[HighLordDave]

As an institution, marriage has historically served three functions:

First, it is a social control to monitor paternity and avert inbreeding. Most cultures encourage monogamy and discourage women from being promiscous, so marriage supposedly ensures that the children a woman bears were sired by her husband. Even in cultures that practise polyandry or polygamy there are similar controls, but in monogamous cultures, marriage is a way for people to trace their bloodlines and prevent close family members from breeding.

Second, it is a mechanism for social and political alliances. The notion of marrying for love is a fairly new phenomenon. In western society, arranged marriages have been the norm up until very recently (the last 150 years or so), and arranged marriages are still the norm in many cultures.

Third, the religious aspect of marriage stresses family and producing children; this is true of nearly all faiths. The reason is simple: the best way to get more [insert denomination here] is to make more. That's another reason why many religious groups discourage homosexuality and treat it as a sin; gay people don't produce children. There was a sect of Christians who believed in sexual abstinance and they died out, literally.

In western culture, marriage is an institution that is changing. What is the function of marriage today? Most people get married for "love", but what is the purpose in an age of co-habitation and common law property settlements? Breaking up is a lot easier and cheaper for people who live together than it is for people who have to dissolve a marriage, even though the actual living, property and custody arrangements may be the same.

What about the vows? "Til death do us part" was a lot shorter when 1 in 3 women died of complications resulting from childbirth, and the average life expectancy was 50 years.

For those of us who are married, why get hitched? My wife and I lived together for a year before we got married and then after the ceremony, the only things that changed were the name on her driver's license and my auto insurance premium (which dropped by about half).

Do people marry to get pesky relatives to quit bugging them about it? Because they're "supposed to"? I think some people get married just to get all the free stuff.

How then should our society view divorce? The social stigma is gone and now divorces are viewed as simply the dissolution of a contract in the same way as a "going out of business" agreement occurs between two partners.

I think we're starting to see a cultural shift in how our society views marriage; it's spiritual and religious overtones are being pushed to the back-burner in favour of the legal and contractual implications (notice the high incidence rates of pre-nuptial agreements among all economic groups). We're starting to see serious discussion (and acceptance) of homosexual marriages and the rates of co-habitation and common law marriages that would have been unheard of even 50 years ago.