Good honest answer. Probably best to limit it to a legal bond, since enforcing love as an aspect of marriage is effectively impossible, a mass invasion of privacy, and from a traditional POV often not the case, lots of 'traditional' marriages were basically just real estate deals and/or breeding compacts between families as you know. As various components of marriage go, love's mostly irrelevant to gay marriage anyway since barring a very few fiery eyed zealots no one seems to think gays can't love each other.



Titles tend to be important to people, since both Rush Limbaugh and Barrack Obama agree that gay marriage shouldn't be allowed but civil unions should be, would tend to make ya wonder what the debate is over, if not titles. I do happen to believe your definition, essentially bringing people together to form a new family node, ideally a loving one, is the preferred one, but pretty much all three - gay, poly, incest - and loveless marriages or elderly marriages fly into technical difficulties on that score. What I'm getting at with my OP is that virtually none of the objections or arguments in favor of just about any of these can't also apply to one of the others, and in part because there really is no set defined standard to get married. Incest being the weirdest of course, because as you say there is already a pre-existing love situation and pre-existing established titles and traditional relations, grandparents and aunts/uncles are regular involved with kids, often as a primary caregiver and living in the same home. However, that interference with pre-existing traditional roles that would apply to incest also flips onto gay marriage, there is not to my knowledge any tradition of it, even though obviously history is packed with examples of prolonged gay or non-romantic same gender family partnerships. We've also got that most 'love-centered' relations between people fall as romantic, family, or friend bonds, clearly most of us believe romantic and friend, and family and friend, are not only not mutually exclusive but added positives. So again, you get stuck with for/against arguments that would seem to apply equally well to other options.