That’s just the thing though; we don’t know about causality. For example, it’s much easier for a cohabiting couple to break up than a married couple, logistically speaking. So I think it stands to reason they have higher break-up rates. I don’t think it’s a good outcome when your spouse would break up with you but they don’t because it’s more of a hassle than if you were just shacking up.
You get married because you want to make clear that your “next-of-kin” is now this other person. It’s a nice way of telling your mom, your sister, your BFF that you’re going to put someone else in front of them now. You marry someone because the two of you are what you mean when you say “we”.
After saying “Yep! wait, I mean…never mind, nope!” many times to many men over a couple dozen years, at 45 I finally said 'Yes" to MrTao’s proposal, and it stuck. Mostly because it took 6 months for me to get him the answer, and during that time he just waited. Smart guy. 
As to why I married him, it’s because it made him happy, and I wanted to do that.
As for why HE married ME, I’m a little lost on that one. But he’s been married before, so I guess old habits die hard. That, and I tend to wander, so he figured maybe a ring might weigh me down a bit. He was right. 
Marriage is great for the small number of couples who end up growing together (instead of apart) and remain reasonably attracted to each other until they die (rather than becoming repulsed). For everyone else, there’s always divorce or liquor.
Married people tend to build their entire identity around marriage (and kids, if applicable). But divorce rates notwithstanding, not every marriage is a happy one. Couples who decide to stay married regardless of their partner’s behavior/choices/hygiene end up with unhappiness on one or both sides. You can blame it on social pressure, and perhaps that’s the real reason for those in older generations. But nowadays, it’s mostly because staying unhappily married is more comfortable than the alternative.
In short, I have more than one pair of married relatives who fucking *despise *each other. Coupled with the high divorce rate… welp, I don’t fancy those odds.
I completely agree that you can’t take a marriage “lasting” as evidence of it’s success, but I think there is an important flip side to that as well: a marriage ending in divorce isn’t always a failure, or at least wasn’t always a bad idea. If two people have ten good years together, where they both grow and learn from each other while providing mutual support, and then it falls apart and they go their separate ways–is that a failure? Even if the last year or two is ugly and painful, that doesn’t undo whatever good came before.
As others have said, I like the idea of announcing to our friends and family that we love each other and plan to spend the rest of our lives with each other. Both of us were also brought up in a culture where getting married is the “proper” thing to do if you want to grow old together. So yes, cultural conditioning plays a big part as well.
In our case it is also a practical decision (we’re not married yet but will be soon). He’s Irish and I’m Korean, and it’s just easier for us to be married if we want to live together and have children. For example - an American friend of mine married a Korean girl here but never registered their marriage with the US embassy. Then they had a daughter. Legally she is entitled to American citizenship because one of her parents is American, but because they hadn’t registered their marriage, technically she was born out of wedlock. So he had to do a hell of a lot more paperwork and a DNA test to prove she was actually his daughter.
25 years later, and I’m still asking that.
Now we know he is Centauri…
This is what I was going to say. Marriage represents commitment. Every relationship is going to have some problems at some point and there’s going to be a temptation to end the relationship. Any relationship will hold together through the good times. Marriage is a commitment to stay together through the bad times.
That is what they say but why? What if you could stay together if you tried hard enough or you could just call it quits and do better individually or in some other arrangement? That is an honest question. People tend to treat forever lasting marriages as some sort of triumph even though there is no reward from it and the result of that decision often causes destruction not only to themselves but also of others just because of the decision to keep the marriage together no matter what.
Wouldn’t it be smarter to have point where the costs (emotional, financial, family and otherwise) just make you decide your marriage isn’t worth it anymore even if you could slog through it until death if you tried hard enough?
He’s talking about “some problems,” and you quickly leap into talking about toxic relationships that destroy multiple people. :dubious: I’m pretty sure no one here, at least (I admit there are some “but I said ‘until death do us part’!!!1omg” people in this world and I have doubts about their sanity), values staying with an abusive asshole or serial cheater or other destructive person, regardless of relationship status.
