Among the many textual themes such as folk tales, film and television novels, and academic research, marriage is one of the most concerned issues. This is consistent with the connotation of the often said "love is the eternal topic of mankind". We yearn for love and create stories and myths for it. Of course, in modern society, marriage without love is denied and abandoned, but this in itself may also be a myth.
Starting a family is often a rational plan and plan, and spontaneous love may not be considered to maintain the stability of family marriage. After the birth of the love story, its function is also to maintain the family. In the first history of mankind, each society invented the basic form of the family, and developed corresponding strategies, ethics and rules from the selection of objects to the maintenance of the family.
Stills from The Big Time (1992).
Economist Chen Zhiwu's general work "The Logic of Civilization: The Game between Human Beings and Risk" explores various organizational forms of human beings based on risk and risk aversion, and marriage and family are naturally one of the most important. In traditional societies, families have increased people's ability to hedge and resist risks – especially in traditional societies that lack financial markets and other security systems – and have also restrained people's violent impulses, but this rational planning is often premised on the sacrifice of love.
So, who has the stronger ability to avoid or resist risks, a marriage based on rational planning (such as a blind date) based on risk avoidance and risk resistance, and a marriage based on free love? The following is an excerpt from the book The Logic of Civilization: The Game Between Humanity and Risk, with the permission of the publisher, with excerpts and deletions, and the title is from the excerpter. For comments, see the original book.
The Logic of Civilization: The Game Between Humans and Risk, by Chen Zhiwu, CITIC Publishing House, March 2022.
Romantic love in marriage is a myth
The birds in the trees are in pairs, and the green water and green mountains are smiling. Picking a flower casually, I wore a hair room with my mother-in-law. From now on, they will not be enslaved again, and both husband and wife will return home. You plough the fields and I weave cloth, and I carry water to water the garden. Although the cold kiln is broken, it can withstand the wind and rain, and the love of husband and wife is bitter and sweet. You and I are like mandarin ducks, flying in the human world with wings.
——Excerpt from Huang Mei's play "Tianxian Match"
Since Lu Hongfei launched the new version of the Huangmei opera "Tianxian Match" in 1953, this song "Husband and Wife Both Return Home" has been widely circulated and is also regarded as one of the most classic and romantic love songs. The myth behind the lyrics originated from Liu Xiang's "Biography of Filial Piety" in the Western Han Dynasty, which was later continuously adapted by various dynasties.
Stills from "New Heavenly Immortals" (1997).
But is this fictional story romantic love? For many people, as soon as they hear "marriage", they will unthinkingly associate it with "love" and "romance", and even draw an equal sign. Of course, this is an illusion, because human marriage and family from the very beginning is to solve the interpersonal intertemporal mutual assistance, reduce the risk of survival and construct the story, but compared with superstition, marriage and family, these two human inventions are not completely fictional, but have a real physiological and economic basis, and the practical effects of risk avoidance and mutual assistance brought about by them are also objective existence.
In "Spiritual Revolution: The Genealogy of Love in Modern China," Li Haiyan argues that the romantic term "love" did not appear until the early 20th century in the Chinese world. Pan Ling pointed out that "love" focuses on the romantic emotion of love, which is different from the Confucian tradition of "benevolence" and "benevolence"; in the history of Chinese evolution, "love" first appeared in the "Etymology" in 1908, but it was not until 1931 that the term "love" was first used. These facts show that love was not a prerequisite for marriage before. In China, like other societies, of course, there has been love and affection, but "love" in the romantic sense is not necessarily the norm in people's daily lives in the past, so there is no need to invent words like "love". The myth of the meeting of the cowherd and the weaver girl Tanabata is also very romantic, but this story has been a dream of tens of millions of people for more than two thousand years, which in itself shows that this is just a vision, which is unattainable in real life.
Stills from Troy (2004).
