What would your descendants need to remember about you? Part IV

Marrying the graph

Author

Ray Doraisamy
January 23, 2026

Centuries from now, people will still use pair-bonds to architect webs.

Sometime in the sixties, a French teacher in Singapore found a promising young postmaster. A local. She proceeded to marry him, and encouraged him to join the Air Force.

He would rise through the ranks, and she would introduce other cultures to his younger siblings and parents.

Opportunities would come their way.

One of the postmaster's younger brothers was my father.

***

The Medicis are often taken as promoters of new men, and Marxists love to paint their rise as part of a class struggle.

However, a look at their marriages show that they did not marry New Men. In fact, it is not that the Medicis liked the New Men, so much that they didn't completely shun them- which is what the incumbent oligarchs did.

Instead, the Medicis kept business and marriage relationships separate.

Within their neighborhood, they cultivated business relationships with New Men.

Outside of their neighborhood, they married other Patricians.

a) They could start to accept daughters from lower social groups. But this moved patricians down to the new men's status level, in other patricians' eyes (b) Alternatively, they could start to marry fellow isolates outside the neighborhood

This at least preserved their claim to status, even if it did nothing to restore power.

For outcasts who wanted to remain patricians, this extra-neighborhood marriage game was the only game in town.

Oligarchs married both outside and inside the neighborhood.

In short, this is how we claim the outcast Medici discovered their "leading edge" and highly consequential marriage strategy. Near exclusive intermarriage with patricians outside their own neighborhood was a network strategy forced on the Medici by the resurgent oligarchs' successful blockage of Medici marriage with their San Giovanni patrician neighbors. The half of the Medici party that was based on marriage was "chosen" by the Medici family only in the sense of positional chess: oligarchs structurally induced their choice.

This led to the Medicis as a hub in a wheel, with each of their connections as a spoke.

Their in-laws wouldn't deign to talk to their business associates. Their business associates couldn't get into rooms with their in-laws.

So the Medicis were the sole intermediaries.

Contrast this to the oligarchs, who had deep multi-way connections- what I would usually count on winning.

However, it is very difficult to make decisions among equals with equal access to information.

The Medicis, meanwhile, had no rivals for power within their faction.

Something curious has happened to the friends of my childhood.

Across race and class, many of them are now related.

This apparently happened to Dallas elites, as well.

“Through moderate levels of intermarriage and reproduction, and over the course of just fifty years, the white upper class of Dallas went from a collection of largely unrelated newcomers to a massive, interconnected family web.”

In truth, this is what my father had hoped for me.

Though I think he’s happy with my exogamy, in the end.

Which families among the Hasidic families were more and which were less attractive as candidates for a match? How did the tsadikim choose candidates for their in-laws? Here varying levels of centrality and peripherality, essential categories in network analysis, come to hand.

In other words, attractiveness to a family is about which families are most inside.

For the Hasidim, the most important gain was "symbolic capital."

And what of Joseon?

Forming a marriage relationship with a powerful family is more important than descent for increasing the chance of obtaining a high rank in the bureaucracy.

The size of the marriage effect was larger than that of the father’s official rank (descent effect) and the individual’s civil service examination rank (meritocratic effect).

The Medicis captured a social bottleneck. The Hasidim got symbolic capital. Joseon families got bureaucratic rank.

Many families seem to marry to get or stay inside.

The Medicis showed what happens when you marry to create a new inside.

So for your descendants:

What graph did or will you marry, and why? What network shape will your bonds lead to, and what will that shape do for you?

Where did you want to get inside?