Should Having Multiple Spouses Be an Option?

"Stormkeep;c-18054872" wrote:

"PenguinFoop;c-18054853" wrote:
Personally, I think that more than one spouse makes the point of having a spouse at all pointless. After all, the whole point of marriage is to forsake all others and commit ONLY to one other person.

That's not actually the "whole point" of marriage. There's far more to the concept of marriage, historically, then the notion of "commitment"...which ultimately is just about the uh..physical...aspects of the relationship.
Marriage also carries with it social and economic reasons, the division/sharing of labors, including child rearing, and much, much more. Most of these other aspects are actually enhanced with polygamous relationships.

That's the argument people like to make for polygamy, but the reality is that it tends to be accompanied by child abuse, coercive relationships, domestic violence, and a whole host of other extremely bad things. There are solid, well-researched reasons it's illegal in the US and condemned by the UN.

Yes, I watched Big Love. No, this is not the source of my information. I have extensive professional knowledge about this; polygamy in real life is almost always a terrible deal for the women and children involved, no matter how some people want to romanticize it for their own purposes.

Now, does that mean it should or should not be in a sandbox game? It depends. Yes, we have things like kleptomania in the game that we would not support IRL, and that's fine. But at the other end of the spectrum, we have things that we will NEVER have in the game, because they are so taboo. So taboo, in fact, that even a certain modmaker refuses to allow even any mention of them. I won't name them here, because I'm sure it's against forum rules, but I'm sure we could all come up with a few examples of things we will never see in the game and never should. So, the only question then is where does polygamy fall on this spectrum: is it more on the kleptomania end, or is it more on the Unnamed Evil things end of the spectrum. For me, it's on the Unnamed Evil end of the spectrum, because in my professional experience polygamy is inextricably linked to and entwined with some of those same evil things. I am almost always a proponent of the view that this is a sandbox, more options are good, and we should be able to play how we want. But there are some things, like child abuse, that we should never see in the game. For me, personally, this is like that.

Polyamory is a whole different story, I would have no issues with that being added as an option to the game, because that has to do with the personal relationship arrangements of consenting adults.

Actually, small caveat: if they wanted to add only polyandry (multiple husbands) and not polygyny (multiple wives), I would be fine with that, because historically polyandry has been FAR less abusive (and obviously more rare) than polygyny. But, you know, that's probably getting into the weeds too much...