Right, we should not ignore everyone else outside of that specific marriage.By the way why limit to more than one wife? Does the equation change if it's more than one husband?
Also we seem to be ignoring everyone else outside of the plural marriage?
Patrilocality and patrilineality support marriages with many wives per husband. Women in many undeveloped rural communities do most of the work and are a valued resource. Many wives also produce many children and these add to the labour force for the family enterprise.
Yesterday Lucky-R wrote:
This would be true for patrilineal and patrilocal arrangements but for the traditions instilled into boys and girls on the occasions of their maturity. The male and female roles are traditionally demarcated and supported by everybody. When urbanised independent persons do married polyamory either legalised or informal the participants are guided or not as cases may be by their own consciences. The use of public wedding ceremonies is that vows are made in public and theoretically the people at the wedding will try to make the couple hold to these vows. If weddings were still taken seriously they would be good not only for a man and wife getting married but also for people who wed multiple partners. The contract is very important.And I am sure it will work great... in years 1-4, how about year 20? Not that binary marriages are immune to problems (far from it), my point is that whatever the risk of trouble is, the impact of trouble is multiplied when you add additional personalities, baggage and quirks into the mix.
"As usual... it depends."
I say "if weddings were taken seriously". Unfortunately this is often not the case and discontent and divorce is all too common.