Love & Marriage

[melannen]

One thing I love in a good SF story is ways of doing love, marriage, and romance that don't buy in to our society's idea of love+romance+sex+monogamy all on one single person as the only way to do it.

I have a small collection of worlds that have come up with better ways, and I have a great deal of fun trying to fit the 'shipping debates from various fandoms into these other ways of looking at love. I especially love the way that many of them explicitly acknowledge the value of non-sexual, sometimes non-romantic, relationships that are of equal importance with the sexual ones.

Since I've been playing with Dresden files crossover fic in a couple of these fandoms lately, I thought it might be time to introduce you all to some of my favorites! Plus I really want people to do more AUs using these ideas, so I am selfishly posting this in order to increase the probability (even if only slightly.) So here are my five favorite alternate marriage/romance systems as displayed in SF, in order of increasing complexity.

GROUP MARRIAGE
Original Source: Many, but you should all read The Tale of the Five because Diane Duane writes it more joyously than anyone. And without the creepy bits that Heinlein puts in.
Fanworks: Many! Not many TotF fanworks though. Which is a travesty.
Someone else's explanation: Group Marriage @ wikipedia

Explanation: Presumably all of my readers have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of polyamory and it not being horrible, right? Group marriage is a subset of polyamory (though there's an argument to be made that actually modern Western polyamory was born out of group marriage as portrayed by Heinlein.) Group marriage involves a group of more than two people (usually of at least two genders) formalizing a relationship in which they share, usually, some form of household and parenting duties, commit to the relationships within the marriage as their most important relationships, and generally agree to some level of sexual or emotional fidelity to the marriage partners as well.

Most of the other relationships described below are really subsets of group marriage, and a lot of SF includes versions of it, but the 'simple' form (not really simple at all!) that is just a group of people deciding they all love each other enough to attempt perfect union is always going to be my favorite. Especially when it's built into a world where that is considered completely natural and normalized.

Tale of the Five (Also sometimes called the Middle Kingdoms series) by Diane Duane is the series that does it best. It's a fairly standard High Fantasy trilogy about dragons and lost swords and magic and kingship and evil sorcerers, but it's set in a world where bisexuality and polyamory are the norm - all relationships are open unless otherwise stated, and marriages can have as many people as you want. And she works this into the cloth of the world seamlessly, with all the ramifications worked out. When I'm writing an everybody's-bi-everybody's-poly story, I think of it as a Middle Kingdoms AU.

The most important thing with writing a group marriage and making it interesting is to acknowledge that every smaller combination of people within the group has their own relationship within the larger marriage, and those relationships are all different, with their own dynamics, and all worth their own exploration. You get a good group together, marry them, and then start exploring all the inner 'ships, and you can keep exploring forever. (One marriage in the Middle Kingdoms has seven people in it, which makes 128 total relationships. Someday I am going to write a drabble series that explores them all.)

Group marriage is the obvious solution to shipping wars in about 90% of fandoms.


LINE MARRIAGE
Original Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Fanworks:Not as much as there should be of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress fanfic.
Someone else's explanation: Line Marriage @ the Heinlein concordance

My Explanation: Heinlein played around a lot with polyamory, but I think line marriage is my very favorite of all of his ideas about sex, if only because it's so functional.

Basically, a line marriage is a poly marriage where every few years, as the older members of the marriage die, they marry in young people to replace them. So the marriage always has (usually it seems like a dozen or so) members ranging in age from teenagers to elderly. As a result, the marriage itself never dies. Children of a line marriage marry into other lines, and don't inherit from their parents, all the assets remaining with the marriage. In a lot of ways, a line marriage is like a corporation, only less soulless and with more sex.

Anyone in a line marriage is free to have sex with anyone else in the line, but sex and romantic love are not really the important part. And there are often complicated sub-relationships within the line, with some pairings and participants far more sexual than others, and also things going on around seniority, with lots of room for cross-generational goodness. The oldest members lead the family, but it requires a unanimous vote to add a new member.

