Mawwiage, that bwessed awwangement

[melannen]

Poll #23823

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 100

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Which is best?

View Answers

Accidental marriage - "we didn't know it was legally valid!" subtype
34 (34.0%)

Accidental marriage - "one night in Vegas" subtype
17 (17.0%)

Arranged marriage
46 (46.0%)

Aliens make them get married
19 (19.0%)

Boston marriage
29 (29.0%)

Confirmed bachelorhood
19 (19.0%)

Confirmed spinsterhood
28 (28.0%)

Elopement
17 (17.0%)

Fake marriage
44 (44.0%)

Forgot they were married
22 (22.0%)

Group marriage
38 (38.0%)

Long, happy marriage
55 (55.0%)

Ludicrously long engagement
21 (21.0%)

Ludicrously short engagement
14 (14.0%)

Marriage of convenience
47 (47.0%)

Marriage of inconvenience
31 (31.0%)

Married in all but name
46 (46.0%)

Platonic marriage
37 (37.0%)

Secret marriage
26 (26.0%)

Shotgun marriage
4 (4.0%)

You left off the most important one!
3 (3.0%)

Comments

[pedanther]

This poll appears to be missing the option for crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentation of their women.

Also, I'd like clarification on the "confirmed bachelorhood" option: does it mean actual confirmed bachelorhood, or 'he thinks he's a confirmed bachelor at the beginning but he'll be hitched by the end'? I'm good with either, but I like it to be clear which I'm getting -- I read a series once where one of the supporting characters was written as solid asexual representation for about three-quarters of the running time, and then the author was suddenly "aha actually he's really gay and very deeply repressed but now he's going to fall in love and admit his true nature and live happily ever after" and I was very annoyed.

[melannen]

I think I would also file that under confirmed bachelorhood. :P

I would say confirmed bachelorhood includes everything from aroace (comics Jughead) to aro-but-not-ace (James Bond) to in a long-term platonic romance (Holmes?) to in a long term non-platonic romance that your culture doesn't allow you to publically affirm as such (Jeeves and Wooster, presumably.) But it would also take in, say, happily committed poly partner of a needs-to-appear-monogamously-married person? Or even some other forms of secret marriage. Or devoting yourself to a forever-lost love. I might even allow someone in a long term, committed, public, but casual-by-choice romance, not that those ever turn up in fiction. Or swearing and keeping an oath of celibacy. Basically: committed to living your live outside the customs of public marital (-ish) bonds.

If they actively and truthfully desire to end their public bachelorhood, or they throw it over by the end of the story, though, it clearly no longer counts!

(I mean it's certainly valid to change your romantic choices, whatever they are, but if you tag something confirmed bachelor and then they get openly married at the end I would judge you like if you tagged them gay and they ended up in a het romance.)

[lannamichaels]

I deeply appreciate that you ask which is the best and then give checkboxes :D

Anyway, I voted for a lot of them, but I have much love in my heart for actually accidental marriage where it's your own custom/tradition/culture. Like, it's one thing for us to go off to a different galaxy and then accidentally get married in that tradition, that's a cool thing! But I would not then return to Earth and consider myself actually married, unless we did that accident on purpose because for reasons we couldn't get married on Earth. But otherwise, it's a cool thing to have happened, but I would not consider it binding.

But for it to accidentally happen in your own way of getting married? Perfection.


And to Group Marriage, I submit the Line Marriage that I read in Heinlein, where a group marriage keeps adding members to it so it keeps going for ages, even after the original members of the marriage are dead.

[lea_hazel]

Line marriage is basically how I play the Sims. :D Instead of having a couple get married and have kids, and then one of the kids gets married and has grandkids etc. I just keep playing adults until they're close to death, then going "oh crap!" and hastily adopting, or marrying a much younger NPC, or both.

[melannen]

I did *think* about forcing a radio button on this one, but then *I* would have had to pick only one. :P

I think "we got married on an alien planet where it's only binding there" is leaning harder toward "aliens made us do it" than "didn't know it was legally binding". There is wiggle room there for "we thought it wasn't binding in our culture, but there was this treaty we didn't know about" and "then we ended up spending most of our time on planets where it was binding after all, oops". (SGA worked all of these out in detail...)

There is something special for the ones where there is nothing but dumbassery as an excuse, though! "We got married on set and it turned out it was real" or "we thought it was joke paperwork when we signed it!" or "turns out this magic ritual that we should have looked at more carefully had a side effect" or "what do you mean we both forgot to file for the annulment ten years ago".

I also like Line Marriage! Though it's hard to do effectively in most fandoms, just based on the spread of characters and relationships we tend to see in canon. (Except the dynastic ones. The Barrayaran Imperial House as a line marriage would be an astonishing and fascinating trainwreck.

