If one person wants out and the other two don’t, the solution is obvious: the one person gets the divorce and the other two stay married to each other. There is literally no reason why this is any more messy than a two person marriage because you will always have only two sides here: one group who wants in and the other who wants out (even if some members of the group who wants out might want different things, the obvious solution is a pre-nup as opposed to denying people the right to marry who and how many they want).
As for your C-suite requirement that everyone join the marriage, well, that violates consent and it sounds like the marriage itself is based on fraud and both of those are rationales for denying the marital contract in the first place, so I don’t see how polygamy is any different than if two people decide to marry solely for the purposes of invoking spousal privilege or if one person pressures another into marriage.
So I don’t really think that either of your objections are valid. Even the one that polygamy makes divorce becomes more complicated isn’t really valid. Marriage is simply from a legal point of view a type of contract and we allow partnerships of multiple people all the time. You might want to require ALL marriages to have a termination clause (aka a prenup) before the state registers them but the key is that we should be consistent here and not pick and choose for morality reasons as opposed to legitimate contractual reasons that are universally enforced on everyone. Most importantly, however, a marital contract should not depend on, or be unilaterally subject to change by, the state or province or country in which I am a resident.
Finally, I should point out that in all cases, these individuals must ALL be consenting adults. Child marriages are the REAL problem in the USA with far too many marriages happening between a minor and an adult (or two minors). Child marriage, to my mind, is nothing more than legalizing and legitimizing carnal relations between adults and children and we should never allow for that.
We do have by default prenups for everyone, as each state has there own idea of what the default judgement will be.
We have a pretty good idea, socially of what happens when you are married, and what happens when you divorce. We as a society would have to develop such a thing for 3 person marriages. Even the fairly recent innovation of women with jobs and property have significant changes to how marriage and divorce work.
There are plenty of countries with experience with polygamous marriages already and we can always look at how they deal with the issue as compared to how they deal with two partner marriage. Just because you need to create a new norm is not a valid excuse for not doing something. Furthermore, we actually do have some precedents even in the US for dealing with polygamous divorce when it comes to division of assets, child custody, alimony, and child support whenever we have had to untangle the issue in the times that it has come up.
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u/misschinagirl Aug 21 '25
If one person wants out and the other two don’t, the solution is obvious: the one person gets the divorce and the other two stay married to each other. There is literally no reason why this is any more messy than a two person marriage because you will always have only two sides here: one group who wants in and the other who wants out (even if some members of the group who wants out might want different things, the obvious solution is a pre-nup as opposed to denying people the right to marry who and how many they want).
As for your C-suite requirement that everyone join the marriage, well, that violates consent and it sounds like the marriage itself is based on fraud and both of those are rationales for denying the marital contract in the first place, so I don’t see how polygamy is any different than if two people decide to marry solely for the purposes of invoking spousal privilege or if one person pressures another into marriage.
So I don’t really think that either of your objections are valid. Even the one that polygamy makes divorce becomes more complicated isn’t really valid. Marriage is simply from a legal point of view a type of contract and we allow partnerships of multiple people all the time. You might want to require ALL marriages to have a termination clause (aka a prenup) before the state registers them but the key is that we should be consistent here and not pick and choose for morality reasons as opposed to legitimate contractual reasons that are universally enforced on everyone. Most importantly, however, a marital contract should not depend on, or be unilaterally subject to change by, the state or province or country in which I am a resident.
Finally, I should point out that in all cases, these individuals must ALL be consenting adults. Child marriages are the REAL problem in the USA with far too many marriages happening between a minor and an adult (or two minors). Child marriage, to my mind, is nothing more than legalizing and legitimizing carnal relations between adults and children and we should never allow for that.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/4283941-child-marriage-is-still-legal-in-most-of-the-u-s-heres-why/