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It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room: that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual state of civil war and seem unable to develop stable, modern institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can aquire by force the cows they need.

The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.

If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.

If that's the case, then how comes China, which has a massive excess of males, hasn't erupted into civil war yet?

China does not have a "massive" excess of males, just around 3-4% overall. The worst hit generations showed 15% more males than global averages, but this seems to be largely an administrative effect where girls were simply reported with a delay.

That being said, China does face a bride price crisis (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common. This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government to intervene and regulate this market.

Extremely effective social controls designed to suppress an insurrection for all the other reasons Chinese would have wanted to revolt over the years.

This has already happened in a bunch of western countries to a limited extent.

The incel people are this social dynamic.

It all makes sense when viewed through the economic lens.

Sexual freedom is a lot like capitalism. It leads to wealth concentration. Very few men attract the majority of women. This implies a class of sexually poor men. I suppose so called incels rising up and trying to seize the means of reproduction is a predictable outcome.

Many religions impose a sort of sexual communism: they try to stabilize society by imposing monogamous relationships, thereby ensuring availability of women for every man and preventing the accumulation of sexual capital. This explicitly counteracts the hypergamous dynamic mentioned in TFA where women would prefer to share a rich man than be in a monogamous relationship with a poor one.

> One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans.

Looking at marriage norms across the world actually suggests the opposite takeaway. What’s remarkable is how similar marriage norms are among people who had almost no historical contact with each other. Confucian marriage 2,000 years ago wasn’t that different from Christian marriage 100 years ago, despite those two cultures having almost nothing else in common.

When anthropologists identify societies with significantly different marriage norms, it’s always some random tribal society that never grew beyond a relatively small number of people and never developed civilization to speak of.

> And fathers who wish to divorce assume that the mothers of their children will be fine raising children alone with the support of their family, the state, and their salaries.

This makes the false assumption that men don't care about their children. Society and the courts tend to agree with it, but the vast majority of divorced men I know complain about how little they get to see their children, combined with how they are seen as only a paycheck and not as a parent. Things are slowly changing, men are more likely to get custody, and joint custody does happen - but there is still a lot of the "men are not able to raise kids" attitude around.

Statistically, fathers who ask the courts for joint custody almost always receive it. Occam's Razor dictates these men you know most likely prefer to complain about their divorce rather than to do the arduous work of parenting. They can also renegotiate this circumstance if they feel like it.

or the parents really just don't get along. seriously, i'd rather give up my kids than deal with a horrible partner. if i could deal with her, why even get a divorce (unless the partner pushes for it)? i am glad that my parents did not get joint custody when they divorced. it would have been a disaster.

most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

Lifelong monogamy as a default and an almost universal ban on kin marriage seem to be solid contributors here.

Also, I don't think the current remnants of hunter gatherers are all that informative about our past. These are different people who live in marginal lands. Hunter gatherers of Europe would have had access to prime real estate and extremely food dense coastal areas, made long voyages at least occasionally. Quite simply, successful societies look different.

>> most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans

> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.

The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.

These societies are the failed people we left behind.

They’re like the PHP developers of humankind. They limp on, but everyone else moved on a long time ago. If they were successful, they wouldn’t still be doing it.

The simpler explanation is that they continue to do it because it is successful.

Enjoyable read. I've long since been wondering whether the low birth rates have something to do with the insecurity that surrounds modern day marriages. If you're a woman you don't want to invest in children, only to be divorced and left to raise the child of your now No.1 enemy. If you're a man, the insecurity is around whether the child is yours and also whether your wife will later divorce you and your child be taken away from you (sure visitation rights, but pratically the child grows up in the household of another man, if she remarries).

It’s all economic, pride and ego. Once you hit a certain amount of income, the marginal cost of children seems too much. It’s not a big deal when you have nothing.

Maintaining a middle/upper middle class lifestyle for your kids is expensive. Few people can afford daycare, 5x college tuitions, etc. Extended families tend to be spread out and social networks aren’t what they once were.

Dudes online blather about paternity, divorce, etc. all nonsense and all irrelevant. Bad marriages and divorce are not new, although religious and conservative people try to imply that. The entire movement for prohibition in the early 20th century was driven by absent fathers who would drink their wages away and let the children starve in some hovel.

The only thing that’s “new” is women have the ability to choose birth control.

The paternity issue should be easy to overcome with modern technology. There's really no reason the state shouldn't require a paternity test to ensure the accuracy of the state issued birth certificate.

Some states go the other way - if you (as the father, maybe the mother but that's pretty easy to verify I hear) sign the birth certificate you are the father (Maury) for all legal purposes even if you're not - wether knowingly or not.

Yes, most states see it that way. But you could still make them the legal father through adoption (like with step parents) without providing inaccurate information on the birth certificate.

isn't that fraud?

75% of divorces are initiated by women in the US. If college educated that number jumps to 90%. Divorce as an mechanism, is almost entirely used by women.

