There is a fascinating new law in Italy that seems a victory for the growing population of polyamorists around the world. Italy may drop the promise for couples to remain faithful in marriage as a commitment that may be viewed as outdated or objectionable by many modern couples who do not view sexual “fidelity” as a precondition for marriage.
Senators supporting the change to the Civil Code maintain that the bar on adultery is a “cultural legacy from an outdated and obsolete vision of marriage, family, and the rights and duties of spouses.” This follows rulings in Italian courts rejecting the claim that a spouse’s infidelity can be treated as the cause for a divorce. The burden is on the other spouse to show that the infidelity led to the irreconcilable breakdown of the marriage.
Some sponsors tied the change to the advancement of status of women and children, noting that fidelity of women was viewed as the condition for determining the “legitimacy’ of children.”
A 2013 poll showed that 55 percent of men and roughly 33 percent women in Italy admitted to adultery.
The change is a victory for those who have long argued for the right to maintain alternative definitions of marriage — an issue at the heart of our “Sister Wives” case currently before the Supreme Court.
The term polygamy generally refers to any form of plural marriage and is derived from the Greek polys gamos, literally meaning “often married.” While polygamy is often used as synonymous with marriages composed of one husband and multiple wives (as opposed to monogamy), it can refer to any of three common forms of plural marriage. Polygyny is specifically a plural marriage of a man and more than one wife. Polyandry is specifically a plural marriage of a woman with more than one husband. Finally, there are some families who have multiple husbands and wives which are commonly referred to as “group marriages.”
While polygyny, polyandry, and group marriages are the three principle groups of polygamy, there is a fourth group that has a distinct history and meaning: polyamorists. That is the group that may be most interested in this change. Polyamory is subject to more varied definitions, but generally refers to consensual relationship where participants have more than one sexual partner. Polyamorists often express lasting relationships and expectations with their lovers. Under some laws, these relationships would qualify as common law marriage or cohabitation or conjugal unions – and thus treated as polygamy or bigamy. Polyamory may, for example, more properly describe some relationships in some communal homes where a subset of individuals consider themselves partners. This is sometimes referred to as polyfidelity. Polyandry and group marriage are particularly found in non-religious settings. In the 1960s and 1970s in the United States and Canada, such plural families were often found in communes or alternative communities. For example, polyandrous families (and polyamorist relationships) were not uncommon in the San Francisco area and group families were found throughout the United States and Canada in the 1960s.
The Italian legislation could reflect a trend toward a more varied definition of the foundations of marriage. Indeed, I have long argued for treating marriages legally under a uniform civil union standard as a binding agreement through the state. This would leave the conditions or expectations of marriages to the individuals and their specific religious or social values. While I do not agree with these alternative definitions of marriage personally, I have long been uncomfortable with the state policing matters of moral integrity or compliance. It is admittedly a more libertarian view that seeks to leave such issues to families or individuals to decide within their own faith structures. That said, however, I also believe that infidelity is a legitimate basis to terminate a marriage for most people. That should not change. Indeed, couples should be allowed to divorce on any grounds of incompatibility. I have never agreed with society imposing long waiting periods or forcing people to prove that they cannot remain married when they clearly do not want to do so. Couples can create these mutually binding agreements with the state and they can dissolve such agreements. Infidelity remains one of the primary reasons for seeking such a termination.
What do you think about the Italian legislation?
Sooo, let’s see. It now takes about 25 years to rise a kid. If a couple has two, and they are 4 years apart, that equates to about 30 years.
And, to compliment this reality, we, as a society, wish to make marriages LESS of a long term commitment.
Yeah. That ought to work out pretty well. Hah! The truth is, strong marriages benefit women and children much more than it does men, and women, as a group, are getting a royal screwing here.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
What? About 60% of all divorces are initiated by wives, 30% by husbands, and 10% through some sort of joint filing. Where there are children involved, about 66% are initiated by wives. Only a minority of people who file actually have grounds. As often as not, divorce is a way for women to change their household economy from one based on marriage to one based on child-support, and they do this because they no longer wish to be married or because they are under the illusion they can trade up (which is generally not possible unless you unwitting married someone with some severe deficiencies – in which case you likely do have grounds).
