>a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know

>a polygamous marriage necessarily requires that 2 people of the same sex are married to each other I never heard of that idea before, but I didn't really know anything about how it is in fact defined where it is legal and customary. I found something that describes the "Law of Marriage Act of 1971" of Tanzania: "Under Section 10(1) of the Act, a marriage is defined as “the voluntary union of a man and a woman, intended to last for their joint lives,” and may either be monogamous or polygamous (or potentially polygamous). Further, under Section 57, no wife in a polygamous marriage holds a superior position in matrimonial homes than any other wife." I read that as saying that polygamy consists of a set of bilateral relationships having one person in common, and not a complete graph of all possible relationships between the individuals. The paper I found that in seems to be about issues arising in divorce in Tanzania. The problem is stated as: "Because non-divorcing co-wives cannot be a party to divorce proceedings, and only parties can claim a stake in marital assets, the LMA currently offers no means for non-divorcing co-wives to claim a stake in marital property" This sounds to me like wives are not considered to have a relationship to each other, and that has social implications which are important. One can't overgeneralize based on this one source and one country, but it tends to make me more confident in my guess that "non-transitive" is the norm.