In most social organizations there is a marked difference between their formal and informal structures. The people with the greatest amount of power are not necessarily those in the leading positions, and the way day-to-day business is transacted rarely fits the written rules regulating these transactions. In organizational development, the trick is to adjust the organizational design to the intricacies of informal structures rather than insist on the simplicities of formal ones. This is a bit like paving the paths that people cut through parks rather than putting up ineffectual signs prohibiting access across grass. Why is this not applied to marriage, as well? Men and women “cheat” left and right, people stumble from marriage to marriage, but we still insist on the sanctity of the institution. Why not accept the “informal” relationships that people actually establish over their lifetimes as the ideal toward which “marriage” should develop? The web of these relationships changes all the time, but its core changes less quickly than its periphery. Different people establish webs of different sizes and degrees of complexity, but few stick for long to the ideals of marriage, as sanctioned by either the church or the state. These webs are old, deeply entrenched in our brains over many millennia of human development. One way or the other, this is where we are heading as both men and women gain economic and social freedom to run their lives as they see fit.