Women aren’t being screwed in any systematic way (though they are in individual cases).
Think of it like this. You have two sets of parents, both with teenagers. One set, let’s it’s 16 year olds drive anywhere, stay out as late as they like, and pretty much do whatever they wish. The other set, has a set curfew, limited auto use with a tracking app, and expect a certain level of good behavior – – – or else!
Now, in one sense, I think the first set of kids is getting screwed by the parenting system. Even though any bad behavior is self-initiated. Sooo, does that make it easier to understand? Because we have sets of rules to hopefully provide a better system of moderating behavior. Which behavior has to be moderated because people tend to do a whole lot of things that are bad for them, and harmful to others.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
PS: I work for an attorney, and we daily watch foolish women screw themselves over, seeking divorces for dumb and trivial reasons. They are almost universally worse off a year or two later, after they have blown their way through the divorce settlement money, and the full impact of raising kids by themselves sinks in. And the fact that aging is not a friend to women.
Well, it’s true a lot of people crave sexual variety thus the attraction to polyamory and such.
But there is a very good practical reason to control such impulses and that is sexually transmitted diseases, the transmission of which is trending up.
When I was much younger, all such diseases were treatable. Now we are seeing some STDs resistant to multiple antibiotics. Plus HIV. So keep your pants on and find another hobby.
There are going to be children born if the human race is to continue. We need two parents to support the upbringing. Marriage is a good way to get them wedded to the chores. Fidleity is a good way to keep them wedded. The problem in America is the government subsistance for the opposite effect where women “get their check” by getting knocked up at age 14 by the guy up the block who will never see or pay for his offspring. Uncle Sam pays. And he does not ever get to pork. Something wrong here.
Yeah, but the earth would be a more comfortable place if there were 90% fewer people.
Jay S – you are welcome to leave the earth at any time.
Bam, I would say the adverse experience/observations regarding Italian men philandering is Continental[Europe], and not indigenous to Italy.
Nick, who said that they were adverse experiences? Lol! Definitely, not. 🙂
bam, Mea culpa. I’m reminded on the Odd Couple scene where Felix Unger breaks it down. “When you ‘assume’ you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me.”
There is a passage in Les Liaisons dangereuses where a married but jaded aristocratic couple decide they need the ultimate taboo to maintain stimulation. In search of this, they imagine every possible compromising partner and position possible as experienced in their dissipated lives. Finally, finally, they hit upon the most lurid, tittilating and mostly novel idea of all;
Go to bed with their own spouses!
It should be pointed out that many in the aristocratic families throughout Italy figured out this trick to spicing up their marital sex lives long before Pierre Choderlos de Laclos figured out how to fashion his first quill.
How interesting. When an Italian proposed marriage to me in Italy, he promised me he wouldn’t cheat on me. I thought it odd that he would feel the need to include that in the proposal (among various other aspects I found unusual in getting a proposal from a lovely man I hadn’t even kissed). Apparently, fidelity is quite rare in France and Italy.
Bam Bam – you’re just saying that because Italian men prize women above air wine and food. My sister and I vacationed in Italy after I’d had a breakup. What an incomparable ego booster and gustatory heaven. Sigh.
I think that anyone who believes that a marriage can survive with adultery or multiple partners or spouses is kidding themselves. Polygamous marriages are infamous for having more miserable women, jealousy, and anger. And those who think affairs will spice up their love life with their spouse are deluding themselves. It’s just a means to either live separate lives, ease into divorce, or sabotage the relationship. The only person who would really be emotionally unharmed by cheating would have to not be in romantic love with their spouse.
If you’re not willing to pledge fidelity to a single person, gaining their trust, and at the very least promising not to bring home any social diseases or illegitimate children, then why get married? Why not just shack up and have kids? What does marriage mean if not fidelity? Just a long term social contract?
Apparently, fidelity is quite rare in France and Italy.
Or people feel the need to pretend to maintain their street cred among other men.
If you want to marry an Italian, you should go hunting on Long Island, and remember that a good husband on the Sicilian model isn’t necessarily delicate (“It’s tough Marie, like shoe leather. These people are lying to you…”).
