What's the point of getting married?

[Tero]

I dont have a problem with a long term committment. The ceremony was what my parents got out of it. They never saw grandkids.

[Tero]

I think we had a Methodist ceremony, it was in a campus chapel. I don't remember any of the words from Pastor Billy Bob. But seeing as my wife was never baptized and never attended church as a kid, there was not much chance or religion being a part of our life. The last time I had to do any official deals with pastors was when we had my Dad's funeral, at my mom's request. Of course, I would not mind a Unitarian funeral for myself as it was the Unitarians that killed Jesus for me once and for all.

[Twoflower]

My brother and his wife got married in part so my nephew would feel more like they were a family.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

My brother and his wife got married in part so my nephew would feel more like they were a family.

A positive? If so, and the negatives don't outweigh it, then it's a good thing, IMHO.

[Twoflower]

My brother and his wife got married in part so my nephew would feel more like they were a family.

A positive? If so, and the negatives don't outweigh it, then it's a good thing, IMHO.

Very much a positive.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

My brother and his wife got married in part so my nephew would feel more like they were a family.

A positive? If so, and the negatives don't outweigh it, then it's a good thing, IMHO.

Very much a positive.

Good on them, then! (And I'm willing to bet they weren't too unhappy with the formalization whatever the "official" reason for it was.)

[JimC]

To reduce my chances of being a sad, lonely pathetic old man...

[hadespussercats]

Much of it boils down, I think, at the most practical level to most people, to getting income tax breaks, access to health insurance, and being able to receive Social Security or inherit from the partner.

Besides love and commitment, there are those practical things - few of which I had really given much thought to until October 31, 2010, when 'Zilla had his stroke. The sentence "I am his wife." was like a magic spell gaining me access to his treatment area in the emergency room, details of his condition, plans for treatment, and his hospital room once they moved him. If he had ever gotten to the point where he could not make his treatment preferences known, that responsibility would have fallen on my shoulders. If we hadn't been married, none of that would have been possible without a huge amount of legal paperwork and mumbo jumbo.

This is very true, at least here in the States. J and I have each had reason to be the next-of-kin/caretaker/advocate of the other in a hospital setting-- our legal commitment facilitated that, though we would have done it anyway, if we were allowed (though we might not have been.) And it was strange to both of us (we've discussed this) how going through those experiences together made us feel more "married" than the ceremony did.

But back then, the big reasons we wanted to get married, with a ceremony, was to bring our families together, and help them to understand that J and I were becoming each others' family. We used traditional elements to convey that meaning for them, and to confirm it for us-- though in most important ways we were married when we agreed we wanted to share our lives together.

And I'm not going to lie-- I'm a sucker for old fashioned romance, and I wanted a day of kissing my honey and feeling in love and celebrating those feelings with all the other people we love. And I wanted to wear a beautiful dress, and have flowers in my hair, and tuck something blue in my garter, and dance all night. Why not? How often in life are we given the opportunity to really pull out all the stops and feel gorgeous?

Plus, people bought us stuff. Which was also nice.

[DRSB]

Currently reading "Committed" by Elizabeth Gilbert: http://www.amazon.com/Committed-Love-St ... 017&sr=8-1
It's about understanding matrimony, still at the beginning where she is in Vietnam interviewing a roomful of Hmong women about their marriages; questions like "how, when did you two meet?", "when did you realise he was special?", etc. are met with a baffled look.
page 35: "None of these women were placing their marriage at the center of their emotional biography in any way that was remotely familiar to me. In the modern industrialized Western world, where I come from, the person whom you choose to marry is perhaps the the single most gleaming possible mirror through which your emotional individualism is reflected back to the world. There is no choice more intensely personal, after all, than whom you choose to marry; that choice tells us, to a large extent, who you are. So if you ask any typical Western woman how she met her husband, when she met her husband and why she fell in love with her husband, you can be plenty sure that you will be told a complete, complex and deeply personal narrative which that woman has not only spun carefully around the entire experience, but which she has memorized, internalized, and scrutinized for clues as to her own selfhood... Whoever that modern Western woman is, I can promise you that her story will concern two people - herself and her spouse - who, like characters in a novel or movie, are presumed to have been on some kind of personal journeys before meeting each other, and whose journeys have intersected at at fateful moment... Whatever the details, you can be certain that the modern Western woman's love story will have been examined by her from every possible angle, and that, over the years, her narrative will have been either hammered into a golden epic myth or embalmed into a bitter cautionary tale...
Hmong women don't seen to do that."

