How marriage has become a cultural universal?

Question

how marriage has become a cultural universal?

Answer 1

Marriage has been around for thousands of years and even existed among Hunter/gathering peoples. However, the modern understanding of what it means to be married (I.e. love, monogamy, partnership) are mostly constructs of our Christian past. Marriage was and in some cases still is used as a way to forge relationships/alliances between two groups. For example, one tribe will send their daughter to marry another tribes son, because of that these two tribes now have a connection and a vested interest in eachothers well being because their families/grandchildren are living in different villages. Marriage however had nothing to do with love, or even s*x in a lot of cases, which is why in some tribes they would marry people off at the age of 8, because its not about s*x or love, its about alliances/relationships. Because two tribes working together instead of against eachother often create a better living standard marriage became a very popular cultural habbit.

Answer 2

The pressure of civilization brought it on. The above answer referring to hunter-gatherer societies is correct and, as people settled down into agrarian social structures, monogamy was the logical solution to the disordering stress and friction of polygamy.

Answer 3

Monogamy is by no means culturally universal, and to our knowledge never has been.

"Marriage" on the other hand can mean many very different things - and hence we have the  the problem that cultural anthropology faces most of the time.  Marriage as a cultural category can not be formally or scientifically defined in such a way that would make it amenable to questions about its actual distribution around the world.  

Furthermore, since it is not recognized as a practice that other animals participate in (because of our desire to think of ourselves as 'special'), we can't even begin talking about its evolutionary and biological bases.

Answer 4

Marriage only became popular with the onset of cities/civilization, within the past 10,000 years!

Before that, Hunter/Gatherer tribes lived more like wolves, with an Alpha male & female, functioning as the primary breeders!

Answer 5

Who says it has?