I agree. Just put a ladder up to her window and elope.
I agree with Doglover. Marriage should be out the window.
If Italy wants to do something important then curb tobacco smoking. Look at the dork in the photo. They connect smoking with porking in the movies to promote smoking for the tobacco companies. Millions have died from smoking since that dork movie was sold.
Only 55% of men in Italy admitted to infidelity? Right. So much for surveys. The other 45% must have missed answering the question because they were too busy sleeping with their best friend’s wife or daughter.
Bam Bam… you are a SCHOLAR OF ITALIAN …What third world Country did Cast you from ????
Not a scholar of Italian–more like a scholar of Italian men FROM Italy. Personal experience, which has been extensive. Don’t shoot the messenger, and, don’t misinterpret what I am saying. I love Italian men, but, those, in particular, hailing from Italy, are many amazing things, including notorious philanderers. What? You haven’t gotten the memo?
I suspect you’ve consulted a pollster who uses a sampling method not fit for playing roulette.
Does Donald Trump support this legislation? Did he inspire it?
You’ve confused Trump (who is vulgar and transgressive) with Ted Turner (who actually is an advocate for adultery) and Silvio Burlusconi (who is incredibly brazen).
If women may have equal education and equal pay, there is no longer any need for marriage.
When ever you state a ‘need’ you have an implicit purpose in mind. Most people have an interest in the optimal rearing of the young and taking advantage of the benefits which come from specialization in the context of a dyad. They also enjoy being in a lifelong union. That those purposes are too elevated for you to appreciate is not their problem or the institution’s problem.
This makes sense. Italy was behind for some time. Not too long ago, you weren’t married unless it was through your religion. The concept of fidelity should be voluntary and personal, between the participants, nothing to do with the legalities of marriage or divorce. Most of the pain and suffering in a marriage comes from trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Anybody?
People typically come together through an explosion of lust and what is known as love. Then they mellow out and get used to each other. More often than not the lust engine keeps on turning. So, does that mean that a marriage accepts the human condition or is exploded apart because of archaic societal stigma?
What in the world is a “polyamorist”? Is that just a new word for slut?
Dookee oKEE…Olly I Think !
YEP !!!!!
Oh why not. Loyalty, honor, fidelity are just moral principles tied to an age where civil society needed to be anchored to something. But as Issac and others have routinely pointed out, our human nature has progressed and so we should discard those old timey traditions. After all, we’re in a new age of globalism. If nations do not need borders then certainly a marriage doesn’t either.
[Sarcasm: Off]
Donald Trump agrees with you.
[No Sarcasm Whatsoever]
He just might. Time will tell.
His divorce from his 1st wife was a personal disaster for him, and he likely knows that. There’s a limit to the extent he can acknowledge that because he has issue from his subsequent marriages. (It also would not surprise one to learn he’s quite fond of the current Mrs. Trump, who wasn’t implicated in his betrayal of Ivana).
Oliver Clozoff – I am sure both Bill and Hillary Clinton agree with this legislation. It has been well known they have an open marriage.
If this goes into effect, what will Italians have to make movies about ?
YUCK, YUCK, YUCK… Archie.. you and Veronica were a great Comic !!! >>>>>>
polygamist must not Marry… or be ABOLISHED as so the Faith of Marriage can Prevail !!!!!!
Why would anyone want to be married to someone and at the same time exercise their horny lust for other persons while in marriage ???? …..If one (and or couples) wants the all; of other sex partners then, all one and or couples) has to do is not get married! …..I’m Ashamed of Italy & that “Italy Moves To Remove The Promise Fidelity As A Condition For Marriage” I Pray that the Pope Aborts the Move To Remove The Promise of Fidelity As A Condition For Marriage….I & my Family were born in Italy and we all came to America while we Children were still very Young…. Our Love and Faith will hopefully Prevail
You came to the U.S. as a child? After all of these years, you still write like that? Sheesh.
Considering the changing times, I thing this is fine. It is only facing reality.
What reality? Where is the evidence that we’ve been facing escalating adultery in the last generation and, if it be so, whymust that social phenomenon be incorporated into marriage vows?