Stephanie Coontz, in A Brief History of Marriage: How Love Conquered Marriage, clearly tells us that love has never been a prerequisite for human marriage, but has only "conquered" marriage and become the core of marriage in modern times.
She said: Whether it is ancient Greece, ancient Rome, or medieval Europe, because marriage is used for political marriage or material utilitarianism, marriage and love have always been two different things, and are considered incompatible with each other; for European aristocrats, extramarital affairs are the realm of love, and it is fashionable to find confidants or promiscuous prostitutes; for middle- and lower-class people, this boundary is even clearer, and European farmers even made up poems to satirize love in marriage, believing that love in marriage is very absurd and strange. From the Acropolis Museum, I see that the marriage of the ancient Greeks looked like this:
Marriage was one of the most basic social institutions of ancient Athens, and its main purpose was to ensure the legal reproduction of offspring, so it did not presuppose the existence of an emotional relationship between the bride and groom. Girls usually marry men older than her at a younger age, and marriages are arranged by the elders of both parties. After marriage, the bride lived in her husband's house. Weddings are held at the bride's home, usually during the wedding month, which is the full moon day from mid-January to mid-February. The wedding lasts three days and ends one day after the official wedding ceremony. (Quoted from the Acropolis Museum exhibits)
In ancient India, falling in love with each other before marriage was seen as "disruptive" and "anti-social", and "loving" was not a valid reason for marriage. In a 1975 survey of Indian college students' views on marriage, 32 percent of college students were "adamantly opposed" to love as the basis of marriage, and only 18 percent were "strongly in favor" of love-based marriages. Kutz also said: In the Chinese tradition, only after the two parents negotiate the conditions like talking about business under the coordination of the matchmaker, the two parties will meet and meet at the wedding, of course, love cannot be the premise of marriage; after marriage, if the husband and wife are too affectionate and loving, it will be regarded as a threat to the interests of the family, and the elders (especially the mother-in-law) will come forward to block it; even if the husband loves his wife, as long as the wife does not fulfill her filial responsibility to her parents and other elders, the clan will also pressure the husband to divorce his wife and drive her back to her mother's house. Even in today's China, when individual mothers-in-law see that their sons are too fond of their daughters-in-law, they may not be able to live with their daughters-in-law, setting up obstacles and creating trouble everywhere.
Stills from "Tang Bohu Dian Qiu Xiang" (1993).
So why is marriage in various traditional societies so repulsive to "love"? We will see that the marriage customs and behavioral norms deduced by various societies are aimed at strengthening the reliability of intertemporal exchanges and enhancing human risk avoidance.
Human beings have long seen the physiological mutual attraction and needs between men and women, and on the basis of which they invent and develop marriage and family, and realize the division of labor, cooperation and risk sharing as sung in "Husband and Wife Return home". In reality, has the vision been effectively realized? Will love strengthen or hinder the hedging function of marriage?
Target: Strategies developed to hedge against risks
Regarding the hedging function of marriage," "although the cold kiln is broken, it can withstand the wind and rain", we can look at several specific examples. Since marriage unites the two parties in terms of income, the ideal state is that the future income of both men and women is 100% negatively correlated, that is, when the man is high, the woman is low, and the man is low, and if the income of the two parties is highly positively correlated, then the combination brought by the marriage has little hedging value for both parties. The lower (the less negative) the correlation coefficient between the parties' incomes, the better the hedging effect of the marriage. This is why it is better for couples not to be employed in the same industry, especially not in the same company, but in different industries that are highly complementary.
Of course, the hedging effect brought by marriage can also be reflected in the relatives, after the marriage, the two families will have inter-period interest exchanges, so if the future income of the two parents is negatively correlated, often this and the other, the marriage will enable both parties to better cope with the future unexpected situation.
Stills from Toilet - Ek Prem Katha 2017.