I love line marriage; I rather suspect it's the best idea Heinlein ever had about sex. Line marriage is a fun way to do a family-of-choice that's a bit more structured and might outlive its founders, especially if you like adding a bit of incestuous overtones and/or age difference for spice. Crane Poole & Schmidt is totally a line marriage. So is SG1. So is the Batfamily. (In fact, a better example of a line marriage than the Batfamily I cannot imagine. Except for the way the writers are uncomfortable with line marriage and keep trying to make the younger members into blood relations: sure.)

SEDORETU
Original Source: Short stories in A Fisherman of the Inland Sea and The Birthday of the World by Ursula K. Le guin (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Unchosen Love and Mountain Ways)
Fanworks: An Ever-Fixed Mark, the amazing Merlin AU of amazing.
Someone else's explanation: The Introduction to 'Mountain Ways'.

Explanation: On the planet O, there are Men and Women. There are also Morning people and Evening people. Your identity as Morning or Evening -- your moiety -- is just as inborn and immutable, and at least as important, as your gender. You are of the same moiety as your mother, and the only tabooed sexual relationships on O are between people of the same moiety.

A marriage on O has four participants: a Morning man, a Morning woman, an Evening man, and an Evening woman. The Morning Woman and the Evening man sleep together, and their children are Morning; the Evening Woman and the Morning man sleep together, and their children are Evening. The two women also sleep together, as do the two men. The Morning pair don't sleep together, nor do the Evening pair, but they are expected to have close nonsexual relationships.

This is complicated enough, especially since nobody is getting married until there is a complete foursome together, but Le Guin managed to queer it up even in canon: apparently, while it is not common, it is not entirely unknown for a sedoretu to have three men or three women in it, or for people to be genderqueer within the sedoretu. As long as the morning/evening ratios are right, and nobody's sleeping with anybody from their own moiety, the neighbors are generally willing to look the other way; moiety is more important than gender.

Sedoretu are amazing fun, and there need to be for fandom AUs that use them: I only know of the one that's linked above, in BBC Merlin fandom. But there are so many other fandoms that have central foursomes for whom a sedoretu would be perfect! To start with I really want to see some Stargate teams sent to O and assumed to be sedoretu. But there are plenty more possibilities. To bring up Harry Potter again: Harry and Hermione are both Evening people, obviously, and Ron and Ginny are both Morning since Molly obvs. is, so they can all get married in a sedoretu! And Harry/Ginny and Ron/Hermione can be awesome, and so can Ron/Harry and Ginny/Hermione, and meanwhile Ron and Ginny can be all sibling-y together and Harry and Hermione can be total best friends.

Really in any situation where people solve the problem of slash + canon het by pairing up the het love interests too becomes an amazing sedoretu. This happens especially a lot in RPS fandoms but there are lots of fandoms where sedoretu could fit seamlessly. (Hodgins and Bones are Evening, Booth and Angela are Morning: y/y/mfy? And Wilson needs to find a nice Evening girl who wants to stick around, so that he and Cuddy and House can get married already.)

BRAIDS
Original Source: The Gameplayers of Zan by M. A. Foster + the rest of the Ler trilogy
Fanworks: None that I know of. ):
Someone else's explanation: Braid at the SF wikia

My Explanation: the Ler are a genetically engineered subspecies of humanity, intended to be 'supermen' but ending up more different than better. They live on a reservation on Earth and have worked very hard at building a separate cultural identity for themselves.

Ler have a complicated sexual cycle in which they go through long periods of sexuality and asexuality. They also have only two fertile periods in their lives, which means that the only way the population can grow is through very rare multiple births or third pregnancies. As a result, they have a marriage system design to maximize fertility and genetic mixing while still allowing a stable family structure.

