I have a question for all the people that believe in the institute of marriage for reasons other than religious reasons (if you are religious and have non-religious reasons for favoring marriage then feel free to post). The question is simple, why bother? Few people treat the vows as solemn oaths anymore. Most people are willing to get divorced. There was a time when marriage was permanent. You stayed together even if you did not like each other. I am not suggesting people do this (I feel staying with someone you hate is a bad idea), but if you do not mean “until death do us part” then why get married in the first place. Other than the religious aspect, the only reason I see for marriage is so you can steal the other person’s money if you do get divorced, but that is far from a noble reason and I would hope that that is not the motivation for most marriages (even if it was, only one of the two people would be getting married for this reason).
Why do people not just live together as if they were married, without being married. I understand their is some social stigma to not being married, but that will go away if people stop acting like marriage is the only option. Do people believe that they are more likely to keep a promise if they have a marriage contract to back it up? There is no reason that you cannot live with someone for 50 years, raise a family, and never cheat on each other without being married. Marriage just seems to stick the nose of the law where it does not belong. Love and law should not be mixed in my opinion yet most people seem to enjoy the mixing.
One of the most confusing things I have heard is, “I am not going to wait around for you forever.” This is usually in the context of a woman that wants a man to marry her even though he does not want to. Why does she feel she needs to get married? She can live a life exactly as she would if she were married without ever getting the law involved in her love life. There was a time when marriage meant that the relationship would be permanent but that is no longer the case. Most people are willing to get divorced so marriage is no longer a life-long commitment. Other than taking the other person’s money in the case of divorce, I see no benefit to marriage. What am I failing to see?
Well, your last statement is wrong. Some people get benifits such as medical and dental that is extended onto their spouses but not their girl/boyfriends. DO NOT take this as a reason why to get married, just pointing this out.
That there is something between “till death do us part” and “this can be cancelled at a moment’s notice”. That marriage isn’t a relationship that involves just two people; it involves the whole society (note that traditionally, the vows are not made to each other, but to the priest, the representative of society). That while stigmas often go to irrational lengths, they usually have some rational basis. That there are benefits, legal and otherwise, other than “stealing” (and if you think that alimony is theft, that’s a whole other debate) money.
I’m an atheist who believes in the institution of marriage. I suppose the main reason is, it works better than other arrangements – for my wife and me, for our children and now for our first grand child.
Ryan’s question is a good one. If one intends to practice serial monogomy or to cheat, then what’s the point? For my spouse and me, the vow and the intent helped us decide to stay together through certain problem times. Our staying together probably benefited the two of us in the long-term, and almost certainly benefited our children.
I’m not a big believer in marriage…I had a starter marriage that kind of proved what a farce marriage can be. When my husband proposed, I didn’t say “yes” or “no.” I said “why?”
We got married, made the public committment to each other, had a big party. It was fun. I kept my maiden name. It was just like living together, except we paid more taxes.
Then we tried to have kids and couldn’t. I was very glad for that marriage license when it came time to prove we were married to the adoption agency.
There are still some things society gives married couples (in addition to higher taxes) that they don’t give people who are married in every sense but having a signed license. On a day to day basis these aren’t important - but need your spouse’s medical insurance, need to be the one to make life and death decisions if there is an accident, need spousal social security benefits, need to inheirit without a will - usually things you don’t need until a crisis - and that little useless piece of paper becomes priceless.
I am an atheist married to a Lutheran. Regardless of my religious views I am a traditional person, and the traditional way to raise a family in this culture is within marriage. Now, one can ‘mate for life’ without legally marrying, but there are tangible benefits to being married – legal benefits, I’m talking here – especially if you want to have and raise children. There are less tangible componants as well. Marital vows are not only or always spoken to God, but also to society. To marry is to announce to society that you are a team. I think that the marital vows are even more moving to an atheist than to a theist – after all, an atheist knows that ‘till death we do part’ is all the time that we have. To yoke yourself to one person for your one and only life is a powerful commitment. I love to see an elderly married couple – a couple who’ve been married for many years and who are still together. Such a couple speak volumes about commitment, sacrifice and the solidity of love in a changing world. Such a marriage is an ideal – not everyone can achieve it – but the fact that I do not believe in a god or gods does not prevent me from seeking that ideal.