In a 1989 study by Mark Rosenzweich and Oded Stark, an interesting phenomenon was found: Parents in rural India often marry their daughters far away, especially rural families with low incomes and large output fluctuations, preferring to marry their daughters far away. In addition, they found that families with daughters marrying away from afar are less affected when natural disasters occur. What are the reasons behind these phenomena? Obviously not to increase productivity.
In low-income countries, it is generally believed that moving from rural to urban areas is intended to raise incomes. However, according to the 1981 Indian Census, the net migration from rural areas to cities accounted for only 2.2 per cent of the total population, while inter-rural migration accounted for 30 per cent of the total population. Among them, 80% of women who move permanently are moved away from their hometowns because of marriage, and marriage migration is the most important model of population mobility. A similar situation exists in Malaysia: 69 per cent of women who move are married, and only 13 per cent of men move away at the time of marriage.
On the other hand, the spatial nature of income risk is an important feature of agricultural production, meaning that disasters occur in one place and do not necessarily suffer the same disasters in another place at the same time. Rosenzweich and Stark calculated that for every 100 km increase in distance between two villages in rural India, the correlation between rainfall in the two places decreased by 0.073 (down 18%), income correlation by 0.083 (down 49%), and wage correlation by 0.038 (down 7%), and the impact of distance on the correlation between villages' economic conditions was obvious. This provides an opportunity for farmers to spread risk across regions. The question is, how can people diversify risk across regions in the presence of contractual risk, adverse selection, and moral hazard? Who makes this intertemporal exchange with whom? Traditional societies have no formal insurance companies or other financial institutions, so other ways must be sought.
The answer lies in marriage, which establishes intertemporal mutual aid relationships by marrying daughters to distant villages, especially those that would otherwise have kinship relationships. One of the advantages of this is that the establishment and implementation costs of intertemporal exchanges are minimized by using kinship relations, especially the cost of information; the second advantage is that diversification and mutual benefit can be achieved, and the daughter of the Zhang san family will marry into the Li si family, on the one hand, the daughter will send some property and income to the mother's family in the future, on the other hand, in the event of an accident, the Zhang family and the Li family will help each other to smooth out consumption fluctuations; the third advantage is that the farther the distance between the Zhang family and the Li family is located, the better the consumer insurance effect brought about by the marriage. Marriage can improve risk resilience.
Stills from His and Her Story (Ki & Ka 2016).
Rosenzweich and Stark collected data from three Indian villages between 1975 and 1984, where agricultural output risks were high, output fluctuations were pronounced over time, and income instability was a challenge farmers had been facing. In terms of family composition, only 8 of the 108 households have parents from other places (born outside the country), but 94% of married women are not born in their own villages, 49% of the families have more than 2 married women, and only 2 of them have daughters-in-law from the same village. This shows that marrying daughters outside the country and marrying daughters-in-law from abroad is a common tradition in village society. In the sample, the average distance between the in-laws' village and the place of birth of the daughter-in-law was 30 km, of which the longest distance was 47.7 km, and the spatial correlation of income was affected by distance by about 63.8%, indicating that inter-district marriage can help reduce risk.
Their measurements proved that for every additional daughter-in-law, the impact of income decline on food consumption was weakened by 15%; for every additional daughter who married out of wedlock, the probability of receiving the transfer of wealth from her in-laws increased by 75%, while for every additional daughter-in-law, the probability of accepting the transfer of wealth from her mother-in-law increased by 46%; in comparison, in inter-district marriage, the woman's family could get more hedging benefits than the man's family; for every 1 standard deviation (60 km) increase in the distance between the married daughter and the mother's village, the impact of income fluctuations on food consumption was reduced by 6%. Therefore, long-distance marriages have made a significant contribution to reducing the risk of consumption.
However, this role is concentrated in relatively poor families, and the children of rich families are much closer to marriage, and what parent does not want to see their children often? The two professors found that for every 1 standard deviation of household wealth, the impact of income risk on food consumption was reduced by 12%, and the resilience of excess wealth was twice as good as the insurance effect of marrying a daughter 60 kilometers away. Of course, rich daughters do not have to marry far away.
