It's hard to believe such an in depth overview of the anthropology of marriage skips the massive elephant in the room: that polygynous societies were widely found to be in a perpetual state of civil war and seem perpetually unable to develop stable, modern institutions. When a substantial part of your young men have no chance of ever buying themselves a wife, the only way they can be recognized and respected as adult men is to join a militia that promises one, or at least gives them guns so they can aquire by force the cows they need.

The corollary for western monogamous society should be clear: traditional marriage is not strictly repressive, it's also a form of egalitarianism and redistribution of social capital.

If we dismantle marriage and let raw pastoralist dynamics run rampant, we might very well see the same hypergamous tendencies and that many of those excluded from the love market take up "other", less peaceful pastimes.