Reader Danae says:
A good discussion I’d love to have sometime is: What’s the purpose of marriage?
That would be an interesting discussion. Let’s have it!
Personally, I think of marriage as a partnership. It is two people formally coming together, becoming stronger than they were by themselves. Things are easier when done together. The easiest place to see this is with children. Being a single parent is very difficult — with two parents it is much easier.
People marry for love, companionship, financial stability, and emotional stability. I don’t see anything inherently religious in marriage.
So what do you think the purpose of marriage is?
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49 Comments
Speaking as a philosophy student studying religion and politics, it started as an ownership relationship and is now a social custom aimed at ensuring the fathership of any fruit of the union. It doesn’t work; one study showed that fully one in 7 children have a different father to what they think they have, with the exception of groups such as the Amish, where the figure is more like 1 in 20.
Speaking as a person, I’d describe it as a statement of partnership, that this is a person you would like to be with so much that you want to be legally tied to them.
@wazza: In some Christian circles and many Islamic circles, it still seems marriage is a type of ownership. Why else would women have to vow to “obey their husbands”?
Also in Islam, women are often married to men whom they don’t know and/or don’t like. Sad.
Where we have dating sites, Islam has “matrimony sites”. Their ads are for some reason often displayed at the bottom of the page on Rationalwiki. It always makes me give a little rueful chuckle. I’m a firm believer in premarital sex, the same way I’m a believer in test-driving a car before you buy it or going on practice expeditions with people before you attempt an antarctic crossing with them…
My personal take is that a lot of people are starting to see marriage as a materialistic thing that they need to “have”, in the same way that they want the latest iPod, designer clothes, or fast car. If they don’t have it then they feel that they’re looked down on by their peers. In that sense, the purpose of marriage is more about improving status and self esteem.
I think that the modern media encourages this too. Magazines in particular (gossip/celeb magazines for example) raise the level of self expectation to ridiculous heights and IMO put a huge amount of pressure on people and relationships to conform to the apparent dream lifestyle of people like Brad & Angelina. From personal experience, I think that it can result in delusional behaviour inside relationships, and encourage couples to get married when actually they’re not right for each other.
As a single guy, I’m incredibly cautious when meeting a girl to see if she subscribes to this materialistic notion of a relationship. I want to know she’s interested in me, not some idealistic fantasy.
Oh, and I can be romantic too. There’s always room for that ;-)
You got it exactly right…I never thought of it that way. I got married mainly because I got tired of people asking me when I finally would…and I am now going through a divorce.
I tend to be a pragmatist. People pair up. It maybe more cultural than instinctive, but it is the way it is. Marriage is simply a legal or social recognition of this fact.
To steal a definition I picked up from the blog Positive Liberty, marriage is the legal recognition that two people’s lives can become so intertwined as to become inseparable. Attempts to treat them as two separate people, personally or financially, will lead to problems. Marriage law is a body of legal attempts to deal with this fact.
@VorJack
That’s a nice definition. Something I could live by.
Marriage is a political union for benefits. Everything else that you list – the joining together, the love, the partnership-can all be achieved without marriage. If you got rid of the economic and legal advantages, I suspect that marriage itself would die a slow death (as it takes longer for religions to lose their hold) or at least a large reduction. From what I’ve read of Scandinavian countries, they have other ways to get the benefits of marriage, and marriage is on the decline in those countries. It has been (do a lesser degree) in the US as well, and I think that is part of the reason for the “preserve traditional marriage” drive – to keep the exceptionalism of the married state. To be married means to have 1000+ perks, with a slight downside. If it were easy to achieve the same perks without the downside, then why would people choose marriage (well, a lot of reasons, cultural and religious are a few, but that’s not the point I was trying to make)?
Marriage doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s merely a label placed upon two people in committed relationship. I was once married so I may be a little jaded about the title these days, but for me I don’t need a label, a piece of paper, or some grand ceremony to show the world that I’m committed to the woman I love. However, society has placed “marriage” above all other unions, granting them benefits and legal resources that other unions must go to court to obtain. It’s kinda sad, really.
If you browse the newsstands these days, you see tons of wedding-themed magazines. I wonder if most women these days want a marriage or a wedding. I guess that’s another discussion for another day.
The definition of marriage that VorJack referenced is very interesting.
I’m rambling and I don’t seem to have a point. Good question today, Daniel.