Stills from "Parched" (2015).
In addition, in villages with lower output risks, there is less need for risk aversion and the distance between married daughters is closer; and if there are multiple daughters, parents will generally marry them in different directions, which seems to be contrary to traditional intuition, because if they are married to the same village, it will reduce transaction costs and reduce the degree of information asymmetry, but it is not conducive to maximizing risk response. This further proves that before the advent of modern finance, the risk-off motive was highly weighted in the marriage arrangement, and love became an unattainable luxury. It is not surprising, then, that marriages are arranged by the elders of both parties and that the children have no freedom of love, for only in this way can the interests of the members of the family be ensured that the interests of the members of the family are not sacrificed. In the face of risk-off benefits, the status of love is of course very low.
We generally believe that "marrying rich" is the primary goal of our daughter's marriage, and high climbing is a shortcut to enhance social status. This is also why the marriage market is full of adverse choice problems, because rich parents will worry that other children are interested in their children, which stems from their motivation to "climb the rich" because of poverty; and even if a marriage with an unequal wealth background occurs, this suspicion will make the marriage relationship extremely unstable and unsustainable. After analyzing the situation of 382 marriages, Rosenzweich and Stark found that the family wealth of the two parties to the marriage was significantly positively correlated, which shows that the wealth "door to door" is high, and the "climbing wealth" tendency is not prominent.
This is very consistent with the mathematical model inference of the two professors: when risk aversion is the primary purpose of marriage beyond having children, it is best for both families to be equally matched in basic endowments such as wealth (door to door), otherwise in the future, when the rich party has an income challenge (disaster or other risk event), the poor relatives may not be able to help and cannot cash in the intertemporal exchange. Moreover, the poor side may experience frequent consumption crises and often need the help of relatives, making the exchange seriously unequal and unsustainable. Rural marriage in India is "right at home" in terms of wealth endowment, and in terms of income risk, it reduces the correlation (maximizing the difference in each other's risk characteristics) by pulling apart the physical distance between the two families, which confirms that risk aversion is indeed an important driving force for marriage, and it is also the actual effect.
The "door-to-door" strategy is also not sustainable
Is China different from India? In the Chinese tradition of marriage, "door-to-door pairs" are undoubtedly important, and the need to avoid risks is often the driving force behind marriage (as sung in "Husband and Wife Return Home"). With the development of modern transportation and economy, especially since the reform and opening up, two different trends have emerged.
Stills from the first part (2003) of "Ma Dashuai".
First, Johor Bahru studied the marriage circle in Kang village, and analyzed the changes in rural Shandong since the 20th century. According to the kangcun household registration data and the survey of Johor Bahru, compared with before the reform and opening up, the marriage distance in Kangcun has been sharply shortened, the intermarriage area has also been rapidly rolled in, the number of intermarriage villages has decreased, and there is a greater asymmetry in the region between marriage and marriage. The main reason is that after the economic development, the frequency of risks has declined, people's income levels and risk response have risen, and the need to achieve risk avoidance by inter-regional marriage has declined, so the radius of intermarriage circles has shrunk. This also confirms the conclusion based on Indian data: when income levels are low and other hedging tools are lacking, people will avoid income risk by marrying daughters away; in turn, the demand for such long-distance marriage will gradually decrease, allowing marriage to be liberated.
Stills from Sweet Honey (1996).
Secondly, there is also the opposite trend, that is, after the reform and opening up, the wealth gap between regions has widened, so long-distance inter-regional marriage can bring "climbing wealth" and urban hukou value. For example, 71% of female marriage immigrants (marry-in) in Jiangsu Province are from Provinces such as Sichuan (29%), Guizhou (16%), Anhui (13%) and Yunnan (13%), and these marriages are generally not "door-to-door" matching marriages. It can be seen that normal marriages for the purpose of hedging tend to be "door-to-door", while other marriages are not necessarily.
