Well, taking away the obvious point that no other animal is capable of the abstract thought necessary to create a marriage ceremony, we can make the observation that a rather small percentage of animals do mate for life, and the pairing is usually preceded by courting behavior by the male and then acceptance behaviors by the female.

Humans, contrary to popular belief, are not historically monogamous.  We're not as polygamous as some of the other primates, but we're definitely not monogamous.   Where myth and religion come into the picture is that they often tell us that people ought to be mated to one person for life.  As we trace marriage back to its origins, we discover that this is, most likely, wishful thinking. Marriage was certainly invented as a means to control wealth, not to symbolize love or affection.  In fact, marriage for love and affection is a remarkably recent development.

I am absolutely with you.  However it seems to me that it's pretty obvious you haven't been close to making that final step.

I'm sure they exist, but it is very very rare that you would ever find a women who would see eye to eye on this with you.  Most of them have been dreaming their entire life for their wedding day, and want it to be perfect.

I can see what the positive uses of marriage are, but not a single benefit of weddings.  However, if you are going to have one, I would strongly suggest going the route that my wife and I did.

 We went to an all-inclusive resort in the caribbean and invited 25 of our closes friends and family.  Once on the resort the wedding took about 45 minutes of planning and cost about a grand.  Back in the states we had a legal ceremony at town hall just to two of us to make sure that everything was legaly binding.

Some can be enjoyable, but I doubt it would be worth the money.  You would be very hard pressed planning a 12-hour period for which I would spend tens of thousands of dollars on.

Well for the Christian woman, it's all about demonstrating the submissiveness of the man. He get's down on one knee to propose(to his Queen). The wedding day is her day. It's in a church and a religion this is all about making hen-pecked demasculinized husbands.

How else would a Christian woman know how really pussy whipped her husband is without a church wedding to confirm this?

Concerning marriage,

Only you and your pal can decide what you should do. Many people are perfectly happy with a common law arrangement. Many people find the perceived security a worthwhile benefit. The benefits afforded by law for being married are worthwhile for most. You’ll need to decide.

Concerning a wedding ceremony,

Again, only you and your pal can decide what’s best for you. For many people, getting married is a big deal and they want to make it as big a deal as they can. For some it’s not a big deal and they find a local judge or official to pronounce them man and wife on the cheap.

I was married in October of last year. My wife and I created our ceremony. It was secular and still very beautiful. I wrote our vows with no lip service to a delusion. I worked lots of overtime to come up with the several thousand dollars we spent on the ceremony, dinner/reception and honeymoon. My wife is not an atheist but we were able to come up with a plan that kept me from blowing a gasket and her happy. I’m sure you’ll be able to do the same. Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

I rarely if ever see a happily married couple, some are happy for a while but for most it seems to be misery and despair. I like to think as a logical, free thinking person I have the ability and wisdom to learn from those who came before me. That being said I see no logic in subjecting myself to the misery of marriage.

The most common reason marriages fail is because people are not honest with each other from the beginning. They either pretend to be who they think their partner wants, or just never bother to talk about some issues.

If people are capable of having a healthy relationship, marriage does not change anything one way or the other.

Sorry I screwed up the quote function.

Ergh...

Ok, so 'dishonesty' is not available as a cause of divorce in the statistics, and the point is taken.  However, the statement, "Divorce happens because of dishonesty" is misleading.  The institution itself is riddled with dishonesty, and the conventions which society expects of married people are literally dishonest -- with respect to human nature.

Any wonder people are dishonest after they're married?

I don't mean to come across as if I'm anti-marriage. In some ways, I am, but for the most part, I think marriage is a relatively harmless institution. The thing that I want to emphasize is that it would be better if people got married knowing exactly what marriage is, and more importantly, what it is not, and what it has never been.

The thing that's most telling in your paragraph is that marriage hasn't changed anything for you. Honestly, it's my opinion that if marriage changes anything, then it was a bad idea to get married.

There is something that I think is the most dangerous aspect of our marriage-centered culture, and that is the facade of permanence for young people. Historically, there has never, ever, ever been a time when people who were married in their 20s could statistically expect their marriage to last 50 years. Most people in their 60s are not with the person they were with in their 20s. If you asked most people (and had them strapped to a lie detector), they don't really think they're going to die with the person they marry while they're young. (I suppose if they're naive, they might.)

The difficulties of ending a marriage, and the social stigma of being a divorcee, are the penalties for pretending that you are going to have one partner for life. I think that V1per41's approach is a good happy medium. If you can live together for most of a decade, you can start talking about marriage.

Nope. Marriage predates any formal concept of property. Humans are naturally monogamous, though not with the strictness and rigidity that religion has brought to the concept. There have been marriage rituals for as long as there have been humans, as far as we can tell.

You've gone back about 1000 years, representing about a sixth of recorded history and maybe as little as a hundred thousandth of total human history. My view would be that this version of marriage bears all the hallmarks of one warped by religion, overpopulation and economics. It was never a common kind of marriage: most people had no grand alliances to make and therefore did in fact marry who they wanted to for no better reason than that they loved each other. The reason we have heard so much about this particular medieval kind of marriage is because the nobles wrote the books, and this is how they got married.

I don't think that those advertisers would have had anything to grab onto if all those tendencies weren't powerfully present in the young population to begin with. Men have been leaving their communities to chase girls from other villages for as long as there have been people. Shit, even chimpanzees do this.

