I don't plan on getting married, unless a few key things come up. One big one is insurance, the second is hospital visitation rights, and the third is tax benefits.
Other than that, I think it's pretty archaic. Also note I don't want children... that might affect such things, too.
Friendships, business partnerships, strategic alliances, romances, all of them are transient in ways that family is not.
But the family you're born with is a happenstance. Apart from marriage and adoption, what other discretionary act allows two adults to create a new, deliberate familial bond?
I don't want to get too "no true Scotsman" about this; I accept that there is divorce (partly because we've embraced divorce as a culture, partly because we've embraced casual marriage as a culture, and yes, partly because as a society we have rightly grown out of practices that secured marriage, such as single-income households) and failed marriage.
But marriage as a concept has a clear, practical value. It's more challenging to realize the concept in 2010 than it was in 1910, but that doesn't mean the concept itself is outdated.
I guess I just don't feel the need for such an actual act. Take my current situation: I've been seeing this girl for about three years now, it's my third 2+ year relationship, and it's going exceptionally well. We live together, we have a joint bank account... why bother getting married? It doesn't change the way that either of us feel about each other. Not only that, but marriage implies a few things about our relationship that are simply not true.
The only value it actually holds is getting certain benefits from organizations that are still structured around the idea that a man and a woman end up loving each other very much, and decided to be together forever. That's the concept I'm talking about when I mean it's 'outdated,' I think that the vast majority of relationships won't actually last forever, nor should they.
So, you're not married. Family bonds last forever. Deep and lasting friendships do not. Just because marriage is valuable doesn't mean everyone should be married.
Home ownership is also a good thing. Clearly, everyone should not be buying houses; even if you have the means, it often makes the best economic sense to rent. But neighborhoods are still built on a foundation of homeowners.
There is a notion that everyone should own a home. There is a notion that everyone should be married. Those notions are what is archaic.
I bet you can't guess what I think about home ownership... ha.
I think we're in agreement. I do know... three people my age who think marriage is a good idea. One is now divorced, the second one is getting married soon, the third is pretty happy. I'm fine with people doing whatever they feel is great, I'm not opposed to other people getting married, just like I'm not opposed to other people doing anything else I find to be kinda silly.
It's just not for me, nor many other people that I know around my age.
I think the most important words in your post were "my current situation". You seem to be doing just fine without being married; kudos to you. I agree that most relationships won't and shouldn't last forever. If your situation were different, though -- for example, if you were planning to have children -- marriage might look more appealing.
Marriage is what you choose it to be. Who says it has to be forever or be considered a failure?
Its just a way to say, ok we plan to be together for a while and we'll share a lot of what we have. Let make that official and even have a contract about it. What is outdated about that?
I disagree, and think instead that words do mean things.
Is there a marriage ceremony anywhere in the mainstream of western culture that doesn't involve promising, in effect, to make the relationship permanent?
I don't know about where you are, but here you can mary just by signing the papers, no ceremony. And if you don't like the default terms, you can have your own stuff in there. Heck I've been to a marriage where the word marriage was actually in parentheses on the invitation.
You don't need a marriage to have a family; if you disagree with this, I worry you are getting concepts and titles knotted to tightly with one another.
Family as a concept has a clear, practical value; this much I will totally agree with. I don't think it is as important the shape that family makes, though, and thus far marriage has only lent legitimacy to certain forms of family -- one man, one woman, largely responsible for the welfare of the offspring they produce. I can think of a lot of ways in which this is suboptimal.
But marriage having clear, practical value? It seems the practical value you call out in marriage is that it acts as a sort of moralistic glue to hold a marriage together when other means of adhesion -- trust of one another, emotional support, physical attraction, etc -- have fallen by the wayside. If this need to not fail against some societal title bestowed upon a couple is all that is left holding them together, why is this good? How does "'till death do us part" help when it is more of a constraint and/or threat than a promise? And if the couple already has a sufficient number of these things gluing them together, why do we need this additional social glue?
So I'd like to see what marriage is meant to represent separated from the actual institution, and considered separately. If a couple has what a marriage represents, but lacks the title, I don't see how this is worth distinguishing -- or a union in general for that matter; I think single man/woman couples are more of a historical accident than anything. If a couple has the title of marriage, but has a substantive lack of what a marriage represents, I don't see how the title is going to make either of their lives better. It only makes them feel guilty for not living up to what they labeled themselves as, and I've never seen the benefit in that.
I am married, and there are few things that mean less to my and my wife's relationship than that title. It isn't the glue that bonds us, and it would not be the glue that would keep us together if everything else fell apart. But enough other people think it is that we found not being married a huge inconvenience; society in general, and the government in particular, are heavily tilted toward engineering couples into marriage. We'd have been happy remaining unmarried the rest of our lives if everything weren't so constructed to engineer us into wedlock, but we also didn't want to be so financially penalized for not behaving.
So we're married, but there are few things that mean less to us; we were married in all practical purposes before we had the title. Getting the title was strictly pragmatic. If this is part of what is tearing marriage apart, so be it; perhaps it would be better if the institutions that stood so much on ceremony faded into insignificance, and we started focusing more on the things those ceremonies are meant to cement.
Other than that, I think it's pretty archaic. Also note I don't want children... that might affect such things, too.