The question, of course, is whether that means women want divorce more, or men fear divorce more.

Women absolutely want the divorce more once they come to conclusion some aspect of relationship is over (typically the emotion part but simply spending less time together or feeling most of the burden of raising kids is enough).

Most guys can suck up now-loveless marriage trivially if kids are fine (after kids come, this is pretty standard path for marriages), heck we can still enjoy sex greatly in such situation. Most women, not so much. I know it sounds sexist, trust me I would be very happy if this wasnt true but when I look/ask/listen around it is.

As an cca older guy at certain age the patterns start emerging left and right, and my own marriage can see some of it, just like most other marriages around us.

Some make it, some don't. When it fails its mostly mixture of personality resilience of both sides rather than some objective measure of (lack of) quality of relationship. Its easy to judge but please be kind to those who are going/went through, they may have been a better partner than ie you and still it wasnt enough to sustain it.

They’re often sexless though.

Also it’s often fear of stepdads. My mom dumped my dad so she could date a string of abusive assholes. It would give me pause before leaving a marriage that wasn’t utter misery.

Anecdotally, men are a lot more content with marriage. Women want a lot more. The whole “healthy relationship” ecosystem in contemporary times is almost entirely women driven.

A lot more men than women are able to be content with the comfortable mediocrity that is bringing in the paycheque, doing the chores, getting laid once or twice a month, but otherwise not really feeling much passion or enthusiasm or joy with their partner.

It's not the life you hope for, but there's a lot of social messaging that that's just the way it is, it's what you signed up for, you would be selfish to leave, the grass won't be greener, and also it's probably your fault anyway for not being a better husband. The messaging to women in romcoms and the like is much more toward you deserve better, be brave, junk the loser, go get the life you want.

As a guy who was in a mediocre marriage like this for many years, I basically got my emotional needs met elsewhere: through work, family, friends, time and activities with my kids, etc.

The divorce mechanism is the legal end of the partnership. It's not an indication of who initiated the termination of the partnership itself.

Do you have evidence to back up the implict claim that those two are not strongly correlated?

Of course they're correlated but it's obvious to anyone who has had a long term relationship unravel that the causes are always complicated and multi-layered.

I (man) was the one who pulled the trigger on my divorce but that followed years of conflict and withdrawing from both sides and ultimately you can point to specific milestones (who killed the bedroom, who opened a separate bank account first, who stepped out first, who wouldn't come back to counselling) but it's actually better for healing not to be preoccupied with the blame game and instead focus on where one's own growth opportunities are.

This does not surprise me, as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters. Almost without exception, they come out ahead in every measurable metric.

"as the courts are flagrantly biased toward women in these matters"

As in most matters. There are many studies about lesser sentences for women vs men who commit the same crimes.

This is not always exactly true if you dig into the details - for example, something like 20% of fathers get custody - but it's something like 90% of fathers who try to get custody get some.

How many don't even try though because them assume it is hopeless. Some custody includes things like 1 weekend a month - if that is all you get it wasn't really worth the bother.

“Some”?

Anything less than fifty percent is state sponsored kidnapping.

From divorces among family & friends - yes, those concerns exist. But they are also worst-case scenarios, and there are many "friendlier" divorces. Or divorces after the kids grow up - where none of the paternity, left-to-raise, and visitation issues really apply.

Vs. even if marriages were magically 100% secure - the costs of having kids in most modern societies have skyrocketed over the past half-ish century or so.

My view - for which I have no proofs, it's just intuition - is that people are too egotistic and self centered and too hedonistic to want to have children.

> For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers.

OT, but I find this fact mindboggling whenever I read it.

Our way of timekeeping and general education emphasizes the last 2 millennia. Popular (highschool level) history usually goes back maybe 5-8. The furthest is maybe the end of the ice age ~14 millennia ago.

But then you learn there are still 270 millennia of human history left that we know almost nothing of...

And the total human population in prehistory was tiny, likely under a million for much of that time, and possibly dropping to a few thousand at some point. The total human experience of those 250k years may not be much more than the last few thousand...

Good point, and in a way even more crazy.

great article.

one thing it mentions is how in Europe etc - places with limited land quickly pivoted to monogamy was due to limited resources. in places with limited resources, raising kids under monogamy has shown to produce the best results i.e kids tend to have better future success.

however, even though legal systems in the west restrict polygyny - due to inequality - its coming back - we already see that with onlyfans etc / high levels of prostitution in younger western females - the richer guys can maintain a harem - while the plebs become sexless incels.

I feel a source is warranted.

Excellent submission. I particularly appreciate the lack of technical drama submissions on weekends. Again, this is a great read and a new favorite.

> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

Usually, polygamous societies tended to become monogamous or perish. Most of the young men who couldn't afford wives could be send to war and die there. Else, they could become very violent very fast because they had nothing to lose.

Not an anthropologist - but instead of "How farming promotes inequality", I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for fishing, or whatever.

> In contemporary Western societies, unigeniture is either considered wrong or is illegal; we no longer differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate offspring...

