What’s The Point Of Marriage?

This might seem like a crazy question to be asking on a wedding blog on one cold and very Autumnal morning in 2018, but, what is the point of marriage?

Why do we still hang on to this ancient ceremony in today’s modern world? Why is ‘getting married’ still regarded as the ultimate sign of commitment?

On Friday 26th October, Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio Four debated this very topic and if you’ve not listened to the programme as yet, I urge you to find a little time to do so, it’s a fascinating listen.

The debate hinged around the question, why do we still choose to get married? We’re in 2018, after all; women no longer need to get wed to be able to vote, own property or feel secure financially. Couples can choose to have children without getting married, they can have a mortgage without marriage and you can live a happy life in a long-term super stable relationship without a marriage certificate.

We all know that there’s a relatively substantial proportion of marriages that don’t last and we also know that weddings can cost a lot of money. So why do we do it? Why is marriage still such a revered institution and something that lots of people, even those who’ve already been through one marriage, still aspire to?

It’s an interesting concept, particularly when so many women now identify as feminists or as supporters of feminism in whatever form appeals. I’m a Founder Member of the Women’s Equality Party and I subscribe to a form of feminism outlined in Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism where feminists are said to be “just women who don’t want to be treated like shit”. It might feel at times that I’m a Roxanne Gay style Bad Feminist, but I maintain you can still support equal pay and equal rights and still like it when a man holds a door open for you. Complicated and almost contradictory it may be (and some people definitely struggle with the intricacies of modern feminism) but life is not simple and it’s certainly not black and white.

So why marriage? What’s the point of it? We thought it would be a nice idea to share our own views first before inviting you to share yours. Let’s start with our founder member, Annabel.

Annabel Beeforth

Founder, Love My Dress

One of the most significant reasons for marrying was that we had a child together and wanted very much to provide her with a sense of security. Nine and a half years on from our wedding, and I will use our marriage to reassure our children, if ever my husband and I have cross words (come on, this is real life folks!). I’ll remind our now two daughters that whilst their daddy and I sometimes may disagree over certain things, we’re a unit, strong at the base, because we made a lifelong commitment to one another.

For me, marriage formalises our love and desire to create a life together – and I really appreciate that. It has absolutely nothing to do with upholding old fashioned traditions – in the same way me walking down the aisle with my father wasn’t anything to do with him ‘giving me away’ at the time. I simply wanted my father to accompany me down the aisle because it was a nice thing for him to do and provided him with a lovely sense of involvement on the day. I wanted to get married, because, being married is nice too. It consolidates love and acknowledges romance and somehow brings a greater sense of purpose to our relationship.

I have found myself leaning on the vows we exchanged over the past nine and a half years too – they have guided me, comforted me, counselled me and reassured me when life has gotten a little icky.

Marriage was something we both entered into because we love each other and wanted to express this love through the ultimate commitment to one another, for us and for our children. We didn’t need too, but it felt right for us.

Shona Raffle-Edwards

Writer, Love My Dress

I’ve been thinking hard about this as, as someone who wasn’t that bothered about getting married my whole life and then suddenly really wanted to, I’ve considered deeply why that is. I’m not very traditional and I think that was what put me off the idea of marriage initially – that and the very old fashioned idea of marriage being about property and possession and all anti-equality things. I think as soon as I realised I could make the day mine/ours, make our marriage equal and modern and do away with any of the anti-equality bits I didn’t like and forge a new way, I liked the idea so much more.

The point of marriage, as I see it, is that it’s a very obvious, very lovely way of sharing your love with the world, making your commitment firm and public and telling your family and friends that your love is real, important and worthy of celebrating. Life is short and I feel that all good things should be celebrated – love is certainly one of these things!

The second, slightly more prosaic (but no less important) point of marriage for me, is that it legally binds you together as a couple. It makes you each other’s next of kin, the person that in an emergency or a horrible situation, can make the choices needed for the other. It’s a huge expression of trust and care and means that if the worst should happen, your soul mate can make decisions for you, and you are protected legally in terms of property etc.

As a final thing (which I spoke about in my speech at my own wedding), is that marriage places your love and your wedding in history, literally creating a paper trail. It’ll forever be noted that X married Y on X date in the record books, and for me and my husband (as history-lovers), that was a big deal!

Katrina Otter

Wedding & Events Planner & Love My Dress Contributor

Yes there’s the dress, the flowing fizz, the delicious feast and ensuing party but underneath it all our marriage was simply the coming together of two people (and a Bulldog) in love.  The point? We wanted (with ‘wanted’ being the operative word) to share and celebrate our love and commitment to each other with our friends and family and revel in this as a family unit.

There was no desire to change surnames or need for financial security, marriage was not part of the journey to having children or something either of us felt pressurised into doing because we’d been dating for the right amount of time, already lived together etc. etc. marriage was a way for us to celebrate our relationship and our lives together and I’ve loved every minute of it.

Laura Callan

Writer, Love My Dress

Marriage isn’t for everyone for lots of reasons, but it was for myself and my now-husband. Despite being together for 7 years by the time we became engaged (and in that time moving in together, growing, sharing in everything that entailed), getting married for us had a point because it represented the next step we took together. We didn’t need to stand in a room full of people and declare our love and commitment, we wanted to. It sounds simple when you say it like that, but that’s how it was for us.

Getting married and now being married has made our bond stronger than ever before. In my wedding speech I told him that it didn’t matter where we were, where we lived, because in him I had found home. Home can be a place, but it can also be a person.