Badger is right – Marriage is a civil contract between individuals for the purposes of sharing property. All the other stuff can be had without marriage.
I don’t see any meaning with marriage. All the points you bring up doesn’t require getting married, except the finanicial part since that is governed by laws.
@Daniel: Not one to normally stand-up for religion but to try and imply that Christianity or Islam is somehow the prime cause of marriages of ownership or forced marriages doesn’t hold true. The reason is far more of a culturally one and yes I agree that culture and religion can appear to be one and the same and the issue of forced marriage is an especially complex one. To me what you have said no really better than claiming that Stalin was a butcher because he was an atheist and not he was a butcher who happened to an atheist.
@Jabster: I didn’t say it was the prime cause or the originator — but it certainly seems to be to be one of the main perpetrators today. Do you disagree with that?
I really think it was all about easy transfer of property to heirs. I married Jane, therefore the children Jane and I have get our property when we die. I mean, since I will also be having bastards with the scullery maid and tavern girl, and we need to make a legal distinction when it comes to inheritance.
In modern times this has evolved into needing two people to raise a child to adulthood. And people tend to get married with the implicit understanding that this is the natural step just prior to beginning to have children.
Which is funny to me, since I am in the 18th year of a very stable and loving marriage, and yet my wife and I have no desire to have kids. When people find this out, they often ask, “Then why get married?”
So, I’d say that to most people Marriage still equals kids.
I think marriage is a decision to be FAMILY for the rest of our lives, or for however long the marriage lasts.
When we are born, we get a birth certificate, when we buy a house we get some paper that says the property belongs to us, and when we get married, we get a marriage license.
My husband and I don’t have children, but we are a family. We are a little army that faces life together. We support each other on all life endeavors and also cuddle and love each other and satisfy our animal instincts. It is a very complete relationship.
I suppose the piece of paper is not necessary, but it is helpful, in that the permanency of the relationship has a beginning. For example, my husband started getting retirement funds on my name shortly after the wedding.
If we had just moved in together, at what point during the relationship would he have known that I was committed enough to him so that he could invest in my retirement?
I think getting married makes it official that we are committed to each other and that it is OK to make plans for the future together, because at least at that moment, we are prepared to be together for the rest of our lives.
We seem to have a disconnect between what marriage was and is and what we think marriage should be.
Marriage was a form of bondage, literally. It was a father literally selling his daughter to another man as a sex and house slave.
Marriage is, in many cultures, still just that. Muslim cultures still engage in the literal selling of women. Marriage acts as a partnership in some circumstances, and in modern America this is true more than in Saudi Arabia, but there are still marriages of convenience, marriages for the sake of financial stability and pension and so on. Not all marriages are partnerships for the sake of interpersonal reward.
Marriage should be a relationship sustained by interpersonal compassion, physical and emotional intimacy and understanding.
@Daniel: I would disagree with it being a perpetrator yes. Is it more prevalent in cultures that have stronger ideas of their “own” culture and family ties – yes. Do these type of communities have a stronger religious background – also yes. This still doesn’t mean that religion is the perpetrator. Obvious the whole issue is far more complicated than this but I still stand by my original comment to your post which I believe is a gross simplification of the issues raised.
OFF TOPIC:
Just found your blog via Pharyngula and linked to you. I, too, am on the same journey from christianity to atheism. It’s a hard road, but it’s alway nice when I find someone who understands.
Hi Lab Kat.
There are several of us reformed christians here. Welcome to our unholy fold.
INMHO, marriage is simply the vehicle used in law to determine ownership and responsibility. People already have good relationships. It’s when they go bad that the necessity of legal marriage kicks in. Sad but true.
Jabster, would it be accurate to say, do you think, that religion is a statistically necessary cause of forced marriages but not a sufficient cause thereof? In other words, forced marriages – for whatever reason – are correlated so highly that one would not expect to see many, if any at all, in areligious contexts; but, at the same time, religion alone doesn’t guarantee in any sense that forced marriages will occur. If so, I would suggest that perhaps both the prominence of whichever religion and the forced marriages are caused by the same underlying social force – a constant sense of threat, for instance, often makes people more religious and less open to compromise or dissent. Under that scenario, perhaps an area where the government is unable to provide basic infrastructure for its citizens would be an area where we would expect to see both high religiosity and a relatively large number of forced marriages.
