I've been working up to proposing to my girlfriend. I've been reading about the history of marriage in order to get confidence. One thing I think I love about it is that it's culturally universal. How many things can you say that about? Everyone in the world celebrates it.
Well sure we are here to procreate and that takes two and raising a family is a teamwork kind of thing
Right, yeah. But what also blew my mind when reading up about the cultural aspect of marriage is the fact that child marriage, polygamy, and forced marriages still exist in today's day and age. They're all cultural traditions that are celebrated and enforced.
That is disheartening, I have read that child marriage exists in the rural west of the US and just did not want to believe it
That's interesting. I was specifically referencing child marriage in India, for example, where according to their law the woman can be below 18, or the man below 21. Most of the women involved are from poor socio-economic backgrounds, too. The International Center for Research on Women-UNICEF publications have estimated India's child marriage rate to be 47% from small sample surveys of 1998, while the United Nations reports it to be 30% in 2005