Writing Social Echoes: What Is Traditional Marriage, Anyway?
A priori speculative fiction provides an interesting testing bed for thinking about the assumptions we make about human social organization and what other options could exist.
The Village of Strong Branches is set on a planet called Maðz. The next novella, A Matter of Oracles, is set on the planet Atara. Neither planet was directly colonized by Earth. In fact, Earth is at least 50,000 years in the past — so far back that it’s barely integrated into mythology, taking a second place to the “seed” planet for all of these worlds, Jiha — the Jewel-World. Humanity was there for (roughly) 17,000 years. Following that, in the trajectory I’m writing in, survivors of cataclysm on Jiha arrived on a planet called Ameisa.1
Due to the specific conditions of settlement, the First City on Ameisa ended up with a matriarchal and matrilocal seed society. In the colonization event, there was about an 8:1 female:male ratio, with banks of fertilized eggs to be used up. The bottleneck of any first population is whether or not it has enough genetic diversity to be successful; inbreeding is a significant risk to a planetary colony’s viability.2
To use up the fertilized eggs in the First City, everyone who could get pregnant had to have at least seven pregnancies. As one can imagine, given the immense physiological stressors of pregnancy and childbirth, this is easy to declare, but most people would not be thrilled with being used as living incubators to seed a population, even if — as in the First City — the population was primed to be compliant because they had nuked themselves to near-extinction and had been raised in a multigenerational silo city with the sole civilizational goal of hopping to a planet that was not radioactive.3 That colony attempted to reproduce the social structures of its parent planet, which were not matriarchal.
The linchpin for this shift to matriarchy was a revolt led by Jeiyeḥa Ziwo4 and her younger brother Kaleḥ Ziwo, who protested the forced pregnancy regime and led a social revolution to change the norms that had come along on the colony ships despite most of the colony twenty years after settlement (like, about 90%) being women under 30 and girls. Jeiyeḥa and Kaleḥ were brought into the colony’s leadership as part of the pacification.5 Some Earth societies do have a matriarchal and/or matrilocal structure, but they’re usually surrounded and juxtaposed against a neighboring patriarchal and/or patrilocal culture. Matriarchal cultures are rare on Earth due to the history of how human culture developed here.6 All of the Seven Gardens cultures are either matriarchal or semi-egalitarian, with a strong emphasis placed on elders and multigenerational family units, due to the echo left by that act. The First City did not have any ambient alternatives.
In addition to that, the cultures I write in have always had access to various family planning tools. The cultures that we live in on Earth today are frequently not optimized for any of this, which is part of why birth rates are declining, but the cultures that evolved on Ameisa have stable birth rates and a societal structure that prioritizes the supports that are needed for a stable birth rate. You can’t just throw money or repressive restrictions at a structural problem and hope that will solve it.
Laseå was settled very quickly after Ameisa, as it is not far away. Maðz, in a neighboring solar system, was given its Opening of the Mouth ceremony about 10,000 years after Ameisa. Atara and Mntaka were given their rituals of settlement 24,000 years after Ameisa. Baruwh and Qamaq, about 28,000-29,000 years after Ameisa.
So, let’s look at those echoes on a practical level. I want to start with some of the underlying motivations that led me here in the first place, followed by a look at some of the marital structures we see on the Gardens.
As a lesbian in my mid-thirties, something that has always fascinated me about American anti-gay discourse is the insistence on traditionalism. You can see that (somewhat) in the ways that I write my speculative fiction, as I decided to do a priori writing that included culturally-integrated gay and lesbian relationship options, and I opted not to classify what I write as LGBTQ fiction because that classification is not emic. When I was much younger, I didn’t realize that one could be anything other than straight without being countercultural or edgy or into clubbing — that’s what tended to get air time. As I started coming out, first to myself and then socially, I had a lot of time to reflect on what made me anxious about all of the discourse against assimilation, both the assumptions that it meant assimilating to American conservatism and, on the flip side, the idea that being gay meant forever being condemned as an outsider. It seemed like people were trying to force a toxic decision that nobody could ever nail based on false extrapolations from the facts, whereas I have always hoped that we would land in a place where we would be culturally-integrated without being forced to hide what makes us different. It’s been decades since Barbara Gittings led the charge for homosexuality to be delisted as a mental disorder and Frank Kameny started picketing for equal treatment under the law, regardless of the prevailing circumstances in late 2024.7 So. I poured a lot into brainstorming about “what is traditional marriage?” when designing the cultures in the Bow of Worlds, all descended from Ameisa’s First City. And I did not let myself be constrained.
Here are the big questions at the core of everything I’ve done. We’ll mostly talk about them in the context of how marriages operate.
How does this society maintain replacement rate?
What does inheritance look like?
How do the family structures impact the way society functions?