I keep reading, the chapters are as follows: 1. Marriage and Surprises, 2. Marriage and expectations, 3. Marriage and History, 4., Marriage and infatuation, 5. Marriage and women, 6. Marriage and Autonomy, 7. Marriage and subversion, 8. Marriage and ceremony.

[Hermit]

I'm a sucker for old fashioned romance, and I wanted a day of kissing my honey and feeling in love and celebrating those feelings with all the other people we love. And I wanted to wear a beautiful dress, and have flowers in my hair, and tuck something blue in my garter, and dance all night. Why not? How often in life are we given the opportunity to really pull out all the stops and feel gorgeous?

Plus, people bought us stuff. Which was also nice.

That seems to be my daughter's motivation. She plans to marry her partner next year. Between them they have four children from previous relationships. The marriage might make the relationship between those children more cohesive, but I am only speculating there.

[odysseus]

I never saw the point of marriage, to be honest. From the experiances most of my friends have had, marriages seem to be more about everyone else's sensibilities than the bride and groom - who's going to sit where, Aunt Josephine will be really pissed off if it's not in a church, we can't sit Cousin Fred next to Cousin Mary in case it breaks out into fisticuffs over the foie gras, can be keep Uncle Frank off the Scotch long enough not to piss himself in front of the kids?.... Factor in the average cost of a wedding in Britain being close to £20,000 last time I looked and a divorce rate that looks more and more scary each time, and also the prospect of my wife buggering off with the house and half my pension..... nah, I'll give it a miss. Fortunately I don't want kids, so I can bypass the whole farce. That said, if that's what people want to do, then good on 'em. Different strokes for different folks, right?

It's always amused me that many hardcore atheists get strangely tight-lipped when the topics of Chritenings, Marriages and Funerals crop up hehehe....

[Evabot]

Why did I get married?..hmmm...To be honest, I can't quite put my finger on it. I don't think I analyzed it as much as I just felt emotions about it. I "felt" that I wanted it, that I was ready, that he would make me feel amazing for the rest of my life.

Now, I'm not quite sure. I'm sure part of me got married because he asked. It was traditional, in front of family, etc. Perhaps I got swept away in THAT moment of our relationship (how well our relationship was going) and didn't really think "How would we really work out as a couple?"

I also think we've both changed since. Even though it's been under a year, we are both becoming fundamentally different. What we want out of life, especially at the moment, seems drastically different.

If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have gotten married. I feel I was just as much to blame. I had my own ideals about marriage and our relationship but I think there was always a tiny piece of me that knew it would never work out. I ignored this tiny piece of me and felt that with time, that voice of doubt would get muffled out by marriage, children, and the pursuit of "happiness".

Now a days, I wonder if I'll ever want to be with anyone "til death do us part". I don't think I've ever met someone that I felt permanently "in love" with or even permanently "attracted" to. I sometimes wonder if monogamy is even something that comes naturally to me and that scares me. Open relationships seem very rare and require more trust and self confidence than I feel I have at the moment. On the other hand, I could see myself being emotionally faithful to someone while being open.

The title of this thread has been running through my mind all Summer and has made me come to the conclusion that 2011 is going to be one of the most difficult years of my life.

It was a beautiful wedding though




Or maybe I just got married so I could have an excuse to make my dog wear a tuxedo.

[charlou]

I didn't see the point, just went along with it.

I'd not do it again. I like my relationships without such extraneously imposed parameters.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

To reduce my chances of being a sad, lonely pathetic old man...

In broader strokes: We seek a support network as part of the "package". Ayaan was ace last Halloween and I can't thank her enough for that.

[DRSB]

From "Committed"; page 62: The big romantic white weddings that we now think of as "traditional" didn't come into being until the 19th C- not until a teenaged Queen Victoria walked down the isle in a fluffy white gown, thereby setting a fashion trend that has never gone out of trend since. Before that, though, your average European wedding day wasn't all that much different from any other day of the week."

I wonder though, if this is true, how did the other monarchs before that wed? I mean, all those Louises and de Bourbons, etc, were there no white gowns?