We always had it right and all the attempts at socioeconomic manipulation have never been able to take us away from the fact that most men and women reach a point in their lives when they want to settle down with one other person.

If you think England doesn't emphasize marriage, you are drunk.

Actually, there is significant evidence showing improved social indicators for married people and their kids. Living together is probably almost as good if both parties are commited, but most people in this situation won't see the point of not having a marriage ritual. 

Especially when the marketing actually delivers the advertised product!

I'm sorry. You're wrong. Humans are most definitely not monogamous. We have corroborating evidence from history, anthropology, biology, and for what it's worth, evolutionary psychology.

We're not as polygamous as some of our primate cousins, but we are not as monogamous as, say, the albatross. To be precise, we're mildly polygamous.

When we speak of marriage predating formal concepts of property, we are making a bit of an equivocation. Lasting mating bonds do predate formal concepts of property, but not the institution of government sanctioned legal marriage.

If you want to document this, I'll look at the evidence, but everything I've ever read on the subject contradicts you. (Everything by scientists, that is.)

In my essay on marriage, I went back about 2000 years, to the formation of the Christian Roman state. The reason I didn't go back farther is that the pre-Christian mediterranean concept of marriage was much more tribal, and did not resemble current marriage enough to warrant comparison.

Actually, the reason we know so much about this period is that they kept damn good records. Among serfs, marriage was not actually that common. What we would call common law marriage? Yeah. But not church/state sanctioned legal bonds.

Marriage contracts and wills are available for every class of landholder, from the kings down to the farmers... those few who had their own land. The historians and sociologists who study this stuff spend much more time compiling data from county records than reading poetry.

[edit: I misspoke slightly.  Written wills are a relatively recent invention, and are not that common in early medieval Europe.  I can't recall off the top of my head when they became common.  Before that, priests or officials would hear bequests (often in private.  Imagine the abuse!), and there were a LOT of laws dictating who you could and couldn't leave stuff to -- all of them benefitting the church in some way)

Humans are female exogamous, meaning that the females leave their families to move into the male's family. Not all primates are female exogamous, but most are.

Of course, the advertisers were latching onto something innate in humans. However, we can't make the mistake of claiming that because something is natural, it is good. For instance, our sweet tooth comes from an evolutionary adaptation towards ripe (and non-poisonous) fruits. If a fruit is sweet, it is good to eat. Prehistoric man had no refined sugar. In fact, refined sugar wasn't commonly available until the 17th century.

Now that we have industrialized sugar companies, it's cheap and easy to get. We still have our pre-agricultural penchant for sugar. We haven't had enough time to evolve different tastes. So, we love dessert and ketchup and coke. All of these things make us fat and give us heart disease.

You're misunderstanding me. Humans do tend towards relatively monogamous (slightly polygamous) long term (2 years or more) relationships. I've never denied this. As we get older, we tend to have longer relationships. I've also never denied this.

My point is that the government sanctioned institution of marriage has never had the goal of furthering this ideal. It's always been used for sociopolitical manipulation, either to enforce a particular religious standard (like not allowing divorce) or to control property (as when the church became the largest single landholder in Christianized Europe in 400 years).

We have inherited many myths from the history of marriage. Most of them are based on distortions of truth, not outright lies. For instance, people do like to have long term partners. On the other hand, human lifespans have never been as long as they are now, and we have never before been faced with the likelihood of living fifty or sixty years after having our first child. The fact is that most everyone is with someone different at sixty than at twenty five. Regardless of what people say they believe, what they actually do is have a string of mostly monogamous relationships, most lasting less than twenty-five years.

You can argue that this is not the way it should be, but you cannot argue that it is not so. If you want to argue that it should be otherwise, you must develop a framework in which this is true, and demonstrate what goal it accomplishes. I'm very well read on the subject, and I don't know of any such evidence.

Recent statistics indicate that large percentages of young people in England are eschewing marriage and choosing instead to cohabitate.

Historical marriage statistics from England indicate that until as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth century, government sanctioned marriage was only common among the upper classes.

As I've said, I don't deny people's tendencies to form long partnerships. I'm well aware that couples are happier than singles, but you're overstating things. Childless couples (who do not wish to have children) give every indication of being as happy as couples with children (who want children).

There isn't much accumulated data on marriage vs. cohabitation with children, but the early indicators are that barring social stigma, there's no significant difference.

Your statement that most people will go ahead and have the marriage ceremony is evidence of what I'm talking about. By all indications, people don't need marriage. Other than the legal ramifications, it has no other objective function. Only the societal pressure to get married, or the stigma of unwed sex, or ostracizing non-conformists remains. These are all social constructs, not instinctual behaviors. (Actually, ostracizing non-conformists is probably instinctual, but it's not instinctually linked to marriage, per se.)

Ahem.

Ok. I know a lot of women who would get very mad at you for suggesting that they're less than a perfect woman because they have decided not to have children.

I'm trying to get you to wrap your head around the distinction between mating bonds (natural, instinctive) and marriage (cultural, institutionalized). The laws regarding marriage through history have not been completely opposite human nature, of course. They also haven't been designed to promote individual happiness, either.

I'm really glad that your marriage is happy and that you love your kids. Really. I'm not trying to say that nobody should ever get married, and that people ought to just fuck anybody they want anytime. That's ludicrous, and it's also not part of our nature. My point is that the institution of marriage, along with the cultural myths that tag along with it, are not representative of efforts to make individuals happy. To the contrary, they