And I guess in Star Wars you have the line that goes Yoda-Dooku-Qui-Gon-Obi-Wan-Anakin-Ahsoka, and then Anakin brings in Padme without proper consultation with the rest, and then Obi-Wan and Padme think the others are all dead so they take the kids and marry into the Organas, and then skip most of a generation and Obi-Wan and Yoda hand the legacy over to Luke and Leia, at which point I supposed it goes Luke-Han-Lando-Chewie-Leia-Poe-Finn-Rose-Rey-(Jannah?) (I am possibly super overinvested in that one tiny scene with Jannah and Lando.)

[lannamichaels]

There is wiggle room there for "we thought it wasn't binding in our culture, but there was this treaty we didn't know about" and "then we ended up spending most of our time on planets where it was binding after all, oops"

I am fully in favor of Oops Treaty and also Oops We Ended Up Spending All Our Time On Planet Of The Marriages. But then I want to bring in, like, "okay but we need to work out how divorces and multiple marriages work into this since I was ALREADY married to my ex-team mate from SG1 in a gould ceremony in a society that doesn't allow for divorce, but this new planet thinks you can only be married to one person at a time, someone please deal with this paperwork for me, I'm off to Planet Of The Chocolate River, if you need to fake my death to the tokra I understand."

The Barrayaran Imperial House as a line marriage would be an astonishing and fascinating trainwreck.

It is also, unfortunately, HORRIBLY EASY TO DO. *hides under the bed from the very idea* But, y'know, if I needed another way to do an Ezar/Aral crackfic, that's how to do it. (Since, unlike Heinlein, I refuse to believe that children of the marriage can marry back into it, it at least isn't Serg/Aral. It theoretically could be Piotr/Serg, which, nope.)

And I guess in Star Wars you have the line that goes Yoda-Dooku-Qui-Gon-Obi-Wan-Anakin-Ahsoka, and then Anakin brings in Padme without proper consultation with the rest, and then Obi-Wan and Padme think the others are all dead so they take the kids and marry into the Organas, and then skip most of a generation and Obi-Wan and Yoda hand the legacy over to Luke and Leia, at which point I supposed it goes Luke-Han-Lando-Chewie-Leia-Poe-Finn-Rose-Rey-(Jannah?) (I am possibly super overinvested in that one tiny scene with Jannah and Lando.)

You had me at Obi-Wan and Padme take the kids and go off to Alderaan for wedding bliss.

[melannen]

> It is also, unfortunately, HORRIBLY EASY TO DO.

IK,R? Do you let grandkids marry back in, or does Gregor get well out in this 'verse, and thus leave Aral stuck marrying Ivan? :D

I have been low-key shipping Yoda/Padme/Anakin/Obi-wan since I watched the first Clone Wars series, so I am all for that one now.

[lannamichaels]

Hmmm, IDK about grandchildren, maybe if no one's left alive who was in the marriage at that time? Aral is definitely okay because he's Dorca's great-grandson.

Of course now that I think about it, I guess I'd have to have Dorca's entire marriage die in the war, so Yuri gets to inherit and start over? ...The more I overcomplicate it, the less likely I am to ever write it, so that's excellent :D

[melannen]

Well presumably Yuri murdered any that were hanging around, that doesn't seem too hard to get around....

I mean at some point it stops working entirely, it only works around canon era because succession has been so messed up for so long.

[lannamichaels]

It's just, how is inheritance supposed to work? If the inheritance is just you keep marrying people, then there's no real concept of a crown prince ever, there's children of the marriage who go marry other people, they aren't heirs. Heirs are people who marry into the marriage. If the only way for children to inherit is to kill their parents's entire marriage, that sure is something. So Yuri wouldn't ever think he could inherit that, or maybe he's Yuri because he does go "well, murdering them all sounds worth it". But would it then be necessary for Yuri not to be married already? Because presumbly kids marry into other families and joins their inheritance line. I guess they could divorce or split off if someone wants to go inherit something else. But you'd eventually have a lot of people in marriages if they did have to marry all the kids into existing marriages for them to be able to inherit anything, so probably there's some gifts and stuff given to adult children? Marriages would accumulate a lot of stuff, so giving it to the kids is one way to do resource management.

This does explain Xav marrying a Betan, he's starting his own marriage stem. ;)

[melannen]

Yeah, Heinlein really didn't do the work on figuring out how kids fit into line marriage, and it's certainly going to drastically change things in any AU using it. OTOH, Heinlein wrote it into a society that started as a penal colony with a skewed sex ratio that meant kids weren't the main source of population growth, and then later as one of a large variety of marriage types.

I think you'd almost have to do that in any fic version unless you went wildly AU (though the Star Wars one still works surprisingly well.) Like, you could have Countships pass through line marriage (or make it a generally High Vor thing) but most other families just use genetic inheritance. That would leave the biokids of Counts in a weird position even for their society.

[lannamichaels]

Okay, bring it back to the Firsters and isolation and their fear of "mutants"... this can work with that. Because instead of heirs being whoever you're stuck with in the genetic relationship lottery, you get to pick your heir to marry them. So it's got the same pressure of population growth at the family level not necessarily being from births, it being from the people around you; if you want your family to increase, it's going to happen through marriage, not children. But you still want to have children, to marry others, and make your own marriage look good because you don't have muties either marrying in or being born. But your children are not necessarily that important for your own house.

