In a society composed of extended-family households, marriage does not bring as pronounced a change in lifestyle as it does in our culture, where the couple typically moves to a new residence and forms an independent family unit. Newlyweds in extended families are assimilated into an existing family unit. Margaret Mead described such a situation in Samoa:
In most marriages there is no sense of setting up a new and separate establishment. The change is felt in the change of residence for either husband or wife and in the reciprocal relations which spring up between the two families. But the young couple live in the main household, simply receiving a bamboo pillow, a mosquito net and a pile of mats for their bed. . . . The wife works with all the women of the household and waits on all the men. The husband shares the enterprises of the other men and boys. Neither in personal service given or received are the two marked off as a unit.114
A young couple in Samoa, as in other societies with extended families, generally has little decision-making power over the governing of the household. Often the responsibility of running the household rests with the senior male. Nor can the new family accumulate its own property and become independent; it is a part of the larger corporate structure:
So the young people bide their time. Eventually, when the old man dies or retires, they will own the homestead, they will run things. When their son grows up and marries, he will create a new subsidiary family to live with them, work for the greater glory of their extended family homestead, and wait for them to die.115
The extended family is more likely than the independent nuclear family to perpetuate itself as a social unit. In contrast with the independent nuclear family, which by definition disintegrates with the death of its senior members (the parents), the extended family is always adding junior families (monogamous, polygamous, or both), whose members become the senior members when their elders die.