I don’t think these statements are true. People who don’t believe in marriage may believe that marriage is not permanent and they may think divorce is always an option. Most people who do believe in marriage, though, are doing it because they are making a permanent commitment.
I was engaged to a man before I met my husband. About two months before we were supposed to get married, while we were discussing some problems we were having, he said, “Well, if it works out, it works out. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” (meaning the marriage) I immediately called the wedding off. I told my parents that I didn’t want it to be my 1st marriage. I am not willing to get divorced. That’s why I chose my husband so carefully. It is not an option for us to dissolve the commitment we made to each other and we both entered into this with that understanding.
If you don’t believe in marriage and wouldn’t place any weight on the vows entailed in a marriage, then I don’t see any reason why you should feel pressured to partake in marriage. Your feelings about marriage are not universal, though, and you can’t extrapolate your assumptions onto the understandings between other couples.
Procacious: A couple months ago you were arguing that since women have the right to choose an abortion, you should have the right to a get-out-of-paternity-free card. Now you’re arguing that marriage is a useless institution, and that women are just being irrational when they say they’re not going to hang around unless you’re willing to formalize the relationship. Unless, of course, they just want to be able to steal your money.
Dude, I swear, you are never gonna get laid with that attitude.
As the other posters have already pointed out, marriage offers plenty of legal and social benefits. Nobody’s forcing you to accept those benefits, of course. But don’t be surprised that other people might want them.
I’m a very non-religious person from a non-religious family that intend to marry one day (although that certainly isn’t my goal in life).
Why marriage instead of extended cohabitation.
First off, is the wedding. A wedding is a primarily a party. It is a chance to see old friends. It is also a chance to introduce your spouse to distant relatives in the family. Even though I am not religious, family is important to me. Weddings bring the entire family together, reconfirm it’s importance and formally welcome in a new member.
Secondly, a marriage is a formalizeing of intentions. Even though it may not be reality to commit “'till death do we part”, the least we can do is confirm that we intend to stay together and make the relationship work. It is hard to build a life together if you don’t have at least some kind of assurance that that life is not going to collapse without due notice.
Then, of course, comes legal benefits. I want my spouse to be able to confirm that I am an organ donor. I want my spouse to be able to share benefits with me.
Oddly enough, I think marriage should be a private social institution that the law does not mess with.
This is true, but many people seem to “marry for love” and not for money, which implies to me that people see something in marriage that I do not.
As I see it, one’s promise to stay together during hard times is not made any more valid by a marriage contract. You are either the type of person that keeps your word, or you are not. The piece of paper really doesn’t help (although I suppose there are those people that think that the paper does mean something and so they can lie all they want when no contract is involved, but the paper makes them keep their promises).
These are all examples of discrimination. There was finally a movement to grant these rights to homosexual couples that were not legally married, but no one seemed to feel that the right should also be granted to heterosexual couples that are not married. I proposed this to many people, but they all seemed to conclude that the heterosexual couple should just get married, as though it were the only option and a meaningless thing that all heterosexual couples should do. It is not meaningless. It is willfully inviting the law into your love life.
I find it disturbing that we as a society tend to believe that a person’s word is meaningless without a contract. In business I can understand it because it is a cutthroat world we live in and lying to get ahead is common and productive. However, a loving relationship without trust is doomed to failure. If your significant other promises to remain with you forever, no contract should be necessary to make you believe them. What is even worse is the sheer number of people that do believe in divorce. If the only reason that you need the contract is so that you can trust your partner and there is a 50% chance that you will get divorced anyway, what does that contract actually mean? If there is no reason to believe that your partner will value that contract anymore than he/she would value a promise made without a contract, then why is the contract so important to you?
