Marriage as a means of insurance

I was strongly  influenced by the fact that new generation people are way smarter than our ancestors based on the theory of evolution. However, it seems like otherwise in terms of using marriage as a means of insurance for various purposes. 

Well, that topic has been intriguing not because of the word marriage but I was in awe thinking how smart our ancestors were even in a technologically deprived society where they solely depended on agriculture for their every day survival. 

Our professor mentioned how a family in one village prefers to marry off their sons/daughters in a village far away from their village to prevent the risk of going hungry in terms of natural disasters, which is a form of crop insurance.  Well this is because the natural disasters will not strike the two different villages at the same time and these two families tied through marriage can save each other in times of crisis. It’s amazing how the concept of insurance existed even before the actual insurance companies were born and my stupid brain thought the family wanted to handover the burden to the in-laws when they marry off their children. I am embarrassed to admit this though. 

This made me think about the arranged marriage systems which are still in practice in some parts of the world. Can this also be a kind of indirect insurance and if so what form of it? 

Even in Bhutan I believe some far flung parts of the country practices some sort of marriage insurance. I remember when I visited Laya a few years back my host shared the story of two brothers sharing one wife. They narrated how one husband goes to herd the yaks in the mountains and cannot return home for months. Hence,  the other brother stays at home doing other works to earn the income and particularly for the Layaps providing the porter service. They were even joking about the equivalency of their horses to Prado car. I didn’t realize it back then but now I can say this was also a form of insurance through the marriage especially to keep the flow of income and also the wife’s risk of becoming a widower is reduced with two husbands. It is also said that marriage within the family retains the wealth within the family only. I wonder if we still practise this kind of marriage or is it just a history now?

Would you agree that our grandparents who had a higher number of children compared to today’s generation took in marriage as an insurance to increase the number of workers to work on the farm? 

Today, forget about getting insured through marriage, most don’t even get married and there are many countries silently facing this issue. So my conclusion on this in relation to what I mentioned above is there are many insurance companies who are providing much better insurance options (hahaha). 

                        

                         

          Photo of my grandparents for they insured the family with
          8 children and now I am blessed with many cousins.