Anyway, to answer the original question, the purpose of religion *in the U.S.* – this is a necessary distinction and says something meaningful about marriage all by itself – seems to be to provide a certain level of social achievement. Obviously, some people (a tiny minority, I would think) marry for strictly economic reasons, but I think the majority view marriage as a required step towards fulfilling the American dream and therefore being a more ideal person. I don’t have much in the way of objective, reliable evidence to back this up, but it would at least explain the amazing levels of antipathy towards the idea of gay marriage: if marriage really is a signifier of legitimization, and if one is convinced that homosexuality is illegitimate, it would be rather troubling to see them combined.
Legally, marriage is a contract which is mostly about property — and that is the only aspect of the institution that the government has any business sticking its nose into. The “spiritual” side of it is optional, for those whose beliefs and affiliation bring in that attribution. Their church can make whatever rules it wants about it — but such rules apply only to their own members. That much was obvious even to my fundamentalist self, 28 years ago when I was getting married.
Which is why there is *no* legitimate objection to same-sex marriage — it’s all about small-time theocrats trying to force everyone else to live by their definitions.
Socially, marriage is about legal rights: property, visitation at hospitals, life support calls, ect.
Otherwise, marriage is personal and can be whatever type of partnership the couple makes it.
Agreed, there is no legitimate objection to same sex marriage. It’s all comes down to bigotry and control of other people’s lives.
The purpose of my marriage is exactly what Victor described, and it ought to simply be called a civil union, for everyone. Our wedding was non-religious, and a fantastic celebration of our love, but that was private (and something we intend to repeat for the fun of it). I have no problem legally recognizing any form of legal partnership between legally consenting adults, including polygamy. Note that animals and children cannot give legal consent.
What planet are people living in that they even understand marriage on a conceptual level? Because it doesn’t even rise to the level of meaninglessness to me.
I don’t see what subscribing to some archaic quasi-religious chattel agreement has to do with how much I love my girlfriend or whether or not she can have a shiny ring, a fancy dress, or a huge cake.
It’s the 21st century, can’t we all grow up already?
@Timothy: For me, it wasn’t about the ceremony — it was about a serious commitment. If people make a serious commitment to each other outside of marriage, great. It doesn’t matter to me. But doing it in a culturally normal way is/was preferable to me.
A colder way to look at it would be like a formal business partnership — you can just start a business together without any paperwork or legal commitment, but I sure wouldn’t. If something goes wrong, who gets what?
A marriage provides legal protection for both parties in case of a divorce. If you’re just using separate accounts for everything, maybe that isn’t a big deal. But when you have joined assets and children, it can get pretty messy.
I once heard, “Every Marriage is a deal, and every deal is different” and I would have to say that is exactly how I view it.. What works for me, won’t necessarily work for others. It is a business deal exactly as described in comment 25…
In NZ, the benefits of marriage automatically accrue to any relationship that is presented to the world as a relationship for more than 3 years. If you break up with your “De Facto” after that, you have legal recourse to get your stuff, custody to the children, and such. Here, I think, Marriage is more about the ceremony, showing everyone else how much you love each other, and a lot of people don’t bother with it.
While we all have personal feelings about what the purpose of marriage may serve in our own lives, to what purpose do governments license and enforce marriage? Governments all over the world must see a benefit in doing so. In the US it seems to be the notioN
oops, baby at the keyboard…
…seems to be the notion that marriage is the pillar of society, whatever that means. Studies have shown however, that married people are better off in some areas of life than singles, and children do seem to do better in multi-adult homes.
As Christians, my Husband and I were frustrated that we had to sign a marriage license before we could have sex. We felt “married” already in our hearts. In our culture today, marriage seems beneficial mainly for economic and legal reasons. Especially when you have children, like Daniel wrote earlier.
But I think there is a spiritual dimension tied to anything our heart is involved with or attached to. To me, it’s spiritual or ethereal.. whatever u want to call it. That can happen with and without marriage, but never w/out our hearts.
My brain is fried now…so I’ll stop.
I used to think that marriage was like a legal contract but once I thought about it more, it took on the form of an incorporation. What does a couple get from a marriage? An orderly mechanism for the transferral of property through inheritance. A legally recognized collective decision making process (that is, if one party is disabled, another part of the corporation can make decisions). Collective responsibility. Some tax breaks. Beyond that, it’s mostly societal.