The one social pathology to have grown verifiably worse since 1980 has been illegitimacy.
Italians get food, fashion and art on a profound level. They are retards in most other aspects of life.
I this country, ethnic Italians are quite adept at navigating their social world while remaining very much themselves. Usually, groups who resist assimilation well also have issues navigating professional / managerial strata in workplaces and are disproportionately in wage-earning occupations. Italians are the exception. Italians also have a very distinctive way of conducting family relations and manage to hang together better than just about anyone else (although the way Italians interact in domestic situations takes some getting used to for non-Italians marrying in). In contrast to the old country, Italians here have also had a great deal of resistance to rancid social ideology and to identity politics.
Desperately, Astute observations and comment. I sense some first hand, real world, experiences.
My brother’s actually, and two men off my short list of friends. Grew up in Rochester, which is an Italian town (in the sense that the Italians are the signature ethnicity and set the overall tone; Buffalo’s a Polish town).
Very commendable of you to be able to recognize astute observations and comments when made by others. Now only if you could dispense with the personal insults and opinions you so frequently offer up as astute observations and opinions and actually substitute some real astute observations and comments in your remarks at this site.
Nick
Don’t you just love when the trolls chastise you for making derogatory comments by doing just the same to you. It must be a full moon out tonight. Even a genuine and complimentary remark, made by you, to another, is met with condemnation. Can’t win for losing.
Hey, don’t sell is short – we can sing, too!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnXIPV6Jh4Y
And rule a planet for a thousand years or so.
mespo – and get their butts kicked by the Germans and the Scots.
Wrong, we made the change before the shooting stopped in WW2. Thus we’re only 0-1-1.
mespo – the Germans wiped them out in the Teutorburg Forest during Augustus. Hadrian built a wall to keep the Scots away from them. Rommel defeated them in WWI, the British defeated them in WWII. The Germans had to replace them with real troops.
The Germans? They were pikers who predictably got their butts kicked at the Battle of the Weser River.
Mark M Esposito – you are correct, but the death total is about the same as Teutorburg Forest. And the Romans, after a few more raids under Germanicus, decided to stay on their side of the Rhine.
I think the death toll was more at Teutonberg Forest because Varus was not the military genius Germanicus was. Of course, he only had three legions, the bulk being sent to Eastern Europe to quell a rebellion there. Hey but we got the eagles back!
mespo – Germanicus only got 2 of the eagles back. Took another 25 years to get the third one. 🙂
Don’t forget that Varus had auxilary and cavalry. Very few survived.
Exactly.
For REAL !!!!!
I include music w/ the category of “art.”
nick:
Ok, we’ll forgive that slight ambiguity, but you did forget sports especially in the 40s-50s.
“The burden is on the other spouse to show that the infidelity led to the irreconcilable breakdown of the marriage.”
This burden is retarded thinking and a vestigial appendage of Catholicism. People aren’t the property of the their spouses. Forcing monogamy as a way to enforce marriage as constructive social policy leads to the varying shades of gray inherent in Pleasantville. Marriage is voluntary and so should be divorce.
You never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate your essential asininity.
People who cannot handle fidelity can do everyone else a favor and refrain from marriage and procreation.
Reminds me of an old Woody Allen routine where he and his wife decide to divorce. However, in New York you need grounds of infidelity, so he volunteered. 🙂
There used to be a certain amount of collusion in divorce cases.
I once had to prepare a statistical analysis of the phenomenon of divorce and discovered that the ‘Reno divorce’ was actually fairly unusual and that no more than 5% of all divorce decrees during the period running from 1935 to 1960 were obtained by filers migrating to lax jurisdictions like Nevada and Idaho. Some phenomena are real but not very common.
I’d wager that collusion in divorce cases back then was less common than people contemplating the past assume. The one case in my grandparents circle of friends I’m aware of involved a late-middle aged couple who were on their second marriage each and had no children.
Does that include Donald Trump?
Three of his children were born prior to the time he blew up his marriage to his first wife.
Steve –
What sort of law does practice?
By your comments, I would suspect divorce law.
Gotta drum-up business somehow …