Eleanor Crossland

Writer, Love My Dress

At a wedding I was at earlier this summer the vicar said some words that really resounded with me and form the basis of my view of marriage and its point. His take on marriage is that this partnership and pledge creates something greater than the sum of its parts. That two people, who are separately ‘whole’, can come together to form a partnership that allows them to flourish, grow, go forward in life together. So, I think the point of marriage is the creation of a new grounding that gives comfort and security, love with no reservation, and the public (or private) but formal declaration of love and vows is symbolic because of the shift in relationship that it marks.

__________

To me, the responses above, in so many ways, sum up the point of marriage in the modern world – and the point is that you can make of it what you will. If it’s part of your journey, if it’s a celebration, if it’s the forming of a partnership or the strengthening of a bond, then that’s definitely a reason to get married.

Could it be the fact that no-one actually needs to get married any more is exactly what keeps marriage still relevant? Marriage is a choice that we make, knowing full well that we don’t have to. Could that be what keeps it special? Potentially, but it’s certainly more nuanced than that, as the thoughts above prove.

We know from the statistics that first marriages now take place later in life and this is definitely a reaction to the fact that people don’t need to get married to be able to leave home any more. Woman’s Hour made the interesting point that even in the ‘free love’ decade of the 1960s, marriage rates were incredibly high among younger people because getting married was seen as a way of gaining your freedom from your parents. That’s not the case now – people often set out to experience life, forge a career and work out who they are and what really makes them tick before they decided to marry. Marriage is an option, not a necessity.

So when we don’t need marriage, why do so many of us (and I’m including my feminist self in this group too) still love the prospect of getting married? Is it about the wedding? Well, perhaps there’s some of that in there, but I think we’re all bright enough to know that however great the prospect of one amazing wedding day might be, there’s a life, with all its ups and downs, that comes afterwards. I think it’s almost insulting to suggest that people get married without realising what’s post-wedding.

Could it be the media? Films, books and similar influences still paint marriage, or an engagement at least, as ‘the happy ending’ of the love story. It’s what you get to as the pinnacle of the story in the moments before the credits roll. What comes after that moment is therefore not important. But someone’s popped the question or taken their vows, so the story is complete.

Of course, we all know that’s not the case – even the most hopeless romantics among us know that love and marriage isn’t plain sailing, and yet we still buy into these storylines, again and again and again. I admit that I love it when the couple gets together in everything from films to First Dates and yet I’ll still bang the drum for women going it alone. How does this all stack up?

We do things because we want to and we’ve chosen to, not because we have to.

Our feminist credentials might also take a bit of a battering when it comes to the actual proposal. In straight relationships, it’s still seen as ‘the man’s role’ to propose and the numbers of women that do the deed is, in the scheme of things, tiny.

Why is this? Why, when women have come so far in so many ways, are there some things, particularly surrounding marriage, that we just don’t do? I know there’s no way that I would have proposed to my partner and I can’t quite figure out why! Am I actually more traditional than I think or is there a part of my subconscious that still has certain things pegged by gender? It’s a bit of an unsettling thought to be honest, particularly when a caller to Woman’s Hour yesterday made the point that when women don’t, or won’t, propose, marriage will always be a “favour bestowed on them” by men. Do I totally agree? No. But does that thought niggle? Yes.

In fact, writing this feature has been quite unsettling. My partner and I have been away this week on a little half-term break and the question ‘what’s the point of marriage’ has been something we’ve talked a lot about on walks and over long dinners. My partner is very much of the firm opinion that the point of marriage is to commit ourselves to each other and to commit ourselves to a lifelong relationship with each other in front of friends and family.

To be honest, I am kind of jealous of the certainty with which he could answer that question because as I sit here now, I’m not entirely sure what the point of marriage, in the broadest sense, is and yet I’ll be getting married myself next July. Is that weird?

Well no, I don’t think it is. I actually love and adore the fact that there doesn’t have to be a point to something for you to want to do it. Is there a point to climbing hills, running marathons or leaping into any of the other things that we embrace as part of life? You can rationalise these things for sure and you can point to benefits and the like but do those answers really explain the point of these things? I don’t think they do.

And that’s ok because we’re humans and we’re complicated and impulsive and vaguely irrational at times. We do things because we want to and we’ve chosen to, not because we have to. Our lives are not games where we have to ‘level up’ to move on. Happily now we don’t need marriage to leave home, have a bank account or live with the person we love.

The point of marriage is not that we have to have it, it’s that we choose to have it. Why we choose it is up to us, why we decide to bind ourselves together legally is possibly the ultimate in personal choice.

So perhaps the question is wrong. Perhaps, instead of asking ‘what’s the point of marriage?’, we should be asking ‘what’s the point of marriage for me?’ We should stop ourselves from believing that there’s a list of acceptable reasons why you get married and once you’ve ticked a certain amount, you can go ahead and wed. Perhaps we should accept that it’s ok to want something or to believe in something, without it being utterly rational or even partially explainable.

And now I’ve asked the question ‘what’s the point of marriage for me?’, I can answer it. The point of getting married for me is that I want to. I have chosen to. I have fallen in love and I want that love and this person to be part of me and my life for as long as possible. I want to be married because I believe this is a story that’s going to be infinitely better with two authors. The tale, the plot and the contents are ours to create and because this is ours and ours alone, we don’t have to justify it to anyone else.

We invite your own views below.

Love,

Tamryn x

 

_____

Main image by Joanna Bongard Photography