I’ve been married for 2 years now and I am trying to find out what the point of marriage is. The religious aspect is outdated and I’m sure marriage was around long before organized religion was but took religion to hijack it as a means of control. Now, you can tell me all day about how Adam, the first man, was married before religion started, but I’ll have my pet dinosaurs stomp on that argument. So, we go back to the social aspect of it. It seems evident that it changed according to the whims and wants of any particular culture you look at. I cannot find a purpose in marriage other than it affords children a better chance at life. I good nuclear family, optimally, provides stability, shelter, and nourishment (social, mental, emotional. However, we all someone that was in the ‘typical’ family that turned out to be a complete waste of space. This just leaves sex. I’ve heard that if you put a penny in a jar every time you have sex for the first year of marriage and then take a penny out every time after the first year, you’ll never run out of pennies. Who knows? If you marry *just* for sex you’ll get bored of it. If you get married to ‘complete’ someone or to be ‘completed’ yourself you’re in for a lot of work. If you marry for money, you’ll earn every cent, or be very lonely.
Sorry,
I wish I knew what the point of marriage was.

If you do not want to start a family, and you do not wish to have your assets bound to another individual out of love/ and or trust, then marriage is not right for you.

As far as the whole God thing, well… its 2009. Odin, Zeus, Jehovah, Allah, Angels, Demons, Djinn, Fairies, Ghosts, Unicorns, and Optimus Prime are all fictional characters. There are no gods, and no supernatural. We as humans made these things up to understand things that we didnt have the ability to fathom, to keep and preserve law and order in societies, and to give us hope when there is none.

We now have the scientific method which helps us to understand those scary things, such as mental disorders, lightning, and evil. People don’t become posessed, they develope schizophrenia. Zeus doesnt throw lightning, its an electric discharge. Satan doesn’t twist peoples minds, some people are just bad individuals.

Ultimately, marriage exists because women, just like slaves, cattle, and gold were possessions. Before men started treating them like humans, they treated them like property and made pacts to avoid other men from using them. However, marriage is an institution etched in stone in our society, so more than likely we’ll all be married for different reasons.

In the pre-modern world, women were like chattle. In may places, they couldn't own land. Almost everywhere, they had no political power. Most professions required degrees of strength and stamina women were deemed incapable of (whether true or not). The only professions available to unmarried women, governesses and teachers, promised a very meagre means of support. Therefore, the only way to ensure that your daughter lived a happy healthy life was to marry her off well.

So, marriage in the beginning was very necessary for families with daughters. There was an entire process of courtship including the express blessing of the bride's father required to obtain a woman's hand. The concept of a dowery was used. Rich families would include a gift offered to the bride contingent upon a marriage. Since the wife was considered legal property of the groom; this would effectively sweeten the prize. Bachelors went out of there way to appear morally and religiously righteous so as to be eligible for the most beautiful brides with the richest doweries. Their fortunes were “mysteriously” leaked so as to entice the interest of prospective father-in-laws. Girls who eloped on there own (particulary to members of the lower classes) were invariably disowned outright.

Woman were liberated by industrialization. A delicate woman with a modest amount of training using an industrial machine could produce hundreds of more bras or shoes or rounds of ammunition per day than the most skilled and trained 18th century craftsman. This fact would have remained blissfully unknown were it not for the rise of Naziism in Germany necessitating the US to draft the largest ever female workforce in history in 1942. The cat is out of the bag now; so there is no cense in lamenting this any further.

But, what I do not understand about the modern world is why no-fault divorce was inacted. When I enter into any number of contracts, from employment to real estate, I am expected to respect the party I work with by abiding by rules of conduct explicitly dictated by the agreement. Failing to do so desolves the contract, depriving me of its benefits and exposing me to liability for damages to the other party. But if I enter into the contract of marriage; well, anything goes. Adultery by either party has been rendered irrelevant. How is this possible? Why should I enter into a contract of monogamy with a single woman if she is not bound to abstain from adultery. And vice versa, why should she trust me? It is ludicrous. Why not remain a bachelor indefinitely and enjoy as many woman as I can con affection from?

Marriage has essentially been rendered non-binding. A more meaninful agreement would allow the victim of adultery to desolve the marriage and seek damages. Otherwise, it is a suckers bet.

This is surya.

This site is having great information about the Marriage is one of the oldest institutions on the planet. It's a subject that has sparked many a debate, especially in the last few years with the various proposals to “protect” marriage as an institution from being “taken over”.

Commitment to God and to the spouse you choose gets a label, we call it marriage. If you know your bible you also will know that weddings seemed to be treated like real big deals.

Again, I wouldn't go by this world's lowering the standards, and for one thing, if they have entered into such a commitment lightly, they have already started off wrong.

Go by God's standards. You know you can't go wrong there.

You give the impression that you are under the belief that God's rules change with the times, and they don't.

They don't change at all? That's the part I'm not sure I'm ready to accept. Allow me to quote part of another discussion I was in recently: (note, these are not my words – I'm just quoting it)

Lev.1:9 says god wants me to burn animals, because he digs the smell. Exodus 21:7 says I can sell my daughter into slavery. Lev.15:19- 24 says I can't be in contact with a woman who is menstruating, or I will become unclean. Lev. 25:44 says I can own slaves, as long as they are from a neighboring country. Exodus 35:2 says that I should KILL anyone who works on a Sunday. Lev. 11:10 says eating shellfish is an abomination. Lev. 21:20 says that I can't apron the alter of god if I have a defect in my sight (I have horrible vision, I guess I'm just screwed). Lev. 19:27 forbids getting your hair trimmed around the temples. Lev. 11:6-8 says that touching the skin of a dead pig makes you unclean. Lev. 19:19 Says that you can not wear a garment made of two different kinds of cloth. Lev.24:10-16 says that people who do must be stoned to death by the entire town.

Now you could argue that not all of those are truly God's laws, and that those were created by men. The moment you do so, you have to admit that you can't take everything in the Bible at face value. If you do maintain that these laws don't change with time, then I have to get going – there's a lot of people I have to stone, and I gotta get started. You see my point? I'm not saying that God is necessarily wrong, but I don't think we can still hold onto everything listed as a “law” in the Bible.

I'll give you a set of laws that I believe do not change with time. There's ten of them, and they're usually referred to as “commandments.” Those, I'll allow as timeless laws from God. The rest, not so much. In those ten laws, I see nothing about marriage, or even fidelity for that matter.

I just don't see the need for the label, for the formality of it. If you want to make a statement to the public that you're committed to this other person, then go for it – send out a letter. As you said, we've made marriage such a disposable thing that there's practically no real value left in it. I've heard people make bets as to how long so-and-so's marriage will last. Never in those conversations have I ever heard someone submit “til death” as an option.