In my personal opinion, marriage is more of a cultural phenomenon than anything else. It is available in multiple countries in different forms, and largely as a whole, is a religious matter. It is possible to be married and not have a religious tone to it, but then it is governmental.
Marriage provides, usually, governmental security and financial benefits. It is seen as joining two person together, and religion has used it over the years vastly to ensure that the child a woman bares is her rightful husbands; this is before paternity tests of course.
I believe that all ideas have a coming and going phase. I don’t think of marriage as a belief, but more as an idea, a tool, and societies will pick up ideas and tools that ‘work’ for them. Society as a whole is a big bout of idealism; we have certain ideals we want to portray so we establish customs and traditions that mirror these ideals. I personally believe that the concept of marriage is outdated. A lot of marriage has to do with the control of woman; if you go back to the early 1800’s the average lifespan of individuals was much shorter, and generally, women became sick easier than men and were quite weaker. Because of this, and due to the fact that there was no way to trace who was the father of a child, marriage was a way for women to be provided for and a way for husbands to make sure their women remained chaste and only have sexual relations to them, for way of child birth and continuing their genes.
This is why in a traditional sense, homosexual relations and the idea of homosexual marriages is frowned upon because it does not mean the main object goals of the idea of marriage. We have to consider that in the early 1800’s the reason that people died so early was a lack of development in the medical field. It wasn’t until later in the 1800’s that the rate started going up and by the early 1900’s people were living a lot longer than they had anytime before. If we look at the marriageable age for both men and women during these different centuries, we will see that the average age would be between 13-16 for women and it would be much older for men, because men had to develop a career to provide for a woman before marriage, and a woman would be married off very soon so that she could be paid and taken care of by her husband and have children quickly before she got to old ( people would die at age about 40).
With the development of the medical field, the lifespan of women increased as well as for men and the marriageable age started to increase as well as women and men and more time to create families and marry. Men started to marry closer into their age range, and by the late 1900’s and now, the early 2000s, we can see that not only do women live long, they on average live longer than their male counterparts.
The idea that women are weaker than men is no longer valid due to the expansion of the medical field, and additionally, because of feminist rights, women are no longer needing to marry at an early age so that they will be provided for. Women are able to work and bare children later on; I believe that in the United States the average marriage age for women is now 25, which is a dramatic increase. People are now living to be 80, 90 years old, so it is only understandable.
Due to these changes there is less of a need of traditional marriage, in fact, the idea of marriage is no longer really required. We now attribute marriage to ‘love’ and creating a stable, respectable family, and now more than ever marriage is more about social standing and religion than anything else. There are some financial benefits to marriage as well as spiritual but there is nothing particularly practical about it, and the appeal of traditional gender roles has worn off due to the change of times.
The idea of marriage, this tool, has worn out. I don’t think we should practice marriage anymore, and if we do, we need to re-define it.