Look, the LEGAL aspects of marriage aren’t for my community–the people who know me personally.
They are to give strangers some idea of what to do when I go to the hospital and tell start giving them instructions about what medical care an unconscious person should have. How do they know whether to ignore my instructions, or follow my instructions.
Similarly, when a person dies, and I claim that dead person’s property, what do the cops say? Do they arrest me for robbery, or send my on my way with the stuff? How do they know what they should do?
This is the purpose of the marriage license on file down at the courthouse. So these complete strangers will let me care for my unconscious wife. My friends and family and community don’t care whether I have a piece of paper on file down at the courthouse, because they already know how my wife and I have things arranged.
If you want to arrange these things *a la carte * rather than just be getting married, go ahead and file a will, a durable power of attorney, and on and on. Lots of same sex couples that can’t get legally married consult attorneys and create a giant stack of legal documents so that when one or the other is incapacitated the other one isn’t shut out of the decision making process. Yeah, you can do that rather than “get married”.
But if your relationship is between you and your steady, and you want to leave The Man completely out of it, well, eventually there will come a day when decisions will have to be made, and if The Man doesn’t have legal documents on hand proving your right to make those decisions, they’ll treat the two of you as strangers. How many times have we heard the story of a same sex couple, and one person is in the hospital, and the asshole fundamentalist parents are the official next of kin and are legally able to deny the other partner any access to the sick partner?
If we lived in a tribal social structure, we wouldn’t need any legal definition of marriage because the only people who would matter would be those people known to us personally. There wouldn’t be any legal definition of marriage, because there wouldn’t be any codified legal system, just a bunch of customs that we follow because that’s what we do.
But we live in a vast impersonal nation state where we regularly come in contact with thousands of strangers every day. And this is why we need laws, written down laws, because these people are strangers. And this is why “get government out of marriage” makes no sense. We regularly interact with strangers, and without legal protection of relationships those strangers will treat us as strangers.