Marriage

====Serial monogamy====
Governments that support monogamy may allow easy divorce. In a number of Western countries, divorce rates approach 50%. Those who remarry do so usually no more than three times.<ref>{{Cite web|date=2014-11-14|title=The Demographics of Remarriage|url=https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2014/11/14/chapter-2-the-demographics-of-remarriage/|access-date=2021-06-28|website=Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project|language=en-US}}</ref> Divorce and remarriage can thus result in "serial monogamy", i.e. having multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. This can be interpreted as a form of plural mating, as are those societies dominated by female-headed families in the [[Caribbean]], [[Mauritius]] and [[Brazil]] where there is frequent rotation of unmarried partners. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the "monogamous" category.<ref>{{cite book|last=Fox|first=Robin|title=Reproduction & Succession: Studies in Anthropology, Law and Society|year=1997|publisher=Transaction Publishers|location=New Brunswick, NJ|page=34}}</ref>

[[File:Hindu wedding couple.jpg|thumb|[[Hindu wedding|Indian Hindu wedding]] with the bride and groom in traditional dress.]]

Serial monogamy creates a new kind of relative, the "ex-". The "ex-wife", for example, may remain an active part of her "ex-husband's" or "ex-wife's" life, as they may be tied together by transfers of resources (alimony, child support), or shared child custody. Bob Simpson notes that in the British case, serial monogamy creates an "extended family" – a number of households tied together in this way, including mobile children (possible exes may include an ex-wife, an ex-brother-in-law, etc., but not an "ex-child"). These "unclear families" do not fit the mould of the monogamous [[nuclear family]]. As a series of connected households, they come to resemble the polygynous model of separate households maintained by mothers with children, tied by a male to whom they are married or divorced.<ref>{{cite book|last=Simpson|first=Bob|title=Changing Families: An Ethnographic Approach to Divorce and Separation|year=1998|publisher=Berg|location=Oxford}}</ref>