the first same-sex weddings officiated in Taiwan, for example, all use 同性カップル, but there are definitely initiatives in Japan that try to raise more awareness for gendered language in the context of LGBT rights.
The 熊本県人権センター published an educational leaflet called LGBTと人権 that highlights quite a few issues in Japanese society and provides people with concrete steps they can take to become an アライ, which includes this point about gendered language use: 「彼氏／彼女、旦那／奥様」ではなく、「恋人、パートナー／つれあい」など、性別にかかわらず使える言葉を使うように心がけましょう.
@crihak This was what I was implying. That there’s just a different dynamic between say 3 people than between 2. Ideally 2 people can have equality (though that is hard to truly achieve), but for 3 people, it’s just even harder and less realistic in the long run. I don’t think about it in moral terms or something like that. Just that the likelihood of one partner being hurt, at some point, just increases.
In any case, I don’t have anything against living in open-ended relationships as such.
I’m not sure marriage as we know it as a legal institution (with protections for equal partners and rights for their children), is a doable path (especially not from the children’s perspective, and what’s best for them should be the main concern not the wishes of the adults in this case).
That, at the very least, shows that 同性カップル can imply a married status, it’s not just “being together”.
Thanks for the tip about that article. I’m gonna check it out!
There is another way to look at this. The goal of reproduction is to create viable offspring, i.e. make sure that the next generation can produce the third generation. When looking at it this way, the “father as many children” argument begins to become more complicated; raising viable offspring requires a lot of resources. Given that human infants require a great deal of care from the mother and are very vulnerable, protection as well as support from the father increase the odds of survival. This article is an interesting overview of different ways of looking at this question.
Apparently there are a lot of historical cases. The trend seems to be diminishing in modern times at least officially. I am familiar with polyamory (not legally recognized) which some women see as a pro-feminist movement. The government really should stay out of people’s beds. The recent US Supreme Court decision about employment rights has me wondering if it would apply to the poly community as well.
One can certainly hope so. Because no one deserves to experience discrimination in the workplace or elsewhere because of who they are or who they love.
I consider myself polyamorous and intend to have children someday, so this is something I’ve done a bit of research into. In cases where there are multiple “parents” (regardless of biological status), not being married means that some of the parents legally have no rights over the children, which can be an issue when it comes to custody, healthcare, schooling, etc. So ideally it would be possible for several people who are all acting parents to get married, or otherwise be granted guardianship, though as has been seen with some gay/lesbian couples, this is still an issue that is being resolved.
Were it possible to marry multiple people, legally it would probably take the form of separate agreements related to different marriage benefits. For example, persons A, B, and C share their finances, but only B and C are legal guardians of their children, and if C falls ill then only D is authorized to make their medical decisions. Certainly it makes no sense to have a hundred people all sharing their finances, but in small groups this seems doable.
In any case, from what I have read the general opinion is that multiple parents (in loving, healthy relationships) are equivalent to or better than a two-parent household, because there are more people to split finances and childcare. And in my experience, polyamory does not imply weaker or less healthy relationships, as people who practice it tend to develop good communication skills and be less influenced by jealousy. There are more people involved so more possibilities for conflict, but each individual relationship is not usually any worse than for a two-person couple.
Anyway, just food for thought.