AKA gray asphalt wrote:

Trying to think this through but I get confused and couldn't even make
it to traditions and rituals;

In biology, a pair bond is the strong affinity that develops in some
species between the male and female in a breeding pair. Pair-bonding,
from 1940, is a term frequently used in sociobiology and evolutionary
psychology circles and is typically meant to imply either a life-long
monogamous relationship or a stage of mating interaction in socially
monogamous species. It is sometimes used in reference to human
relationships.

Pair bonding is also sometimes seen between individuals of the same
sex, as demonstrated by behavior similar to that of male-female
pair-bonded individuals.

According to evolutionary psychologists David Barash and Judith Lipton,
from their 2001 book The Myth of Monogamy, there are several varieties
of pair bonds:

Short-term pair-bond: a transient
mating or associations

Long-term pair-bond: bonded for a
significant portion of the life
cycle of that pair

Life-long pair-bond: mated for
the life of that pair

Social pair-bond: attachments for
territorial or social reasons,
as in cuckold situations

Clandestine pair-bond: quick
extra-pair copulations

Dynamic pair-bond: e.g. gibbon mating
systems being analogous to "swingers"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_bond

The Seven Year Itch

This phenomenon, popularized in the Marilyn Monroe movie The Seven Year
Itch, is based on the notion that the fabric of marriage gets frayed
threadbare after seven years....

Evolutionists feel that the seven-year span is to humans what a
breeding season is to birds. Apparently, natural selection has designed
us to withstand the rigors of marriage for at least long enough to
raise a child to the point that it has a reasonable chance of survival
without a father. After seven years of marriage, the first child is
likely to be five or six years old. By this age, children are strong
enough to walk without being carried, which is in keeping with
constraints on our hunter-gatherer ancestors who had to relocate their
temporary camps by distances of several miles. Children at five or six
years can feed themselves to some extent, by collecting plant food, for
example, and are alert to dangers of wild animals.

The Science of Romance - by Nigel Barber
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573929700/

Serial Monogamy = Polygamy?

Polygamy is in the air these days. On the popular HBO drama "Big Love,"
Bill Paxton plays a man with three wives who live next door to each
other and share a backyard. The Utah Supreme Court just upheld the
state's polygamy ban, and a polygamist church leader named Warren Jeffs
was just arrested after being on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives
list for fleeing prosecution of charges including sexual conduct with a
minor [ref]. So polygamy isn't just on fictional TV, but are any of
these portrayals accurate?

Today, most Americans think of monogamy as the "normal" form of
marriage. But as it turns out, strictly monogamous practices are in the
minority. In fact, cultures that practice some form of polygamy
outnumber monogamous cultures by the hundreds [ref]. Some critics
suggest that the Western practice of frequent divorce and remarrying
represents a form of serial polygamy, though most anthropologists
consider it serial monogamy -- no one gets married to more than one
person at one time.

The Nyinba people of Nepal practice fraternal polyandry. Polyandry is a
form of polygamy in which one woman has multiple husbands. In Nyinbian
culture, when a woman marries a man, she marries all of his brothers,
too. All of the brothers have equal sexual access to the wife, and the
entire family cares for the children, although the family may recognize
individual brothers as the specific father of a given child [ref]. This
kind of marriage structure concentrates the wealth and resources of all
the brothers into one family, and also concentrates their parents' land
and wealth.

http://people.howstuffworks.com/polygamy.htm

Actually, for our present society to single out Mormon polygamy for
special legal censure strikes me as profoundly hypocritical. Think of
related practices we do not treat as criminal. "Serial monogamy" is a
long established pattern in contemporary life; many popular leaders in
our culture have gone through multiple marriages and divorces, sharing
parental responsibilities with a variety of former partners. In some
urban subcultures, teenage males have fathered children with several
different single mothers, often without acknowledging any serious sense
of parental obligation.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/78/story_7881_2.html

Rights and obligations relating to marriage
Typically, marriage is the institution through which people join
together their lives in emotional and economic ways through forming a
household. It often confers rights and obligations with respect to
raising children, holding property, sexual behavior, kinship ties,
tribal membership, relationship to society, inheritance, emotional
intimacy, health care, and love.

