I am not seeing much talk about the actual motivations behind the original invention of marriage so I will throw in my $0.02
For almost all of human existence, human beings used to be hunter gathers living is small tribes. During this time we, like every other species on the planet, had no concept of property.
The hunter gatherer existence was a nomadic existence so anything you owned you would need to carry around with you anyway which would slow you down and decrease your chances of survival and not increase it.
Things like food, basic tools and child rearing responsibilities were shared in the tribe.
This is called the Sex 1.0 period of human existence.
Approximately 8,000 BC, we started to go through the agricultural revolution and, as a by-product of this, we for the first time invented the concept of property.
The first property was land, specifically fertile land that was good for farming.
Once the concept of property was invented it became very important for men to start to treat women as sexual property.
Why? Well, regardless of where you were born in the world, your ethnicity, language or cultural history one thing never changes. When a new born arrives, it comes out of the body of a woman.
Due to the self-evident nature of child birth, women could have sex with any number of men without ever having to worry that the child is not their own. It came out of their body; it's obvious it's their child even though they may or may not have known who the father was.
Men didn't have that luxury which meant that men experienced what I call paternity concern - the worry that they are raising a child that might not be theirs and they might be passing their own property down somebody else's blood line and best ensuring the survival of somebody else's children and not their own.
In a Sex 1.0 era this would not have been an issue with nobody having any concept of property to pass down and all the children being raised collectively by the tribe anyway.
In this new era - the Sex 2.0 era - however where property became a key tool for the chances of survival of both yourself and your children, establishing lines of hereditary became of crucial importance for men.
So a new system was required - a system of control needed to be invented to deal with this problem and to calm male paternity concern; a system which allowed men to claim women as their sexual property.
This system was called marriage.
So this is how the shift to Sex 2.0 came about. Historically the Sex 2.0 era is roughly 8,000BC up to and including present day.
For the past 50 years or so we have been living in the post Sex 2.0 era in which these original fears and reasons for the inventions of marriage have been rendered obsolete by paternity testing technology and women having their own careers.
However, that is the subject of a separate discussion. You can always click in the links to my signature if you want to know more about that because I wrote about that elsewhere.
As for how to reconcile marriage and kids? For me I would have an unfenced sexual relationship with the mother and sign and legal contract that lays out financial and parental responsibilities for both of us * AND NOTHING ELSE * as a replacement for the marriage contract.
Such a contract should always assume joint responsibility.
Marriage was historically designed as a system for men to best ensure paternity of the kids they were raising and for women to handcuff a provider male to her.
It's never successfully worked as a system to provide anything else other than that.
It's day is done.
For almost all of human existence, human beings used to be hunter gathers living is small tribes. During this time we, like every other species on the planet, had no concept of property.
The hunter gatherer existence was a nomadic existence so anything you owned you would need to carry around with you anyway which would slow you down and decrease your chances of survival and not increase it.
Things like food, basic tools and child rearing responsibilities were shared in the tribe.
This is called the Sex 1.0 period of human existence.
Approximately 8,000 BC, we started to go through the agricultural revolution and, as a by-product of this, we for the first time invented the concept of property.
The first property was land, specifically fertile land that was good for farming.
Once the concept of property was invented it became very important for men to start to treat women as sexual property.
Why? Well, regardless of where you were born in the world, your ethnicity, language or cultural history one thing never changes. When a new born arrives, it comes out of the body of a woman.
Due to the self-evident nature of child birth, women could have sex with any number of men without ever having to worry that the child is not their own. It came out of their body; it's obvious it's their child even though they may or may not have known who the father was.
Men didn't have that luxury which meant that men experienced what I call paternity concern - the worry that they are raising a child that might not be theirs and they might be passing their own property down somebody else's blood line and best ensuring the survival of somebody else's children and not their own.
In a Sex 1.0 era this would not have been an issue with nobody having any concept of property to pass down and all the children being raised collectively by the tribe anyway.
In this new era - the Sex 2.0 era - however where property became a key tool for the chances of survival of both yourself and your children, establishing lines of hereditary became of crucial importance for men.
So a new system was required - a system of control needed to be invented to deal with this problem and to calm male paternity concern; a system which allowed men to claim women as their sexual property.
This system was called marriage.
So this is how the shift to Sex 2.0 came about. Historically the Sex 2.0 era is roughly 8,000BC up to and including present day.
For the past 50 years or so we have been living in the post Sex 2.0 era in which these original fears and reasons for the inventions of marriage have been rendered obsolete by paternity testing technology and women having their own careers.
However, that is the subject of a separate discussion. You can always click in the links to my signature if you want to know more about that because I wrote about that elsewhere.
As for how to reconcile marriage and kids? For me I would have an unfenced sexual relationship with the mother and sign and legal contract that lays out financial and parental responsibilities for both of us * AND NOTHING ELSE * as a replacement for the marriage contract.
Such a contract should always assume joint responsibility.
Marriage was historically designed as a system for men to best ensure paternity of the kids they were raising and for women to handcuff a provider male to her.
It's never successfully worked as a system to provide anything else other than that.
It's day is done.