In my personal experience, it’s only that handful of legal things that ate important. I spent 13 years with my “girlfriend” and raising our daughter before getting married. The only reason we got married was so that we could purchase a house. If we weren’t married, the bank would assess our mortgage liability as if we were separate and that each would have to have the capability to cover the entire mortgage. So, each of us separately might be able to afford a $50,000 mortgage so the best they would give us was $50,000. But, being married, suddenly we were considered as a single entity with a combined income and the bank was willing to offer us a $100,000 mortgage. It didn’t matter that we had been together for 13 years. It didn’t matter that we had only gotten married a year before. It didn’t matter that half of marriages end in divorce. Simply filling in the “married” box was sufficient to double the mortgage we could get. I quite literally married her for her money.
Formal/legal/civil declaration concerning an interpersonal relationship, usually formalising a new ‘family’ tie, between two unrelated people.
I actually think the ‘two’ provision could be dropped, too (or changed to ‘two or more’). Some social issues arise from polygamous marriages, sure, but on reflection I think they’re more down to asymmetries/inequalities in standing between partners (e.g. husband having more ‘power’ than wife) rather than any inherent issue with polygamous/polyamorous relationships.
the above is subject to revision, I guess. I’ll think about it.
I don’t think that polygamy is going to be legalized anytime soon, but I tend to agree with Jason. While I don’t see the attraction myself – seems like it would lead to factions and strife – group marriage might work for some. I just have two requirements:
They need to be equal. You can have as many wives as your wife can have husbands.
They need to be communicative. If you marry her, and she marries him, congratulations, you’re now married to him. They’re called group marriages, not chain marriages.
On a personal level, I think marriage (today in Western society) is about avoiding loneliness, especially in our old age. It’s harder and harder to keep in touch with people, and lord knows we need human contact to keep ourselves sane. Not to mention someone you can count on to drive you to doctors appointments and help feed and bathe you when you lose your functioning. Significant others may keep us company for a while, but marriage signifies the highest level of commitment to each other.
“So what do you think the purpose of marriage is?”
To be able to provide insurance to those I love through my employment.
To have legal grounds to speak on their behalf and for them to speak on mine.
To ensure financial stability for those I love in case of injury or loss of life.
I think it’s a shame that a religious tradition is a legal requirement that is forced upon people. This mostly affects the middle and lower financial classes of our society. It’s depressing.
You forget the point of view of the priest, mula, rabbi, etc… THEIR purpose is VERY clear and has nothing to do with “love, companionship, financial stability, and emotional stability…” From their point of view it’s all about power (and money).
I too don’t have all the answers because as said by another, “I don’t” (great statement by the way)
As with Danae (my wife) and others, I too believe – think (but not limited to this) that marriage is a tangible relationship that essentially is to embody the richest and most profound of phenomena that runs counter-intuitively to our normalcy – long-suffering and unconditional commitment.
I have been convinced through out my marriage experience that mankind will not thrive if there is no agonizing love. For me agonizing love follows the pattern of Christ. I see only perpetuation of the cycle of violence and the will to power if there is not this ‘laying down of our lives in order to take them back up.’ And marriage is the most vulnerable place in all of human relationships for such a work to occur. A work that will have significant impact in untold ways.
The purpose of which serves as a catalyst for human flourishing. It also, like everything else in creation serves as an illustrative imaging forth of Him whom we’ve been created after.
More to it of course; procreation and the delighting in of sexual intimacy.
: : : peace
Daniel, do you have a facebook?
It’s a way to publicly display your commitment for each other. I believe it fulfils a definite purpose just for that reason, even if it’s just on the day of the wedding itself – a chance to stand up in front of your familly and friends and say “We love each other, and we want you all to know and share that love”. It’s about a demonstration of commitment.
I’m excited to see what happens in America here in the next few years.
I think there are two ways to approach the question. The first would be to assume that it’s simply the spiritual union of two (or more) people.
However, I don’t favor that particular definition, as by itsef it does not require laws to enforce or protect it. The second would be, of course, the legal definition. For the purposes of this discussion, that’s the one I’m going to be referring to.
Marriage today (in the US) is simply a legal contract between 2 people and the state they live in. Nothing more. It’s a state (and optionally religion) -sponsored advocation of a desired lifestyle. This desire is nothing more than the institution’s idea of what would be best for the commonwealth as a whole. In the case of religion, marriage is an endorsement of religious views; in the case of the state, it’s an endorsement of the idea that a family unit is more stable & more productive & ultimate less of a drain on state resources.
