Types of marriages

In the West, the prevailing view toward marriage today is that it is based on a legal covenant recognizing emotional attachment between the partners and entered into voluntarily.

These societies include some bands of the Canadian Inuit,[citation needed] although the practice has declined sharply in the 20th century due to their conversion from tribal religion to Christianity by Moravian missionaries.

[citation needed] Today, many married people practice various forms of consensual nonmonogamy, including polyamory and swinging.

Some parts of India follow a custom in which the groom is required to marry with an auspicious plant called Tulsi before a second marriage to overcome inauspicious predictions about the health of the husband.

[10] In the state of Kerala, India, the Nambudiri Brahmin caste traditionally practiced henogamy, in which only the eldest son in each family was permitted to marry.

According to anthropologist Cia Hua, sexual liaisons among the Na took place in the form of "visits" initiated by either men or women, each of whom might have two or three partners each at any given time (and as many as two hundred throughout a lifetime).

In recent years the Chinese state has encouraged the Na to acculturate to the monogamous marriage norms of greater China.

Such programs have included land grants to monogamous Na families, conscription (in the 1970s, couples were rounded up in villages ten or twenty at a time and issued marriage licenses), legislation declaring frequent sexual partners married and outlawing "visits", and the withholding of food rations from children who could not identify their fathers.

Popular wisdom and standard social attitudes as transmitted in folk tales may show a matter-of-fact acceptance of universality of marriage in a variety of manifestations.

Folk-tales can feature marriage (labelled as such) between species,[12] including humans[13] - compare versions of the tale of the Frog Prince.