At best, those are common ideals in Western society. Try talking to an old attorney who does family law.

Also worth a mention - in primitive conditions, polygamy can speed the spread of highly beneficial genes through the society. The textbook case is immune system genes - historically, disease killed a lot of our ancestors.

TFA talked about the difficulty of division, and waved at the idea that farming was different from pastoral societies because of the ease of division: farming land is more valuable as it is concentrated (because of the well known dangers of having many very small plots that are difficult to work and improve) but a herd (or fishing tools) can be split and merged far more easily. So agriculture drives to unigenture.

A blog post like this is mostly hand-waving at complex ideas, but that was her argument for it.

Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of having many small plots of land in early agricultural conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.

And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.

(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)

> I'd frame it as "How resource-producing capital promotes inequality". It could be livestock in a migratory herding society, or boats and nets when those were critical for fishing, or whatever.

I agree, but nitpick: capital by definition can be put to use to produce or gather something. So resource-producing capital is redundant.

Yes-ish? I'm not a CPA or MBA (ditto most folks here) but looked at a few online dictionaries for "capital". From cases like gold in a hunter-gatherer society - a status-signaling luxury and trade good, but you probably can't get much more than perishable foods or nicer stone tools in exchange - it seemed worth the clarifying/emphasizing redundancy.

Eden was probably just a metaphor for life before agriculture

I mean it makes sense, all you really need are cows and wives to turn sunshine into children. What more could a man need.

A lot of grass land for the cows.

This approach is correlational and interpretive. The same raw data points can be assembled into substantively different, even diametrically opposed, narratives depending on which mechanisms, confounders, or weighting someone wants to emphasise.

Correlation is not causation. Just because they appear together doesn't mean the cows caused the marriage system. It could be that a third factor, like high male mortality in war prone herding societies, caused both.

She ignores polyandry (one woman, multiple husbands) which occurs in some herding societies like Tibet. If "livestock = polygyny" was a hard scientific law, Tibet shouldn't exist as an exception.

> For much of history, this complexity was invisible to Westerners. Northwestern Europeans assumed that their way of doing things, lifelong monogamous marriage sanctified by religion and nuclear families with male breadwinners, was the natural order.

Hard to take this nonsense seriously. Northwest europe was christian and there are plenty of examples of non-monogamous marriages in the bible.

> One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans.

No shit. Heck, even within europe it was known. Such as the areas controlled by muslims. It was known for hundreds of years.

> It’s easy to see how the arrival of wealth reshaped marriage: more cows, more wives.

This is true prior to farming. Those who claimed the best hunting grounds ( wealth ) or access to water ( wealth ) would get more wives.

> Women, however, do. They have a choice: be the second or third wife of a rich pastoralist or be the first wife of a poor one. It can pay to be the former.

Did women really have a choice? Or wouldn't it make more sense for the father to marry her off to the guy who offers him the most dowry? The guy writes further down : "Parents can also command a higher bride price for daughters seen as compliant and chaste.".

> Monogamous systems, therefore, may have evolved to limit the transfer of resources, rather than as a form of monogamous mating.

Monogamous systems happened in most "civilizations" to maintain peace. When you have a significant group of men without women or prospects for women, it can lead to instability. Especially in civilizations with large populations. Monogamy introduces a sense of fairness which everyone - men, women, fathers, mathers, etc can buy into.

It's why monogamous systems are dominant in every developed civilizations from europe to east asia and in between. And nonmonogamous systems are dominant in rural tribal backwards areas.

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> So how does one explain the parts of the world, like Europe and large parts of Asia, that are unequal yet predominantly monogamous?

Note that when we talk about polygamy in the past, it's about, like in TFA, a man with many wives. Not a woman with many men.

How does the modern "free" and "liberated" world reconcile that with feminism? When we talk about modern-day polygamous societies, it's basically islam. And islam is a highly patriarcal society.

So what's the take of feminists on these facts?

Polyandry exists mainly in isolated, agrarian, or mountainous regions like Tibet, Nepal, and parts of India to preserve land and family resources. It is also found in some African communities and among indigenous groups.

The most common form is where a woman marries a group of brothers to keep family land and assets united. It is often a strategic economic decision for survival in difficult conditions, rather than just a cultural preference.

You should clarify the use of "polygamy" term in this context. Having multiple spuses, implicitly having sex and children with them? Having children with multiple partners but no official mariage? Having sex with multiple partners but no children?

I don't know the feminist take, but just to explain: the reason there is much much more polygyny than polyandry is basic reproduction mechanics. Women max out at ~13 kids, the most reproductively successful men have had thousands. So, a single well-resourced man can keep a bevy of wives at close to their reproductive limit no problem.

(Well, problems come when you do this as a society and create an age group of young men who have no shot at a wife because of 50/50 birth ratio. They get violent.)

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That’s quite the hot take. My wife has more boyfriends than i do girlfriends, does that make us bottom of the barrel humans?