Bride service denotes the service rendered to a bride's family by the bridegroom to validate a marriage. It has often been conceptualized in the extant literature as a type of bride-price. Such services are typically provided to the groom's father-in-law, though the groom may also be compelled to serve other affines, such as his mother-in-law or brothers-in-law. Bride service consists of a period of months or years before or after marriage during which the husband performs labor for his wife's parents. The classical compensatory interpretation of bride service contends that men serve their in-laws to establish rights to prospective wives. Rather than seeing affinity in terms of a compensation model whereby individuals are exchanged as objects, other scholars have emphasized the agentive capacities of differentially situated subjects in the arrangement and maintenance of matrimony.