Marriage Across Different Cultures. Research Paper

Marriage Across Different Cultures
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Marriage Across Different Cultures
According to Robert Pollak (2007), matrimony refers to a legal union between two people that has no limit to any one specific location. On the other hand, a family is a basic unit of social connection that comprises of parents and children. Divorce is a process that entails dissolving marriage through competent bodies such as a court of law. Marriage form the fundamental basis of most families’ foundations throughout the history of humanity. Nonetheless, different cultures around the world, such as the US and Hispanic, hold on to different traditions surrounding choosing a marriage partner, marriage ceremonies, as well as the rights and obligations of the parties in the marriage (Browning & Chiappori, 1998). The US and Hispanic cultures are used in this study because they depict a sharp contrast in their lifestyles. This paper examines the element of divorce in Hispanic and American cultures. The article will also provide a particular focus on these relationships through the spectrum of the economic theory of bargaining in marriages, marriage contracts, and property issues and division in marriages as contracts economic models.
The study uses the Gale-Shapley model to describe the distribution and sharing of resources between couples in the economic theory of bargaining and marriage. The model is the most preferred approach for examining the marriage market equilibrium whenever the BIM model determines resource redistribution within the family. The Gale-Shapley matching model assumes that potential couples enter into a Binding Agreement in the Marriage Market, which plays a pivotal role in determining the allocation of resources in their prospective families.
The ancient culture of the United States had laws that gave husbands the legal responsibilities to manage and to ownership of their wives and personal property. However, in the Hispanic traditions, the community allowed women to own and manage assets. In the Hispanic culture, a married woman could control and manage both her property as well as that of her husband (Harris & Gedicks, 2003). Moreover, the society gave exclusive rights to women to will and inherited wealth. The latter tradition helped families to stick together because husbands did not solely own the property; hence, there were few rates of divorce. On the contrary, lack of ownership and management rights for women in the United States’ culture gave met the leeway to divorce their wives. Hence, this affected the economic growth due to instability in marriages and time wastage during and after divorce.
Procreation, per se, comes with a lot more responsibilities than the act itself. Such duties include but are not limited to caring for children, providing them with proper education and sound social functions as well as regulating their lines of descent. However, marriages have undergone a significant change over time, taking on a high number of forms. By the late 20th century, the tradition of marriages in the Hispanic culture, and particularly about the ease of divorce and significance of procreation, had begun showing notable changes. At the onset ...