ABSTRACT
There are three kinds of bonds between human beings: biological and natural; legal and artificial; social and voluntary. Marriage can be seen as an artificial and legal means of shifting the loose bonding of the third category of relationship into the deep and inescapable bonding of the first. The desire to create bonds of this type is widespread, but non-bonding, too, has been recommended either as good in itself—a way of achieving peace of mind or personal emancipation through wider relationships—or as necessary self-denial for some higher cause. In the latter case, the bonds of family are seen as a positive good, a view shared, though for different reasons, by religious and political conservatives and by revisionist feminists.