Since the hedging function of marriage is already significant, why will it change in the future? Of course, on the one hand, this arrangement is premised on sacrificing the free love rights of young people, so that marriage is far away from love.
On the other hand, Rosenzweihi's 1993 follow-up study, based on data from the Indian Rural Census, found that once the insurance effects of inter-district marriages were too good, it would have two negative effects: inhibiting the formal lending market and the development of new technologies. The former is easy to understand, because if the villagers are busy using marriage and family networks to solve intertemporal risk exchanges, and these are more or less useful, they have no time to consider or even believe in the hedging effects of formal finance. The latter is the channel of influence: technological progress enhances population mobility, farmers are no longer bound to the place of birth, which weakens the spatial insurance effect brought about by inter-district marriage, while technological progress has increased family wealth, directly reducing the impact of income risk on consumption and reducing dependence on the function of marriage insurance.
Rosenzweich found that the more dependent farmers are on traditional hedging methods such as marriage, the stronger their rejection of advanced technologies, because they fear that the widespread adoption of new technologies will reduce the reliability of traditional hedging methods. If other farmers reduce the demand for inter-district marriage due to new technologies, the choice space of farmers themselves in the marriage market will also shrink. As a result, they chose to reject new technologies, stick to old cultures, and even Indians and their descendants who immigrated to the United States insisted on arranged marriages.
Risk avoidance marriage or love marriage, who is more stable?
In terms of practical effects, arranged marriages (risk-off marriages) have different outcomes from free-love marriages. If parents help their children arrange objects, they will give priority to their own old-age needs (risk avoidance needs) and the interests of other clans; and if their children choose their own spouses, they will care about whether they like and love each other.
In 1991, three scholars conducted a systematic questionnaire survey of 6334 couples in 7 provinces in China, and found that compared with men who married in free love, marrying wives arranged by their parents brought the following differences: wives were more obedient, had more children, had a higher probability of having boys, and were more in agreement with their husbands' filial parental responsibilities, but at the cost of more disharmonious marriages, low wives' incomes, or not going out to work.
In free love marriage, the husband and wife have a high degree of harmony and generally better feelings. This can be supported by the story of Zhang Zuolin's children, who was a famous general during the Beiyang government and had 6 wives and concubines and 14 children, 6 of whom were daughters. Zhang Zuolin stipulated that the marriage of his children should be arranged by him, and in this way, the marriage of the eldest five daughters was arranged by him, and each became a tool for him to expand his political influence, resulting in the tragedy of the second daughter and the fourth daughter, and because the youngest sixth daughter was only 4 years old when Zhang Zuolin died in 1928, she did not have time to be arranged by her father, and later she was able to marry herself, and she became the most perfect one among the 6 sisters.
Zhang Zuolin's six daughters.
These findings explain why arranged marriages were prevalent in societies in ancient times, and arranged marriages by elders ensured that the marriages of later generations gave priority to the interests of elders and other relatives, and prevented future generations from wasting a marriage on love that was not necessarily useful for the interests of relatives.
So, compared with utilitarian marriage, is love beneficial to strengthen the insurance effect of marriage? As mentioned earlier, as far as risk aversion is concerned, the best match is that the future income of both parties to the marriage is completely negatively correlated, one party is high and the other is low, and vice versa, the so-called "opposite sex attraction". But as far as love is concerned, the more similar the birth and growth backgrounds of the two parties, the more like-minded they may be in favor of cultural and value-like-mindedness, the so-called "clustering of things".
Gregory Hess, in his theoretical model, studied the interaction between risk aversion and love on marriage, and concluded that if the uncertainty of the future income of both men and women is low and the need for hedging is small, then love will dominate the marriage decision, and whether it can be sustained after marriage depends on whether their love can be long-lasting; however, if one party's future income risk is high and the risk of hedging is large, then whether the love itself can last or is short-lived, the hedging need will prevail and dominate the future of marriage That is, even if the parties were originally married in love, as long as the income fluctuations of the two parties were highly positively correlated (for example, working in the same company or the same industry), the marriage would be difficult to maintain because of the lack of hedging value. Only in the context of wealth is already a lot of money and future income is calm, love can dominate marriage.