The basic Ler social structure is a braid. The core of the braid are two insiblings, who were born and raised in the braid, but are not genetically related to each other. When the insiblings undergo their first fertile period, they have sex, and have a child together; that child is the elder outsibling. Before their second fertile period, each of the insiblings finds an outsibling from another braid who is about to reach their first period of fertility, and "weave" the new outsiblings into the braid. The children of the outsibling+insibling pairings become the insiblings of the next generation. Finally, the outsiblings have their second fertile period together, and their child becomes the braid's younger outsibling. The genes of the braid's founding insiblings are carried down through the generations without the insiblings ever being blood relations. (There is a science-ex-machina reason why the gender ratios almost always work out right.)

Relationships within the braid, and how those relationships change between sex allowed, sex required, and sex forbidden before & after the fertile periods, can get really chewy and complicated. (Also, while homosexuality is pretty much invisible in this canon, there are various ways that they get queered up anyway. My username comes from a character in this book & I am amused that even ten years ago I chose to identify with the minor character who is vaguely genderqueer and markedly, freakishly asexual by her society's standards.)

Braids are chock full of incesty fun. In fact, they are practically an excuse to do incest 'ships without making anyone be actually genetically related. One example of a story that would be *immeasurably* improved by giving them Ler braids is Wuthering Heights. It also works really well with fandoms where there's a core het partnership, and then canon brings in outside love interests for them instead. No need for tearful breakups or writing people out, just weave all four of 'em into the braid!

TROLL ROMANCE
Original Source: Homestuck
Fanworks: SO MUCH TROLL FIC
Someone else's explanation: Troll Romance the short version

My Explanation: Oh, Homestuck trolls. I don't even read the blasted comic, and yet.

Homestuck's trolls acknowledge four types of romantic relationships: Matespritship, Kismesissitude, Moirallegiance, and Auspisticism. We are told that the main thing troll romance has in common with human romance is that it's incredibly confusing for everyone involved, and most of what we know about it in practice comes from the experiences of a group of very young trolls who have other things to think about - it's like trying to derive human romance by reading Twilight.

As a result there is a lot of debate in the fandom as to what the four 'quadrants' actually involve, complicated of course by individual fans' shipping preferences, so any attempt at explaining them is probably going to cause controversy. There have also been various attempts to systematize the relationships, but I happen to disagree strongly with fanon on that, so we're not going to get into it here.

Troll relationships are usually put on a grid, which each relationship in a quadrant. The left column is the "concupiscent" or sexual relationships; the right column are the "conciliatory" or nonsexual romances. The top row are the "red" or postive relationships; the bottom row are the "black" or negative relationships. A troll's goal for fulfillment is to have someone to fill each of their four quadrants, presumably in a stable or semi-stable way. The relationships are (ideally) mutual - if A is B's matesprit, then B is A's - but each of the four relationships is not necessarily linked to the others. Gender is irrelevant. Trolls also believe that each person has a destined partner for each of the four quadrants, who they will eventually find, hopefully in time.

There is a lot more symbolism and terminology and argument around troll relationships and biology, but I am not going into it all here.

Matespritship is Lust and Liking. It's the closest to what we think of as human romance and love. But trolls don't expect matespritship to be the be-all and end-all of romance, and don't expect a matespirit to give them everything they need, so matespiritship is both simpler and more complicated. I imagine that without the pressure to be everything to each other, the illusions of love and perfection get to last a lot longer.

Kismesissitude is lust plus hate. It is what fandom likes to call "Foe Yay" or hatesex - nemeses holding on to a rivalry fuelled by unwilling respect and sexual tension. Humans - or at least fannish humans - tend to have a good understanding of these relationships, there are certainly enough people who ship them in fandom, but among humans, generally a "happy ending" for such a pairing is supposed to include not being enemies any more. Trolls, on the other hand, consider the foeyay relationship to be the goal - kismeses becoming matesprits happens but is far from ideal. (Matesprits becoming kismeses happens a lot too. Sometimes a relationship oscillates wildly between the two down the concupiscent side.)