My parents have been married for 42 years and they are horrible for each other. My father is too unwilling to communicate to be married to anyone and my mother suffers for it. But they have grown dependent on each other and will suffer together until one of them dies at which point he/she will suffer alone. Promising to stay together in misery does not really benefit anyone, including the children.
It seems that most people that view marriage as a permanent commitment are still willing to get divorced if the situation is bad enough. Though “permanent” in some respects, few are willing to stay together through anything. Even my mother constantly ponders divorce and she was raised in a time when divorce was considered totally unacceptable. She even feels that divorce is totally unacceptable yet considers it anyway. I do not blame her given the situation.
I am pleased to read of your caution. As far as I am concerned, no one should wed until they are absolutely sure that the person is the right person. Since people change over time, living together for 10 years before getting married doesn’t seem unreasonable. Especially when you consider that absolutely nothing will change once you get married.
I take all of my vows very seriously and never make a promise that I am not absolutely sure I cannot keep. If I fail to keep a promise it is because I am dead or unconscious. Contracts do not make my word any more or less valid. To say that you will love someone forever is a promise that no human can make. You cannot be sure that what you say is true. You hope it will be true. You can lie to yourself to make you feel that it is true. But you cannot make it true.
I am not against formalizing the relationship, I am against bringing the law into it. Having to go to court when you decide that you do not love each other anymore is not something that I will volunteer to do.
Sex is of little importance to me. There are greater things in life.
These legal and social benefits are examples of discrimination. There are so many movements to treat each other like equals, I do not see why so many people are against this one. If unmarried homosexual couples are entitled to the same rights as married couples (as I believe they are) then so are unmarried heterosexual couples. The fact that the heterosexual couples have the option to get married is irrelevant.
Cheer Finally. That is all I ask for. I have nothing against making a promise that I am able to keep. But the government has more control over my everyday life than I would like as it is. Asking me to voluntarily give the government even more control is not a reasonable thing to ask. You want my word. You can have it. And that should be good enough.
You also seem to be changing the basis for the debate a bit. You’ve gone from “marriage is worthless” to “the benefits of marriage are just discrimination.” Fine with me if you want to chalk up the legal benefits as discrimination. In some respects, at least, I would probably agree with you.
On the other hand, can you not see that, on a purely emotional level, there might be a big difference between the following promises:
[ul][li]Darling, I love you so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Subject, of course, to the proviso that I can drop your ass at any second with no consequences whatsoever. Will you hang out with me until one or the other of us gets bored and wanders off?[/li]
[li]Darling, I love you so much that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Subject, of course, to the proviso that I can drop your ass at any second if I’m willing to go through a drawn-out legal process that will probably result in you taking half of everything I own. Will you marry me?[/li][/ul]Of course, I’ll be omitting the second sentence of those statements when I propose to my girl.
You are right, those are examples of discrimination. If I had my way it would work this way:
Each adult can declare one other adult his/her “next of kin” That person gets treated like a spouse for the benefit of the law (benefits, inheritance, medical decisions, etc). Wouldn’t make any difference what your sexual relationship is.
Of course, that is bringing the law into it. But I lived with a boyfriend (or two) before marriage, and shacking up doesn’t mean I want him to make the decision on pulling the plug if I’m on life support. (More likely it meant that I was sick of having to keep underwear in two places)
And, I’m not willing to not get the benefits of marriage so that I can be victimized by the discrimination. Someone else can fight that battle.
(Minty, my hubbys proposal:
“We should get married”
“Why”
“Cause I’m tired of having to refer to you as that shameless hussy I shack up with. Wife is far easier to say.”
It should be pointed out that it’s quite possible to take care of probably 90% of the legal benefits of marriage through simple contractual relationships. Want to inherit from your SO? That’s what a will is for. The right to pull the plug on your vegetized body? Medical power of attorney should do quite nicely. Tax deduction and helath insurance? Okay, you’re s.o.l. on those two. But on the whole, you can’t beat a marriage for reducing permanent-relationsip paperwork.
