>>1843867I was talking about marriage in general. In the specifically Catholic case I agree with that portrayal of the Church's perspective. These days, with little potential for property ownership and no particular individual responsibility to reproduce the species (on average, other people take care of that), there isn't much point.
But, if there is an arc over history in the form of a law of human social development, the study of marriage as we don't know it today might help reveal it.
>>1843847It really depends on the expectations that you have set for the relationship. Under present material conditions in the industrialized countries, there isn't any particular reason for a relationship with a single breadwinner role to necessarily seat a man in that role. And women do have more power in interpersonal relationships, in part because girls, especially but not only of the upper and middle strata, are being raised to assume leadership roles, but also in part because they can participate in the bulk of possible economic activities on approximately equal terms to men, which makes the ideal genders less dependent on one another, and relationships less binding and "serious". Some people find that tragic; others do a materialism and make history with what they got. The increasing intensity of labor power exploitation may find its social correlate in the intensity of relationships, which is something opinion writers have observed and I have seen in my travels, and that seems likely to carry over into lower phase
anarchists may skip this step and possibly, with amendments, through into the higher phase.
For now, as the mode of personality shifts "from status to contract", consent culture provides one set of tools by which individuals can negotiate and renegotiate the nature and conditions of their own relations just as they have a mind; importantly, through the act of deliberate negotiation, people also debug their own desires and locate self-contradictions so they can be handled productively. The better the real sexual vanguard (not scenesters) design these relations, live them, and propagate them, the less likely that tragic flaws will make personal relationship forms and mores more noxious than is necessary.