Christians look largely to the New Testament concerning marriage. Paul was quite adamant that marriage was intended to be the union of one man and one woman. It takes some serious mental gymnastics to try to draw a different conclusion.
Interestingly, your description of the marriage relationship is totally wrong. Men are commanded to love their wives and wives are commanded to respect their husbands. When your obligation to your wife means putting her ahead of your desires, it is pretty clear the woman is not "property" but you and the woman are soulmates... one flesh.
Sadly, to many men point to the verse where women are supposed to respect and obey their husbands, while forgetting about the verse that they are supposed to love their wives.
However, if a man follows the Bible and puts his wife needs and desires ahead of his own (as Christ did to the point of death) for his "spouse" (the Church), then I suspect most women would have little problem with the relationship.
Sadly, most men put their own selfish desires ahead of their wives and the result is that women lose respect for them, and the marriage fails.
In the Old Testament marriage was both a "social safety net" and a relationship between one man and one woman.
As a societal organization it was designed to minimize the number of widows and orphans (the product of a time where men were constantly dying in war). Powerful men abused this provision and took additional wives simply for the pleasure it afforded them. Reading some of the ancient Jewish texts, Jewish scribes blamed the collapse of Israel for this immoral behavior. Many pointing to King Soloman as the epitome of this depraved behavior.
In essence, the only justification for a man having more than one wife was so that the woman would not be destitute, which would have happened in a society without a social safety net and many widows with children incapable of supporting themselves.
And in the instance where there was no one to marry the widow, then the community through the church was charged with caring for them. A far less preferable arrangement when compared to the benefits of being in an extended family.
The reverse was not true, because for the most part the society simply did not have a surplus of men and women were not expected to support a man.
So, understanding the purpose of marriage as a societal building block that was used to minimize poverty and provide a secure setting to raise children as well as a soul mate kind of make the idea of gay marriage seem silly in light of its broader purpose.
One could make the argument that marriage is no longer necessary in a modern society and that is evidenced by the fact that nearly half of all children are born outside of marriage and many people no longer operate within the ties of an extended family. Instead, at a civil secular level, marriage has evolved to reflect a societal contract where absent a prenuptial agreement the terms of that contract are grounded in common and civil law. This explains why many prefer to refer to this relationship not as "marriage" but rather a "civil union".