Hess also analyzed the panel data of 1200 pairs of marriages in the United States from 1978 to 1994, and found that in practice, American love is generally short-lived, and marriages established only by love are difficult to last, so the decisive factor for the length of marriage fate lies in whether the combination of the two brings hedging value: the higher the correlation between the income fluctuations of the two parties (or the greater the difference in the income volatility level between the two parties), the lower the hedge value of the marriage, and the sooner the two will divorce. This perfectly validates what the Western proverb calls "a friend in need is a friend indeed" that marriages with mutual hedging needs last.
However, Hess also found that the difference in the income level of the two parties itself did not affect the durability of the marriage. In other words, the large income gap between husband and wife will not cause divorce, and whether the income of the two is complementary is the key. Ordinary people need to use marriage to achieve mutual protection and mutual assistance because of their high income risk, and they cannot expect to pursue love marriage, but they can grow old.
Stills from Marriage Story 2019.
As early as 1981, Kotlikoff and his collaborators introduced a theory of marriage: precisely because everyone faces future risks (including unemployment), once hit, they will experience both material and emotional shocks, so in times of suffering, they need both material and spiritual help. However, if you go directly to the market to buy emotional insurance and income insurance, you will face two challenges.
First of all, such as "emotional insurance" such as "products", so far there is no convenient and diversified trading market, this market to be developed, because "emotion" is difficult to standardize or quantify, so it is not easy to trade, delivery; secondly, as far as income insurance is concerned, although there are annuity insurance products on the market to choose from, but due to serious adverse selection and moral hazard problems, these insurance markets can not be fully developed, or the pricing is too high, or not personalized enough. In contrast, love is a process of full contact, understanding, and even living together for a few years before marriage, which makes each other full of information and confidence when they get married, and there are not many problems of adverse selection and moral hazard, so mutual insurance in the material and emotional dimensions is better.
In their theory, the length and depth of the free love process is important, helping to reduce information asymmetry and strengthen trust, and love is a means of reducing adverse choices and moral hazard. In fact, according to the authors' models, marriage often plays a more reliable insurance role than the market.
The Hedging Function of Marriage: A Modern Case
Of course, we can also look for some scenarios in practice, in which the insurance value of marriage is greatly affected by certain changes, and then we examine whether people's marriage decisions before and after this change are significantly affected, so as to reflect the impact of insurance value on marriage decisions.
Stills from Scenery ur ett äktenskap 1973.
Sweden's 1989 "Insurance for the Undead" reform bill provides such a scenario. Before the reform, the Swedish government provided life insurance to widowed individuals. Although specific payment schemes are cumbersome, the government will generally guarantee that the surviving party will receive cash for life at least half of the previous annual household income; however, the reformed New Deal requires that for couples who marry on or after 1 January 1989, in the event of widowhood, the government will only pay a one-time guarantee payment, which is 40% of the annual income of widowhood. That is, the 1989 reform significantly reduced the insurance value of marriage.
This was followed by a dramatic change in local marriage decisions: At the end of 1988, the last quarter before the reforms came into effect, the number of couples registering for marriage surged more than 17 times as much as before. For long time, young people at the time generally married early because of the reforms: but at the beginning of 1989, the marriage rate was at a low for a long time, and the number of new marriages was only about half of what it had been before. Until the legalization of same-sex marriage in 1995, the marriage rate did not return to its previous level. In addition, the "marriage wave" was indeed sloppy: the proportion of marriages concluded in the fourth quarter of 1988 and divorces since then was significantly higher than that of earlier ones. Within 5 years, the divorce rate in this part of the marriage was about 2.5% higher than in other periods; within 10 years, the divorce rate was 5%.