For example, Sāqab societies — Sāqab being the term I use for a wide set of societies that all share a language family and some consistent norms (such as a gender initiation ritual that bestows gender-based ritual and social responsibilities on people who consent to initiation) — practice visiting marriages among the common classes. Societies on Laseå — a planet with many different cultures where “Longing for Water” is set — do the same. These visiting marriages are done solely for reproduction. Everyone is expected to take part. While there is some cultural variation in the details, at its core, it is a sperm contract that has very little to do with love. While sometimes young sweethearts do contract with each other, it’s more often the case that people do “the marriage pool” in early adulthood to produce babies before settling into more mature, childfree romances in their late 20s or early 30s with others in their neighborhood or social spheres. Everyone still lives with their own relatives. Tilōno in A Matter of Oracles lives in a Sāqab-umbrella culture, with the added complexity that the planet she is on, Atara, is still expanding its population, so there is machine learning matchmaking guidance to optimize genetic diversity.
Other societies I write about are more straightforwardly matrilocal, meaning that they do matrilocal marriages. Someone — usually a man — is brought into a matriarchal home from outside. In Sabaji and Ịgzarhjenya cultures, there are very, very large matriarchal houses. In most historical periods, those families have between 400-1000 people in them before they cleave, and they may be distributed across multiple properties in multiple cities. The marriages in their societies are, barring divorce, for life. This person brought in is called the word that means husband regardless of the person’s actual gender. (When I use the word “wife” in works about these cultures when the relocated spouse is a woman, it’s for your benefit, and it is not an accurate reflection of what is being said by a character.) For lesbian couples, there are designated parties who are named during the marriage ritual as sperm donors. Conception without using those designated persons is illegitimate. There’s a convoluted legal framework called hjathoma (or hụkepli or yadokyozị, depending on the language) which governs who has the right to remain in the matriarchal home during a marriage. People who are generally assumed to have hjathoma are called hjathomahi.8 Culturally, many have children young (starting around ages 18-20 in Earth years; Ameisa’s year is longer than ours, as I have mentioned), and the society is optimized for that.
Regardless of the general marriage style, some cultures have status marriages. Wherever these appear, they are usually limited to social elites. This is exactly what it sounds like. It’s really about family alliances, and who joins whose home — if they join it at all — is highly variable.
Mamltaqal is one of the countries on the planet Maðz that practices a less typical type of marriage. There, marriages involve exactly 2, 3, or 5 people. These marriages tend to be egalitarian. The two- or three-person marriages are called “chain-lineage” and are usually embedded in multigenerational families who either all live together or who live apart, depending on how many cities they’re spread across. Two-person marriages are what we would usually term “heterosexual.” Three-person marriages are, generally speaking, a same-gamete couple with a designated third person who is a womb-mother or sperm-father. They can also be marriages that are heterosexual where one person in the couple has fertility issues. It’s taboo to not incorporate all participants in a pregnancy into the marriage. The third person may or may not even have sex with the other members of the couple.
Five-person marriages practiced in some Maðzi cultures are called “sinåmn” houses, homes, or marriages. Every chain-lineage house is descended from a sinåmn house, and sinåmn houses seed the ancestor rites and practices that the chain-lineage families do. Most chain-lineage families only persist for 8-11 generations before fading away. This is culturally encouraged. Some people in sinåmn homes will continue creating sinåmn homes for several generations. Every sinåmn marriage gives its children a new, shared surname, and the members who created the sinåmn are the final ones who bear their inherited surnames.
You don’t see family structures that look like an American nuclear family anywhere, really. Even the smaller, somewhat egalitarian matriarchal families and the Maðzi families incorporate more generations. In every example above, childcare is communal, the responsibility shared among a number of adults — there are no daycares, and parents are never isolated. Most young women (and kaju, atan, &c., and female sselē, yadzakma, &c., depending on the culture’s framework9) do vocational training, advanced studies, and other personal development while their babies and young toddlers are still breastfeeding. The only thing that comes close to the American nuclear family is Tenes Sari’s situation in (unpublished) The Raised Seal. That family — like many others — has been broken apart by a devastating calamity, the Occupation, and is not normal at all. Even there, Tenes’ daughter Kesar will be the de facto matriarch as soon as she hits the age of majority.
So. What is traditional marriage? Traditions are something that start somewhere. Speculative fiction is a useful place to explore possibilities beyond the confines of our circumstances. These societies have all found ways to ensure that the barriers to having children are minimal.
If you read the above and thought, wow, that is so weird and interesting but so, so rigid, and how is it possible for the Sāqab to decouple romance from making babies, you would be right. It is very different from our situation. These cultures have always had access to automation, medicine, good transportation, and food. People have always lived in megacity environments with a small portion of the population in villages and small towns in agricultural regions. Children are raised collectively by the family, not by individual parents, in almost all historical periods. They have a lot of time for ritual, pomp, and circumstance. The ornate rigidity of their cultural practices reflects tens of millennia of cultural evolutions and revolutions.
