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I’m convinced this is the next big legal/political marriage change after gay marriage. Though, this one might be a bit harder for developers. I imagine most government databases are setup to assume a 1-to-1 marriage relationship rather than a many-to-many relationship.

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There will be plenty of time to fix the code. Like most social change, it will be politicized, fought against bitterly by the usual suspects, and the battle will drag on until enough of the detractors die of old age so that finally another piece of society can move on. We'll have entirely different databases by the time the 1:1 mappings have to be fixed.

Would you have said any different about prohibition or eugenics in the 1920s? The progressive causes of that time period

> We'll have entirely different databases by the time the 1:1 mappings have to be fixed.

Don’t underestimate how long government databases can linger. Not so long ago I worked with data from a school system than was running on RDB - an old VAX based database from the 80’s. They kept it going on a virtualised OpenVMS system rather than rewrite it. This system was so old that they were using it when I was in school myself.

I’m reminded of Steve Yegge in 2009 saying, “Everyone these days, when debating the merits and demerits of marijuana legalization, seems to have completely overlooked the fact that it's HARD. It's a project of vast, nearly unimaginable complexity.”

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

It's harder legally: marriages at the moment end when one partner leaves or dies.

A polyamorous marriage on the other hand would be more similar to the board of a corporation since it theoretically could be immortal through consistently replacing partners.

> A polyamorous marriage on the other hand would be more similar to the board of a corporation since it theoretically could be immortal through consistently replacing partners.

I remember reading a SF story that had that sort of arrangement, but I can’t remember the name.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress? The Expanse?

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? The Cat Who Walks Through Walls?

A lot of Heinlein's stuff had polyamory at least in the background, it not front and center.

More recently, The Expanse dealt with it.

Though, honestly, the other spouses all just felt like 2D cutouts of characters, existing solely to show the "open mindedness" of the main character.

I don't think I've ever seen a story that really dealt with polyamory with all the characters having agency. Though, granted, haven't gone out of my way to look for it.

I’ve made this work with a multi member LLC. Anything an LLC can’t handle is done with power of attorney.

Marriage of Theseus.

It's Christmas, why do you have to be giving me panic attacks like this ;-)

Every relationship in a relational database eventually requires a join table.

This is the funniest take on polyamory I've read in years.

Does a government really need a database of marriages? IRS is the only agency I can think of, but they probably don’t need to put it in a database. I’m probably missing something though.

Sure. They need the info for handling inheritance, to handle disputes around divorces and also for rights around medical information and decision making when one is incapacitated.

Probably there are other reasons too.

I’ve been through all of those except the divorce, and I don’t think any of them involved a government database. It was all done with documents I provided.

Those were government documents, right? I assume if they were lost or destroyed, the government would need to go to a database to recreate them.

If your marriage license is lost or destroyed you request a copy of the original from the county where you were married. A clerk finds the license and makes copies to send you. Some counties make have digitized this.

It’s hilarious (in a good way) in threads like these that someone always bring up a pretty trivial aspect that, though relevant to the forum, is tiny compared to the other effects

that was my primary concern too. schema normalization

$dayJob is a records management system for LEA, we definitely support many-to-many subject relationships. You have to account for past and present as well, so from/to comes into play as well.

Now I start to think about inheritance and who would be considered a parent of a child from such marriage... All members, some paternity test? If paternity test is not allowed, all males?

Nah, we'll just use the existing spouse_id field in the records to set up a circular linked list through the polycule. A conventional two-person marriage is just a special case of that anyway.

Linked lists can only have two neighbours, a polycule can be arbitrarily complex.

(Depending on the purpose for which the data is being used, it may even be directional — e.g. for STD tracking, it does actually matter if someone has a cuckoldry kink).

What I'm hearing is I'll finally have a reason to learn graph databases if polyamory becomes mainstream.

I'm not sure which will come first: mainstream polyamory; or brain uploading.

If the latter, every personal ID has to switch from a single database entry to a git (or other vcs) repo, where relationships may or may not survive the branch.

Nice. Haven't yet gotten over timezones, now this.

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