Number of newly married couples in Sweden each quarter before and after the reform. The long dotted line is the effective date of the new policy (January 1, 1989), and "1989Q4" indicates the fourth quarter of 1989 (other similarities).
Obviously, insurance benefits have led many Young Swedish youth to lower their requirements for partner fit, proving that the weight of benefits in marriage decision-making is not light. Sweden is one of the most developed countries, with abundant national welfare and a well-established insurance industry. If even Young Swedish people care so much about the insurance value of marriage, other countries should care even more.
This reform has also changed the criteria for young people to choose a mate. The number of years of schooling may be used as a measure of skill. After the reform, then, the probability of high-skilled men marrying low-skilled women has dropped sharply; in other words, in the marriage market, both men and women are more likely to match objects of equal skill level after the reform. The reason is that before, because the state assumed a considerable part of the insurance function, it was not necessary to consider the hedging effect when looking for a partner, and it was possible to focus on finding tacit understanding in other dimensions; however, with the weakening of the state insurance function, people had to rely on marriage again to achieve economic security, and the spouse was expected to fill some economic gaps. As a result, the mutual attraction between men and women with equal skills increases, and the probability of mutual marriage increases. The experience of the Swedish reforms profoundly explains the weight of risk protection in marriage decision-making, and also provides a modern case for understanding the origins of human marriage.
Stills from Kvinnodröm (1955).
Marriage: A human-chosen hedge
Solving the problem of intertemporal mutual aid based on blood relatives is well understood, because blood relatives are biological and unchanging for life. However, the marriage relationship is acquired, based on the inter-period commitment of the Sea Oath Mountain Alliance, and it is also a fictional "story" of human beings, and in the evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, the "story" of marriage appeared very late. If so, why are people willing to pin so many hedging needs and intertemporal cooperation on this "story" and not trust other intertemporal commitments? After all, even today, in the existence of various peoples, blood relatives and in-laws are still the two most important dimensions of social relations. Of course, hormones, sexual relations, and the birth of children are the places where marriage between a man and a woman differs from other contractual relationships, and these physiological factors may be enough to make the marriage commitment last long.
Stills from Sweet Honey (1996).
In fact, Homo sapiens invented marriage very late, and the specific form and connotation went through many stages of change. However, from its origins to its later evolution, marriage has never been the crystallization of love, but to better realize the division of labor between men and women in labor, in order to provide the necessary basis of trust for the exchange of human risks. This is the value of the marriage network, and it is also the logic behind the tradition of arranged marriages in various societies.
In societies that lack financial markets and other safeguard systems, marriage is not just a matter for the individuals involved, but is also closely related to the interests of many others. From China to India, Africa, Europe and other places, people attach a number of risk-avoidance needs to marriage, so that marriage bears unlimited weight, so that in modern America, there are more than 1,000 rights obtained by marriage. For such a burdensome interpersonal relationship, of course, human beings will not be taken lightly, but have introduced various rituals, various superstitions, and various carriers, such as "three from four virtues", "seven out of three out", chastity ethics, and even chastity arches, etc., the purpose of which is to strengthen the reliability of marriage, reduce the risk of default (divorce), and let people rest assured about the future.
It is precisely because traditional marriage is not the crystallization of love from the beginning, so as long as the need for intertemporal interest exchange is still there, people cannot say "we have no feelings, so divorced", so the divorce rate in the past was extremely low. The evolution of marriage has increased human risk response, while also domesticating men's violent impulses (wives and fathers have helped temper men's aggressive impulses), both channels have led to a decline in social violence. Of course, marriage is only a means of starting a family, but the purpose is to establish a family and then form a clan. That's another topic.
Note: The cover image is from the stills of "The Tale of Wulin" (2006).
Original text/ Chen Zhiwu
Excerpts/Rodong
Introduction part proofreading /Li Ming