Wednesday, October 03, 2007

My wife doesn't want me to get married

There are plenty of groups that allow, or even encourage, polygamy. Whether it's a cultural or religious thing, people having many spouses has been common throughout human history. Over time, changes have been made to the institution, in some ways minimizing the existence. Other changes have only helped to help polygamy spread.

In Indonesia, where polygamy is legal, a case was recently brought before the court to attempt to make polygamy easier. Muhammad Insa, who was petitioning the case, argued that the current rules regarding polygamy were too restrictive.

Namely, he didn't think that permission should be gotten from previous wives before taking more. The courts didn't agree.

In some ways, Insa made sense. Because of the rules, he claims that a large number of "marriages" never get registered, thereby depriving the children of those unions of things like inheritence. Meanwhile, the main argument presented by the court was that, according to the tenets of Islam, multiple marriages are allowed, as long as the wives are all treated fairly.

Which makes us wonder. Specifically, we wonder about why many men are interested in polygamy at all? After all, it's difficult enough for most men to live with only one woman for the rest of their lives, as is clearly evidenced by the growing divorce rate. Why would men want to have multiple spouses, with their own sets of problems and issues, thereby making the remainder of life exponentially more confusing. After all, relationships are difficult, and the answer is almost never going to be bringing a third (or fourth or fifth) person into the tangled mess.

Unless all of these men are looking at polygamy from a strictly sexual standpoint. If that's the case, then they've already forgotten that, at least stereotypically, sex tends to slow down (if not stop altogether) with marriage. The sole exception to that being Hollywood marriages, but those only exist to share profits from the inevitable sex tapes.

And really, when you think about it, do these guys really need to forget to put the seat down with more than one wife?

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