Moirallegiance is positive feelings without lust. This is probably close to how fandom feels about "partners". The duty of a moirail is to keep their partner sane and at least semi-functional, or at least stop them from snapping and killing other people, or themself. The first fandom example I can come up with is Mulder and Scully, due to it having the relevant risk of snapping and death all 'round. Holmes and Watson are moirails too. So are House and Wilson. This quadrant can be read as romantic friendship/platonic partnership, only drop the fluffy illusion endorphins part and have them see right into each other's weak points and dark places from the beginning. In some ways it's the deepest of the troll relationships, but keeping it non-sexual is important.

Auspisticeship is the relationship that probably has the most confusion about it. It is romance with neither lust nor liking. I propose that its closest analogues are relationships that humans think of as familial, like parents or siblings: you are auspistice for someone you don't necessarily always like, and don't want to sleep with -- heck no, that would be a trainwreck - but somehow you care about their welfare anyway, and your life would have an empty place without them. An auspistice apparently spends most of their time making sure their partner's other relationships are functional and at least quasi-stable, and it's implied that their most important role is to keep kismeses from killing each other. You can probably think of a fandom with characters like that, and if they aren't seen as familial, they're probably exes.

In practice, working with a network of troll relationships gets complicated fast - the fewest trolls you can have in a closed system and still mutually fill all quadrants is six, but in practice, there are these tangled webs where even trolls get quickly lost figuring out who is what to who ... kind of like human relationships, only trolls have names for more of them.

It is, however, still awesome to work out troll relationship quadrants for people. For example: Harry's matesprit is Ginny, his kismesis is Draco, and during the books Ron and Hermione fluctuate between being his moirail and his Auspistice, but I think by the last book Ron is moirail and Hermione is auspistice. Meanwhile, Hermione is matesprit with Ron and mutual auspistice with Harry, but I am less sure about her other two quadrants - I suspect the first person she played blackrom games with was Rita though, and she could probably pull off moiraillegiance with Viktor. Ron is matesprit with Hermione and moirail with Harry, and I suspect his auspistice is Ginny (I have decided incest is irrelevant in the conciliatory quadrants), but he has had no luck at all finding a proper kismesis. Ginny is matesprits with Harry, auspistices with Ron, and kismeses with Tom; I suspect she has a moirail too, we just didn't see enough of her to know who it is (but it ought to be Neville!)

See, doesn't that make a lot more sense than the 'shipping arguments people usually have? :D

Also, because I hate all the terms currently in circulation in the asexual community for the not-sexual-not-exactly-romantic-but-necessary-to-life partnerships, I am considering trying to sneak "moirail" into the discourse...


So what are your favorite fictional systems of romance and marriage? What do I need to add to this list?

Comments

[valiha]

(Hi, found this link hopping from various places) Have you read John Varley's Gaea trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon)? It involves a NASA expedition to Saturn which discovers that there's an extra satellite orbiting Saturn, which turns out to be a living organism shaped like a hollow ring, with spokes leading to the hub. It is basically a goddess to many other organisms living inside of her. There's an awesome video that was made recently showing some of the landscape of Gaea.

Gaea is thousands of years old, close to the end of her life cycle, and more than a little insane. She picked up Earth TV signals and decided to create (in addition to other species already in existence) a sentient species called Titanides, centaur like beings with three sets of sexual organs: front female or male which determine their gender, middle male and rear female.

All Titanides can bear children, and all can breastfeed. The number of individuals involved in producing offspring can vary between one and four. They speak in song, and give their children music based names which follow the pattern of Musical instrument (Manner of conception) Chord, which corresponds to human clan or family name and is typically a musical form or genre (e.g. Valiha (Aeolian Solo) Madrigal, Phase Shifter (Double-Sharped Lydian Trio) Rock'n'Roll). They are in communication with their hindmother during gestation, who thinks about various instruments until the child chooses the one to bear as the name; the hindmother then makes it and presents it as a gift to the child. The children can walk and talk within hours of being born, and one child was born with knowledge of English, transferred to him by his mother. In later books one of te human characters is essential for Titanide reproduction, and without her Titanides would die out as a species.