Plus, what am I thinking, the Vor fight too many wars for me to be worried about the sizes of those marriages and the number of people who have to marry into existing power structures.

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean it would still drastically change a lot of the more recent stuff that depends on primogeniture mattering to Vor (Forget Dorca, Miles gets to have biosiblings! Miles' grandpa isn't nearly as upset about the mutie thing!) but I think if you did it that way you wouldn't have too change too much else *as* drastically.

Marriage alliances then become a lot more important, but since it's group marriage, differently important, since you don't have to pick just one other line to ally with. So your biokids are socially most important in terms of tying your line to other lines...

[lannamichaels]

Yep. And sibling relationships become even more of allying because instead of inheritance being a competition, inheritance can work for all of them if they all play it right.

But you know what? Maybe Barrayar's Barrayar. But it's Beta Colony that does line marriages, what with their economic tests to be able to have kids; marriages will accumulate resources as more people join, therefore, more ability to have kids. And then Cordelia shows up on Barrayar and wonders where the hell the rest of everyone's marriage is.

[melannen]

I mean, Beta is basically a Heinlein utopia anyway, so I'm sure they have them!

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Athos.

You've got those monastic Confirmed Bachelors and you've got social credit "we want kids"- Lois was writing and publishing that early enough to "Well, here's what was happening Off Page."

[polarissruler]

I think I voted for every option, but hey - each one has so many pluses and each one has so great fics that I can't decide. If I had to choose only one, I'd probably take the long, happy marriage. After all, who does not want to see their OTPs living happily ever after? (Although in my case that also includes lots of group marriages.)

[melannen]

It's weird how many people vote for that option but how few people actually write stories about it!

[polarissruler]

Which one exactly - the group or the happy marriage? If it's the first, well, I have trouble writing only two characters in a single scene, so a group is out of question. If you are talking about the happy marriage, I can only say that angst is far more interesting to read. (Although there's one pairing about which I write only fluffy, happy fics - but not a marriage fic yet.)

[melannen]

Oh, I meant the happy marriage one, but I would be delighted to see more group marriage too!

I think it is possible to write delightfully interesting stories about happy established relationships, there just aren't a lot of examples out there for people to model off of. (And of course they're a differently structured type of story. But there seems to be a market for them....)

[polarissruler]

Yeah, there's a market for them (at least for me - if I find a good fic with an established relationship, I binge-read it). Part of my problem is my literature teacher, who insisted "Every text must have conflict!" However much I try to write happy relationships, I feel obligated to shoehorn some conflict.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

You just have to contextualize conflict differently. I'm writing Phlint as happily married for 13 years (Commonwealth of Mass, thank you) and recently married mixed pair Bruce Banner/Steve Rogers.

Though, not on the list is "Vaudeville" complex polycule. Because Bruce Wayne and Bruce Banner, how often has it been unclear until context. Run with it.

[lea_hazel]

So many possibilities!

When left to my own devices, I avoid marriage for my characters because it's just not something that I feel a strong pull towards. Imagine my surprise when I fell headlong into a fandom that positively revolves around marriage. Now I have a selection of OCs covering maybe every third option on the poll.

I can't say that I ever tried "forgot they were married", but I'm tempted to.

[melannen]

"Forgot they were married" seems rare as a fic trope, except as a corollary to Accidental/AMTDI, but turns up sometimes in, like, TV comedies? Usually as an obstacle to the OTP rather than the actual OTP, though.

But I first encountered it in Arthurian romances, where it's pretty standard for a knight to go out questing, rescue the maiden fair, marry her, go out questing some more, go back to Arthur's court for awhile, do more questing, go back to court, and then his wife shows up at court going, "Umm, sir, I think you forgot about something!" and the knight smacks his forehead and goes "D'oh, right," and they live happily ever after.

I have no idea what was going on in high medieval Europe to make this a recurring trope (...I suspect a lot of family abandonment, which is less fun) but I enjoy it a lot in the stories.

[lea_hazel]

That's... fascinating, and now I'm sorely tempted to see if I can work it into a fic indirectly, as one of the Escapades that a certain OC's favorite fairytale protagonist gets up to.

[stellar_dust]

It also might have been a lot of random people tacking on new adventure stories for decades, and then one person was like "how dare you all forget about my fave from season 1" and generated plot to add her back in.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Several of these can be in the same story for the same marriage. So, ticky boxes.

You however didn't include the Ticky Boxes!!! option, which, I think a quack fic needs to be written.

[melannen]

I am hoping someone recs me a story that has them all at once! :D

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

From my imperfect recall, I'm hoping it's several couples/mupples they are playing over.

But yeah, bring on the combined program. =)

[annathecrow]

Niiiiice. I appreciate the multi-choice, I wouldn't be able to choose one. :D

Is there a difference between "confirmed bachelorhood" and "confirmed spinsterhood", and what would it be?