But bailing on a committed partner just because you don’t have shiny happy days all the time or he/she is on the downslope of the “richer or poorer” or “in sickness and in health”… that’s called being [del]Newt Gingrich[/del] a jerk.
Basically because it is the expected thing in my little slice of society for a couple who love one another, live together, and plan on having kids. It’s not legally required, but it does make a lot of little things easier. I’d also have been OK with just living together but my wife, not so much.
For me, this.
That said, my wife likes to quote a statistic (not sure if there’s a cite): The life expectancy for married men is longer than for single men. The life expectancy for married women is shorter than for single women.
My husband and I made a private commitment to spend the rest of our lives together after being together for about two years. The primary motivation for marriage (ten years into our relationship) was to ensure I could get a visa as a spouse of a British citizen when we moved to the UK.
To me, the commitment made in private was much more important than the civil ceremony held in public. Maybe that’s a sign of our introverted personalities.
I do like referring to him as my ‘husband’. We don’t have a proper word for ‘someone I’ve committed to spending a lifetime with but haven’t signed a legal document’. There are a number of words, but they can mean different things to different people.
We married at age 23, after four years together. We were the first among our peers to get hitched. I married him because I have always been madly in love with him. He exhibited a lot behaviors that pointed to a successful marriage - he is open to change, takes his responsibilities seriously, is very easy to talk to, shares a lot of my interests, and accepts the fact that I am batshit insane. I really considered the day-to-day aspect - how our values were similar and whether we both wanted essentially the same thing out of life. We can talk for hours so it was clear this was a real companionship.
I didn’t truly realize it until our wedding day, but marriage is something you do for your community more than for yourself. For us it was a symbol of this commitment we had to one another, and it was very important for our friends and family to see us publicly express this commitment. It was a real joy to see the love and support of so many people.
We definitely changed a lot over our twenties, and faced many challenges, but somehow we grew closer together rather than further apart. I think I made a wise decision. We are both very happy with our marriage after six years.
Why married instead of living together in a long-term committed relationship?
I wanted the legal protections marriage provides. Plus it simplifies a lot of stuff when the person is designated your spouse. It also gave me some legitimacy (with schools and day camps) with my stepson.
It was a signal to my stepson that we would be together for him for the long haul.
Tradition.
It was fun to have a wedding and celebrate with our friends. It was touching to see my dad cry at our wedding.
In Spain a very common reason to move from “living together” to “married” is that they’ve decided to try for children (or decided it a while back and the kid’s already in the way); it’s a way to announce to the wannabe grandmothers that it is finally ok for them to start asking “soooo… any good news?” Another one is tradition/religious imperative, but nowadays it’s rarer; we have people who are practicing Catholics but who either choose to have a non-legally binding religious ceremony or not to have any (less confusing for the relatives), because there would be negative consequences to getting the paperwork done (higher taxes, HR discriminatory practices toward married women - for example, often the HR people assume that a married woman will not be willing to travel, whereas married status isn’t a consideration for men; note that this can be a PITA both to married women who are interested in jobs that involve traveling and for men who are not).
I got married the first time because my boyfriend and I were both in the airforce and if we wanted to stay in the same general area we needed to be married. Posting boards do not consider “informal relationships” no matter how committed you think you are.
Turns out the marriage didn’t last long enough for that to matter.
I was really hesitant to get married to my current husband. We were living together, we were happy, why screw that up? He wanted to get married and he was sure that he was going to love me forever so what was I so worried about? Turns out he was right. We had some rough patches around the 4-5 year mark and if we hadn’t been married I would probably have just walked away and missed out on the last decade plus of happiness. We both had to work at it but it was completely worth it.
We wanted to make serious vows to one another in front of our friends and families. We wanted to, you know, be all in. Plus, if we do decide to have children, we felt marriage was important.
Not to mention, of course, the million little benefits of marriage - you can see each other in the hospital, you can be on each other’s insurance, you can receive death benefits, etc.
ETA - also it is very nice to have a real word to call somebody - “boyfriend” doesn’t quite cut it when somebody lives with you, “partner” suggests that you’re either gay or have a law firm together, etc. Still not used to saying “husband”, but “fiance” was a definite improvement on the alternatives.