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 having children,
which many believe 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.

In most of the world's major religions, marriage is a prerequisite for
sexual intercourse: unmarried people are not supposed to have sex,
which is referred to as fornication and is socially discouraged or even
criminalized. Sex with a married person other than one's spouse, called
adultery, is even less acceptable and has also often been criminalized,
especially in the case of a person who is a representative of the
government (e.g. president, prime minister, political representative,
public-school teacher, military officer). It is against the governing
law of the U.S. military. Conversely, a marriage is commonly held to
require a sexual relationship, and non-consummation (that is, failure
to engage in sex) may be held grounds for an annulment (as for instance
in the of John Ruskin's abortive marriage).

Marriage and economics

The economics of marriage have changed over time. Historically, in many
cultures the family of the bride had to provide a dowry to pay a man
for marrying their daughter. In other cultures, the family of the groom
had to pay a bride price to the bride's family for the right to marry
the daughter. In some cultures, dowries and bride prices are still
demanded today. In both cases, the financial transaction takes place
between the groom (or his family) and the bride's family; the bride has
no part in the transaction and often no choice in whether to
participate in the marriage.

In some cultures, dowries were not unconditional gifts; if the groom
had other children, they could not inherit the dowry, which had to go
to the bride's children, and which, in the event of her childlessness,
had to return to her family -- sometimes not until the groom's death,
or his remarriage; often the bride was entitled to inherit at least as
much as her dowry from her husband's estate.

Morning gifts, which might also be arranged by the bride's father
rather than the bride, were given to the bride herself; the name
derives from the Germanic tribal custom of giving them the morning
after the wedding night. She might or might not have control of this
morning gift during the lifetime of her husband, but is entitled to it
when widowed. If the amount of her inheritance is settled by law rather
than agreement, it may be called dower. Depending on legal systems and
the exact arrangement, she may not be entitled to dispose of it after
her death, and may lose the property if she remarries.

Morning gifts were preserved for many centuries in morganatic marriage,
a union where the wife's inferior social status was held to prohibit
her children from inheriting a noble's titles or estates. The morning
gift would be to support the wife and children.

Another legal provision for widowhood was jointure, in which property,
often land, would be held in joint tenancy, so that it would
automatically go to the widow on her husband's death.

In many modern legal systems, two people who marry have the choice
between keeping their property separate or combining their property. In
the latter case, called community property, when the marriage ends by
divorce each owns half; if one partner dies the surviving partner owns
half and for the other half inheritance rules apply. In many legal
jurisdictions, laws related to property and inheritance, provide by
default for property to pass upon the death of one party in a marriage
to the spouse first and secondarily to the children. Wills and trusts
can be recorded to make alternative provisions for property succession.

In some legal systems, the partners in a marriage are "jointly liable"
for the debts of the marriage. This has a basis in a traditional legal
notion called the "Doctrine of Necessities" whereby a husband was
responsible to provide necessary things for his wife. Where this is the
case, one partner may be sued to collect a debt for which they did not
expressly contract. Critics of this practice note that debt collection
agencies can abuse this claiming an unreasonably wide range of debts to
be expenses of the marriage. The cost of defence and the burden of
proof is then placed on the non-contracting party to prove that the
expense is not a debt of the family.

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

Some have attempted to analyse the institution of marriage using
economic theory; for example, anarcho-capitalist economist David
Friedman has written a lengthy and controversial study of marriage as a
market transaction (the market for husbands and wives).[5]

In some cultures, woman are expected to marry a spouse more powerful
economically, socially, or politically. Called hypergyny, this practice
is common in India.[citation needed] Though an expected social norm in
America, hypergyny is slowly being replaced by Isogamy, marriage
between equals, and the marrying 'down' of woman.[citation needed] Many
anthropologists ascribe this to increased gender equality between women
and men.[citation needed]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1604/cakinship_nav.html