Grey Day for Elcia said:
I've never understood that. Some government paper and a ceremony invented by men to celebrate their purchase of a woman and to show her off to family defines when you feel ready to express your love, trust and closeness to another? What f marriage had not been invented? What if it were outlawed? What if the cleric lost your papers and never filed them? You would have had sex without being married. Would that be bad? Why use someone else's measure of readiness to define your own? What if you were born in a country were marriage happened at 12 years of age?
It's all so irrelevant.
"Do I love my partner? Do I trust them? Do I wish to show them how much I love them in a way words cannot express? Then I will hold them and embrace them. Oh wait, we have yet to fulfill my society's version of marriage. Guess I shant."
Eh. Very queer.
Agreed. I personally have no intention of marriage or having children (for personal reasons I won't bother delving into here), because it just seems like an outdated and pointless tradition (originating from religion, and I'm an Atheist) passed off as some kind of "commitment". Isn't just expressing to your partner that you love them a commitment in itself, rather than some empty ceremony and legal document, effectively reducing your relationship to some kind of contract? And I know that many people may not really think about this (because of "tempting fate" or whatever), but if you get divorced, then it's even MORE hassle and you get into all the crap about money and who gets what, and it's especially harmful if there's children involved.
It just seems as if people only get married nowadays because of religion, tradition, societal pressures or feeling as if they need to make their relationship "official". None of which I care about. I'm an individual who lives my life, not anyone else's. If some conservative conformist douchebag wants to disapprove that I'm having sex with my girlfriend outside of marriage, they can go fuck themselves all the way back to the Dark Ages, because I don't want to hear it.