You shouldn't be limited to one partner in terms of love/sex/living together/whatnot if you so desire. Why the hell should I care? But let's say that your job offers healthcare for you and your partner - if you have 18 partners, that's a hell of a different cost from one partner.
Likewise, let's say that you slip into a comma. Who has say over that feeding tube? That's already complicated! Let's say I'm some rich jerk trying to skirt the inheritance tax. Well, spouses are one way around it. Well, clearly my kids are also my spouses! Who gets to visit you at the hospital and who doesn't? Well, spouse 1 says your friend Joe should come, but spouse 2 hates Joe. Does it work by majority voting? What if they can't find all your spouses and you're dying and Joe really wants to see you?
So, if you think of marriage as the government telling you that you can only love/have sex with/live with one person, it seems oppressive if you desire something else. If you see marriage as this standard government contract that says you are allowed to designate one other individual for partner benefits, hospital visitation, inheritance, etc. then it makes sense.
The problem is that our society equates marriage with love/sex. Marriage should probably be seen as a contract. As such, you can see how it wouldn't really work to designate 6 people as having the right to determine whether you stay on life support. Yes, you could simply create individual contracts specifying everything that marriage entails, but that's tedious, expensive, prone to error and requires everyone who deals with you to have a lawyer to interpret that agreement - and they're not going to want to spend hundreds of dollars for a lawyer and tons more in liability to interpret your individualized contracts so they'll just deny you. Marriage is a standard convenience contract and shouldn't be confused with love or sex.
//I'm really interested to see if you disagree with this or how you think things like benefits/hospital visitation/whatnot should work in poly relationships (yeah, sociology student ;-))
1) People don't want to pay for it. Well, last I checked we weren't adding up figures. This is a definition change. The economics of it are free to work in various ways. For instance, companies could offer n-couple insurance with scaling rates.
2) Who makes executive decisions? ie, Who Pulls The Plug. I'd think you'd set this up the same way any n-party organization, like a board of directors, would. You could just vote. Or go by age. Or by gender. Seems like your marriage contract would be the place to put this.
We allow lots of people to form agreements with n-people. We allow people to live with whomever they choose. Why not allow these agreements to have the force of marriage? I can form a multi-billion-dollar business deal with 7 women but we can't all call each other spouses? It's just stupid. And it's cruel. Especially to me. :)
You can set up whatever legal arrangements you want. But marriage is a sensible default for the majority of people, thus specifically written into specific laws to make our society function more smoothly. If you want a custom arrangement that is less in demand, that is going to have some higher costs and less convenience for you. But that is true of many things, heavily customized products are often more costly and inconvenient than just buying the show room floor model.
I think this is what the post you responded to is arguing for, not some prohibition on non-standard living arrangements.
I think finding n > 2 people willing to share each other is more than a little problematic.
Besides, if you really love someone, like enough-to-marry-her lot, do you need to have anyone else?
On the other hand, would you be willing to be married to a woman with 6 other husbands?
Where it gets more complicated is in things like the tax code - it seems advantageous to society to offer tax breaks to married couples, with the idea being that this will help them have more resources for raising children. Of course this is predicated upon the notion that a husband-wife team is the best way to raise children (which I happen to believe). If gay marriage is strictly equal to straight marriage, those sorts of policies would seem to disproportionately favor gay couples (who tend not to have children) over straight ones (who generally do).
The opposite of this is why many people are advocating allowing same sex couples to participate in marriage. It is difficult to assemble exactly the parts of the marriage rights/responsibilities that you want in a legally binding way. Just getting the whole package with the label "marriage" is a big benefit.
Actually, this is done all the time.
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BondBook's Backers Pull the Plug, Citing Lack of Critical Mass ... The board of directors reached this decision because current market conditions in the ...
After fifty years of futile funding, itβs time to pull the plug. ...
I would send this business plan to my board of directors for approval with my .... We pull the plug when we find that the startup is not going as per the ...
rounds of financing while reserving the option to pull the plug if the experiments ...
If we're going to redefine marriage as two people who love each other and want a long-term commitment, then there is no logical reason n=2 and 2 alone.