In college, I used to joke that what I was writing might seem utopic to us, but then said, “Everything is secretly terrible.” That statement is over-the-top, but the correct way to write an a priori cultural set is to allow for friction points. Someone reading a novel or novella with a priori worldbuilding should always see something that makes lim uncomfortable, and maybe even a moment that makes lim think, Someone should be protesting this, or Where are the investigative journalists? or Who is left out? That is part of what makes a setting feel real.
While there are more than seven planets that people can get to using available technologies, it would be best to characterize these as “Seven Gardens” cultures, where garden is a loose adaptation of the Tveshi word peaira, a word for planet that also means garden. Tveshi, like many languages, has a word for stars that have life-bearing worlds in their custody: hoharu, adding the ho- prefix to the term for star, haru. The ho- prefix means something similar to what we would call “earthy” or “earthlike,” but Earth is not a reference point for anyone in my worldbuilding, as it is so far back in history that it is barely in folklore at all, let alone myths. They are also called the “Bow of Worlds” due to their temporary archery bow-like configuration — several of the stars are gravitationally moving together, but others are not, so the analogy will eventually not work.
Last year, over a decade after I decided on that, I read Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?, and it turns out that my hunch is consistent with human population science.
Incidentally, the only place Earth has made it into folklore or myth is a statement that some of the older demimortal and immortal characters sometimes make in some form or other — “We destroyed the first world due to our appetites, the second due to our tempers. We planned to make our societies well-governed here, to stop hurting ourselves like that, and if you look around, I don’t think we’re doing a very good job of that.” That is a pessimistic statement, in my opinion. On a Platonic gloss level, the fact that Ameisa and its sister planets keep having civilizational collapses is really just an analogy to the rational soul reincarnating across multiple lives, even when the appetites and emotions are being governed. None of the Ameisa-and-sisters’ collapses has rendered a planet uninhabitable to humans.
The ḥ is a glottal stop, like the dash in uh-oh or the apostrophe in Hawai’i.
I’m 99% sure that both thought that was a win and not just a co-sentencing into a (figurative) bureaucratic Hell Realm.
Our two closest relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo, have patriarchal and matriarchal social configurations respectively. The narratives that we tell about ourselves, while there are some roots in physiological constraints and evolutionary traits, especially given how difficult human childbirth is in comparison to other species, are far more flexible than many people think.
I’m using this example intentionally. Lillian Faderman spent a lot of time in The Gay Revolution talking about the duo’s 1960s gay activism, and they were very focused on the Lavender Scare’s fallout — demedicalization (lobotomies were frequently performed on lesbians, for example, as a “cure”; aversion torture was also very normal) and ending employment discrimination. Kameny’s picketing campaign is what coined the phrase GAY IS GOOD. Given Kameny and Gittings’ focus on social integration, they had some culture clashes post-Stonewall with activists who wanted to embrace the counterculture. We can still see these sixty-year-old tensions playing out today.
I wrote a story, “The Waterfall Commune,” that was a thought exploration piece about how young people might actually have a home together with non-relatives in one of these societies. The narrator’s spouse, a woman named Sahiti, married into her family because the narrator’s family is higher-status. “We hjathomahi went to the gymnasium near my family’s home and met Sahiti and Morau back at the house for electrolyte drinks and entertainment,” she says in the story. Morau is a man married to a jomela (male children who are dedicated to the Goddess Likhera as toddlers and are then raised as daughters), and his jomela spouse, Konnajo, has hjathoma and is thus part of the “we hjathomahi.” Someone randomly meeting Sahiti on the street would likely call her a hjathomahi until corrected because she is a woman. Most jomela marry men, not other jomela or women, so the same is assumed of any jomela.
There are 7 social genders in Laseå’s Welåden culture. On Ameisa, there are 3 in Sabaji Tveshi culture, 4 in other Sabaji cultures, and 5-6 in Ịgzarhjenya cultures. One of my translation struggles is trying to figure out how to mark these social environments while writing in English. All of the noun classification systems in these languages are based on animacy, and human pronouns only inflect based on formality and number, if anything at all. In all of those cultures, girls and boys become women and men unless they have an intervention ritual that initiates them into a new social identity, with a specific deity or set of deities overseeing the rite of passage, which comes with a set of new ritual responsibilities and rigid gender expectations. There is always a core theurgic base upon which culture is layered. I tried using le for everyone in the 2010s and letting readers pick out what was going on based on context, but received feedback that that was too difficult, especially since even women and men do not have the same gender expectations as us, so I’m now inflecting he and she and giving le to everyone else. It’s far easier to translate Hịciptụ and Sāqab cultures because they have encoded gender into their grammar — “default” constructions and then honorifics for those initiated into women and men’s mysteries, where foreigners and the uninitiated (and some mystics) are all given the “default.” This is also admittedly easier in the first person omniscient stories because the narrator, Àwiðeàb, does not take for granted that her readers are from the culture she is writing about or that they are history-aware even though she takes for granted that everyone is descended from Ameisa’s First City. The first-person limited stories make a lot of assumptions because the narrators are more oblivious to the need to offer glosses.