Wedlock

In the Islamic world, marriage is sanctioned between a man and up to four women. In Imperial China, formal marriage was sanctioned only between a man and a woman, although a man could take several concubines and the children from the union were considered legitimate.

In most societies, marriage was polygynic, where a man could have multiple wives, but even there, the vast majority of men had only one. In such societies, multiple wives is generally considered a sign of wealth and power. The status of multiple wives varied from one society to another. In Islamic societies, the different wives were considered equal while in Imperial China, one woman was considered the primary wife while the other women were considered concubines. Among the upper classes, the primary wife was an arranged marriage with an elaborate formal ceremony while the concubines were taken on later with minimal ceremony.

There were also many societies that were monogamous, where a person could be married to only one person at once, and very few polyandrous, where a woman could have multiple husbands. Societies which permit group marriage are extremely rare, but have existed in utopian societies such as the Oneida Community.

Marriage sometimes: establishes the legal father of a woman's child; establishes the legal mother of a man's child; gives the husband or his family control over the wife's sexual services, labor, and/or property; gives the wife or her family control over the husband's sexual services, labor, and/or property; establishes a joint fund of property for the benefit of children; establishes a relationship between the families of the husband and wife. No society does all of these; no one of these is universal (see Edmund Leach's article in "Marriage, Family, and Residence," edited by Paul Bohannan and John Middleton).

Marriage has traditionally been a prerequisite for starting a family, which usually serves as the building block of a community and society. Thus, marriage not only serves the interests of the two individuals, but also the interests of their children and the society of which they are a part.

Within Chinese societies, marriage with persons of the same surname is generally considered taboo, and many Chinese areas will have local taboos against marriages between people with certain surnames which are considered closely related. The sanctions against this action are informal social ones rather than formal legal ones, however.

Anthropologists refer to these sort of restrictions as exogamy. One exception to this pattern is in ancient Egypt, where marriage between brothers and sisters was permitted in the royal family; this privilege was denied commoners and may have served to concentrate wealth and power in one family (See also incest). The consequence of the incest-taboo is exogamy, the requirement to marry someone from another group. Anthropologists have thus pointed out that the incest-taboo may serve to promote social solidarity.

Societies have also at times required marriage from within a certain group. Anthropologists refer to these restrictions as endogamy. An example of such a restrictions would be a requirement to marry someone from the same tribe. Racist laws adopted by some societies in the past to prohibit marriage of peoples of different races, or miscegenation, could also be considered examples of endogamy.

The way in which a marriage is enacted has changed over time, as has the institution of marriage itself. In Europe during the Middle Ages, marriage was enacted by the couple promising verbally to each other that they would be married to each other. This promise was known as the verbum. At first, the Catholic Church did not conduct or recognise marriages, but priests did step in to witness the verbum and so be able to help resolve disputes about whether the couple in fact married themselves. At the Council of Trent, the Church declared marriage a sacrament. As part of the Reformation, the role of recording marriages and setting the rules for marriage passed to the state. By the 1600s many of the Protestant European countries had heavy state involvement in marriage.

Many religions have extensive teachings regarding marriage. Most Christian churches give some form of blessing to a marriage; the wedding ceremony typically includes some sort of pledge by the community to support the couple's relationship. In the Catholic Church, marriage is one of the seven sacraments. In the Eastern Orthodox church, it is one of the Mysteries, and is seen as an ordination and a martyrdom. In marriage, Christians see a picture of the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Church. In Judaism, marriage is so important that remaining unmarried is deemed unnatural. Islam also recommends marriage highly; among other things, it helps in the pursuit of spiritual perfection. Hinduism sees marriage as a sacred duty that entails both religious and social obligations. By contrast, Buddhism does not encourage or discourage marriage, although it does teach how one might live a happily married life.

It is also worth noting that different religions have different beliefs as regards the breakup of marriage. For example, the Roman Catholic Church believes it is morally wrong to divorce, and divorcées cannot remarry in a church marriage, though they can do in the eyes of the law. In the area of nullity, religions and the state often apply different rules, meaning that a couple, for example, could have their marriage annulled by the Catholic Church but still be married in the eyes of the law, because the state disagrees with the church over whether an annulment could be granted in a particular case. This produces the phenomenon of Catholics getting church annulments simultaneously with state divorces, allowing the ex-partners to marry other people in the eyes of both the church and the state.

The respective maintenance obligations, during and eventually after a marriage, are regulated in most jurisdictions; see alimony.

USA

1. a personal commitment between the people who are married to each other,
2. social recognition and acknowledgement of that commitment by the community of the married people (family, friends, and religious community),
3. religious treatment of the relationship and rules for how that relationship is entered into (referred to as "religious marriage"),
4. a civil status defined by law and recognised by society generally (referred to as "civil marriage")

Criticisms of marriage

Many commentators have argued that marriage has a significant dark side, sometimes condemning individual local practices and sometimes even the entire institution of marriage. A good many of these are feminist critiques, which claim that in many cultures marriage is particularly disadvantageous to women.

In many areas of the world, when a woman was in her early teens her father arranged a marriage for her in return for a brideprice, sometimes to a man twice her age who was a stranger to her. Her older husband then became her guardian and she could be cut off almost completely from her family. The woman had little or no say in the marriage negotiations, which might even have occurred without her knowledge.

Some traditions allowed a woman who failed to bear a male child to be given back to her father. This reflected the importance of bearing children and extending the family to succeeding generations.

Often both parties are expected to be virgins before their marriage, but in many cultures women were more strictly held to this standard. One old tradition in Europe, which survived into the twentieth century in rural Greece, was for this to be proven by hanging the bloody bed sheet from the wedding night from the side of the house. Similarly, sexual fidelity is very often expected in marriage, but sometimes the expectations and penalties for women were harsher than those for men.

In some traditions marriage could be a traumatic, unpleasant turn of events for a girl. "The Lot of Women" written in Athens in the mid 5th century BC laments this situation: "Young women, in my opinion, have the sweetest existence known to mortals in their father's homes, for their innocence always keeps children safe and happy. But when we reach puberty and can understand, we are thrust out and sold away from our ancestral gods and from our parents. Some go to strange men's homes, others to foreigner's, some to joyless houses, some to hostile. And all this once the first night has yoked us to our husband we are forced to praise and say that all is well." On the other hand, marriage has often served to assure the woman of her husband's continued support and enabled her to focus more attention on the raising of her children. This security has typically been greater when and where divorce was more difficult to obtain.

Some older wedding traditions still survive in some form in today's ceremonies. Women may still be symbolically "given away" by their fathers. Some brides still vow to "love and obey" their husbands and some bridegrooms vow to "care for" their wives. A groom might remove his bride's garter, a symbol of her virginity, as a public representation of his claim on her sexuality. Brides toss their bouquets towards a group of single women, who compete to catch the bouquet; the woman who catches the bouquet is believed to have the good fortune to be the next woman to get married. These traditions, though often attacked by critics and scholars, nevertheless remain a treasured part of many ceremonies, cherished by both bride and groom.