There's a good explanation of Titanide reproduction practices and family groups on Wikipedia; I'm afraid I get too tangled up when I try to explain it! Hindsex is casual and indulged in by all Titanides (and some human settlers - there are hybrids, some of who look... interesting, to say the least), but frontalsex carries a great deal of emotional baggage. I wish I could find a scan of the diagrams Varley included explaining the reproduction modes!

[valiha]

Found: Titanide sexual ensembles. All humans are Lydian duets. :)

[simonejester]

I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in seventh grade, and the line family idea has always stuck in my head and I've always enjoyed the thought of it, even though my own polyamory didn't actually manifest until I was in my early twenties.

Well done with explaining each kind of group system. :)

[aiffe]

ahhh I love this pooost

I read Birthday of the World years ago, and was vaguely aware of sedoretus in fandom, and was just thinking that needed to be the romantic configuration Princess Tutu ended on. Fakir and Rue as Morning people, Ahiru and Mytho as Evening people. (Morning and Evening in canon seemed to be by maternal inheritance and have as much to do with your personality as astrology so it could be random, but Le Guin in general plays with Taoist ideas, so whenever I see Le Guin + a light/dark binary, I'm inclined to think the light is yang and the dark is yin.) This gives us: Ahiru/Rue, Ahiru/Fakir, Rue/Mytho, and Mytho/Fakir as expected sexual relationships. Rue and Fakir are one forbidden relationship and there doesn't seem to be sexual chemistry there anyway. Ahiru and Mytho are the other, and what's beautiful about this is in canon they clearly have feelings for each other but it's portrayed as forbidden and doomed, Ahiru is literally told she's fated to die the moment she confesses her love to Mytho, so this works for me as a queered-sedoretu forbidden het relationship.

I came here for a refresher, but I loved seeing all the other possibilities--especially the sine-gen thing in the comments, that is exactly the kind of creepy vampiric addictive dubcon loving I am about. (I think that in fannish adaptations, the tentacles might not be necessary--selyn could be collected via close contact, or any type of sex, or suchlike? Not that I'm against tentacles!)

Also! One of my favorite poly things at the moment is Steven Universe, which didn't exist back when you wrote this post, isn't that amazing? In case you haven't seen it, I'll try to explain this, because it really isn't quite like anything else, and I'm not even sure if it quite fits any ideas of romance or marriage either, it's just so different. Basically, gems are an alien species whose true form is a literal rock but can shapeshift into various forms and take (always female-presenting) humanoid forms for convenience. (Edit: one character has a male-presenting persona, but still uses her female-presenting form 99% of the time. It's a voluntary thing.) They don't have sexual reproduction--how exactly they reproduce isn't completely clear yet, we've seen some kind of operation with industrial drills making holes in the ground to grow gems in, but we have official confirmation there's no sexual component, and gems do not come in more than one sex. They use she/her pronouns but are considered genderless/nonbinary, personally I think of them sort of like "female like worker bees, not female like humans." There is no biological need for them to have intimacy of any kind.

Yet they still very much fall in love with each other. Most of the gems we've seen are from a fringe group that split off from Homeworld, and it's implied that Homeworld is more draconian and forbids or at least disparages certain types of gem intimacy. But of the ones we've seen, monogamy is seemingly an unheard-of concept, though jealousy still very much exists, especially if one wanted attention from another gem and that attention was given to someone else.

But what really makes gem relationships interesting is the concept of fusion. When two or more gems like each other very much (or have other reasons to attempt this), they can combine their forms into a larger body and personality that is an amalgam of both/all their traits. This is shown to be a "more than the sum of their parts" kind of deal, where a fusion's traits are more than simply the original gems coinhabiting a space, but rather it creates something new out of the dynamism of the fused gems. While fused, gems mostly lose their own consciousness, and experience instead the fused consciousness--though something they feel very strongly about can snap them back into their own separate mind, at the risk of breaking the fusion apart back into its components. Fusion arrangements can be one-time things, they can be situations where the gems cohabitate unfused most of the time but then occasionally fuse, or extreme love/devotion can lead gems to remain fused permanently, their very existence as a being an expression of the original components' love. Fusion of this last type seems to be the most taboo on Homeworld. (Permanent fusion still requires continuous consent, they can break apart at any time but choose not to.)