This endorsement usually affords the joined couple legal privileges – which is the incentive the state provides to the couple, in return for the stability & productivity the couple provides to the state.
The above definitions are one of the reasons I sit on the fence in regards to the legalization of “homosexual marriage”. I do believe the state and religious institutions have the ethical right to define marriage as they see fit.
With that said, there are certain human rights afforded by marriage, such as spousal privileges in the case of a medical emergency and so forth. Should an institution define marriage as between a man and a woman, it would not have an ethical right to deny a homosexual life partner (sorry for the PC wording) visitation and guardianship authority, for example. For that reason, defining marriage as Man + Woman needs at a minimum to be coupled with some legal institution that provides the homosexual couple with the same legal rights.
Seperate but equal, as it were…
I think marriage is like Christmas… you don’t have to believe in Jesus to like elves. similarly, you don’t have to be religious to have a little fun, throw a big party, get a lot of gifts and end up in the same situation you would have been had you not thrown the party!
And on a more serious note, legal matters, public recognition of relationship status, and… honeymoon? :P
Anon. Simple. I agree.
Fundamentally, away from legal frameworks, I believe marriage evolved as a way to ensure kids had at least a fifty-fifty chance of surviving into adulthood with one adult still alive to advise, protect, and guide them.
It was possibly also a recognition that betrayal, sometimes a tribal-level survival trait, was a possibility from one’s own extended family, but less likely from one’s parents.
Now:
At one level, marriage was what I did to gain sociopolitical recognition of my relationship to Mme Metro, and the benefits thereof. Visitation, power of attorney, inheritance and other legal rights follow.
At another, I did it to give her something to complain about :-)
At still another I did it because I wanted her, our closest friends, and the world, to recognize that this is the woman that I want, in the fullness of time (and may it be a long, long fullness), to be found cold, stiff, and dead in bed next to. That I might outlive her is a rather long shot.
In Canada, it is noteable that as the social benefits of marriage were slowly rolled up successive governments, the divorce rates went up, and fewer people got officially married. However, our marriage rates have had a wee boost lately. Still waiting to see what the divorce stats do.
The last (and soon to be former, so it seems) government jiggered the tax codes to benefit married couples, which I think is a good idea. Because at the heart of it, it’s simply a codified recognition that this simple four-legged structure is a useful and stable one, at least half the time.
I’d consider polyandry if I thought there was the slightest chance it would be fully equitable for all parties. And I’m sure it happens anyway. But certainly I feel that legal recognition of two-person marriages is difficult and legally thorny enough without adding bods.
I tend to think that the marriage ceremony is more for the family and friends than it is for the couple. The ceremony and license doesn’t make a marriage real, what makes it real is the relationship between the two people.
I do think ceremonies are a great time to celebrate and come together with both sides of the family. Its also cool that people are so giving to newlyweds during this time.. We all recognize that it is hard to get started, and so we help each other.
Thanks for starting this discussion Daniel.. good thoughts here.
As is illustrated by the posts on this thread already, there are lots of different purposes of marriage, and I’d like it if we separated them more clearly. I think the spiritual, emotional, and ceremonial parts should be separate from the legal contracts. And I’d like it if the legal contracts could be separate from one another and more specific – like the ‘contract for cohabitation’ and ‘contract for progeny’ conceived by Robert Heinlein.
If you do this, the question of how to deal with group marriages also becomes more simple. If you’re living with two other people and cooperating with both of them financially, then you will probably want a contract of cohabitation with both of them. If you’re raising children in cooperation with just one of them, then you’ll want a contract for progeny with just that person. Much nicer, in my opinion.
to make a potentially bad start here, and quote the bible, “it is not good that man be alone.”
for as many bad things as the bible can say about marriage, i still find some truth in that statement. because people are better off — emotionally, financially, socially, etc — in groups larger than one.
though the genesis story is laughably inaccurate (and possibly quite horrible if closely examined) this one brief line in an ancient culture’s origin mythology still manages to ring true. marriage for them was largely an economic agreement between two men for the exchange of property, but they justified it with religion. and i see no reason we should have to follow either of those two traditions in modern secular society.
Arachnophilia: someone posted a link in the discussion about the Genesis story that sort of explains why it’s so horrible; the “boy god” hypothesis. Check it out.