Dangerosa: I’d have fallen for that proposal. But I’m just old-fashioned enough to think keeping toothbrushes in two different residences before marriage is still kind of appropriate. On the other hand, you ought to see the candles, champagne, and flowers I’m working on for Saturday night, even without a ring.
Well I’ve just recently got married and I’m an atheist. Maybe I can shed a bit of light. Marriage isn’t just the emotional bonding of two individuals it is also the economic bonding of those two individuals. My wife and I plan on purchasing large ticket items such as houses, automobiles, and plan on retiring together. It makes a lot of sense for us to economically combine.
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GASP! You mean she only married me because of my kick ass car? THat’s a rather cynical view my friend. I’d like to think that most people get married because they love one another and plan on spending their whole lives together.
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Because shacking up doesn’t confer the same legal protections and benefits of marriage.
I think I’ve pointed out at least one reason why marriage is a benefit. And you can’t get around it by saying they could draw up some other sort of legally binding contract.
I’ve always figured it was to get stuff. You know, everything in the relationship is the same as before, but now you have a blender, some fine china, perhaps a nice wok, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think marriage is worthless Those benefits that people have been mentioning are trivial to me (since most can be achieved in other ways that are less imposing). I didn’t mention them because I did not expect people to cite them as reasons for marriage, but since people did I brought up the fact that it is discriminatory to give those benefits only to married couples.
Yes, I would say omitting that second sentence probably would be to your benefit when proposing
I do see the difference between the two. However, staying together with someone you no longer love does not really benefit either of you very much. If you really want a divorce, it may as well be as easy as possible. If you do still love the person, but just want to be able to sleep around, then you should either learn to control yourself or not get married in the first place since it is cruel to subject the person you love to a marriage where you are always cheating.
My only trouble is that the marriage contract adds a little more paperwork than what was mentioned above. If I could line-item veto some of the marriage contract then that would be different
Exactly, and marriage does not do a single thing to help loving each other or spending your lives together. That can be done just as easily without marriage. The “benefits” of marriage seem largely to come in the case of divorce, in which case there never should have been a marriage in the first place. (The other benefits of marriage, such as pulling the plug, etc., should not be benefits of marriage because they should exist for all couples that want them).
So marriage really doesn’t have anything to do with love?
It is just as easy to buy such things with two bank accounts as with one.
I suppose I should point out that I am not against marriage existing in our society. Those that want to can. My problem is that just about everyone assumes that they will get married (even me, though I will be kicking and screaming the whole way ), as though there is no other choice. That that is the way it has always been and always shall be. In the case of a couple where they do stay together their entire lives, marriage only grants some very minor benefits (minor enough that I refer to them as worthless). In the case of the many relationships that do not work out, marriage makes a bad situation worse. Since so many relationships do not work out, marriage should be rare, not common. If marriage is done for the minor benefits it confers, then it has nothing to do with love at all.
Jerry Seinfeld (paraphrased from memory): “The problem I have with marriage is that it happens so often. Two people decided that they love eachother so much, they want to spend their whole lives together. That should happen what: two, three times a century?”
Saying that, let me turn the tables a little and ask why not get married? If you think that you have made all the commitments of a marriage, then how would it be a negative thing for you to actually go ahead and get married? Maybe the reason society discriminates against heterosexual couples that don’t get married is that society doesn’t truly believe that they are as serious as a married couple. You want the benefits? You claim that you are as serious? Then prove it! After all, nothing’s stopping you!
I’m not sure I totally agree with this myself, but I can understand the reasoning. And when setting a law as regards tax (for example), it is a lot simpler to draw the line at marriage than at some nebulous self-defined relationship.
I think the benefits of marriage go far beyond love and also go beyond legal benefits. There’s a big advantage to having a committed, permanent relationship. Marriage helps make the commitment stronger. (I don’t mean to deny that marriage is not for everyone. It certainly has downsides, too)