The main group of gems is three people raising a child together, running a household, and essentially acting extremely married. They've all fused with each other on occasion, and one is a permanent fusion of two gems herself. The biggest fusion we've seen so far involved that group, for a total of four gems in one being. Fusion has been shown to be a metaphor for all kinds of human dynamics--sex, love, kissing, marriage, hand-holding, that way couples finish each other's sentences and get good at the thing the other lacks, that way couples start to resemble each other and say the same types of things. (I say "couples" but obviously it could be more than two people.) And yet fusion isn't exactly those things--it's literally merging into a new person. Which means that in group marriage situations, you're involved not only with your wives, but with the people your wives can fuse and defuse into, and also involved with them as the people you yourself can fuse into. Loving someone means experiencing the world WITH them, AS them, in a really unique way.

I've actually already seen some fusion AUs on tumblr for other fandoms, like Korra and Asami as gems fusing into a new gem. Gem fusion designs are really cool, some traits we've seen: being enormously tall (anywhere from seven feet to like thirty feet), having anywhere from 2-6 arms, anywhere from 2-5 eyes, one had a second face under her chin, one had a sort of humantaur shape, basically they look like terrifyingly beautiful demons or gods. Fusions.

[alatefeline]

Agreed!

[(Anonymous)]

Interesting post!

There are also Fives from Cherry Wilder's Tapestry Warriors series.

In the books, a classic Five (not counting the kids) consists of three able-bodied adults, with one explicitly the head of the family; an oldster, possibly a blood-relation to one of the younger members; and a Luck, who might for example have dichromatic eyes, be albino, have survived a terrible accident... (I liked the way care of the elderly and acceptance of the somewhat odd are engineered into the society.)

The first book, The Luck of Brin's Five, starts when an explorer from Earth crashlands in the mountains near a family of humble spider-weavers who are mourning the recent death of their last Luck. Ah... they don't exactly ask him if he wants to marry them, but it works out okay for various reasons. (Trouble happens when less-friendly authorities start looking for the creepy alien (who is a member of our family dammit) and they go on a bit of a roadtrip.)

Sorry about the anonymous comment - I'm cat-i-th-adage on LJ.

[alatefeline]

I love all of these so much and am deeply overjoyed that someone else latched on to these EXACT SAME source materials as important foundational fictional texts for their imagination. (Seriously, aside from the whole Braid thing, there is not a lot I actually like in the Ler books? BUT.)

I would definitely add Glory, by David Brin, the complete works of Octavia Butler, and In the Mothers' Land, by Elisabeth Vonarburg, plus anything by Eleanor Arnason, and possibly also some of the Culture novels of Iain Banks, as sf texts which sociobiologically restructure sex, romance, partnership, marriage and family in interesting ways. Also a lot of newer indie sf especially in the loose category of Afrofuturism.

[alatefeline]

I'll probably come back with some also-alsos eventually, I can FEEL the fansquee wheels turning.

[aoftheis]

I don't have anything of substance to add, but I wanted to drop a comment so that you know that eight years later, people are still reading & deriving great joy from this post. :)

(I've been obsessively rereading Diane Duane's Young Wizards series since I was a kid — I had no idea that she had an amazing queer poly fantasy series out there, too. If only I'd discovered that when I was twelve ... !

I was always super invested in Tom/Carl from Young Wizards, who are definitely queerplatonic life partners if not straight up lovers — either way, a win for queer representation in kids' books from the '80s!)

found this on fanlore

[himejoshiheart]

considering how popular homestuck is I wonder why qprs are called qprs and not moirails...