I think crying isn't s good way to see it. If anything, it's an easily ignored feature that they're experimenting with. I'd like to see how they execute it, because in Fable 2, once you got married, you had a ball-and-chain attached to your adventuring, with in-game days determining the various needs your family had, so you ideally would not be able to travel very far before having to return to your family. In Fable 3, I opted to not get married at all based on my experiences with the second, although I must say that there may be some differences, but marriage is a universally understood concept, so it might not have been that different.
One other thing one should bring up is that the characters in (even Oblivion) had actual names, were unique and different for each person (as different as the random generator would allow, anyway) and they would have their own routines. One thing to note, is that on the lower levels, you'd get to choose what species your spouse would be. If anything, the ten different species would invite plenty of less than pleasant thoughts, but it is different from Fable 3, where only gender defined the difference between NPC's as they had only a first name, and one of several cookie-cutter outfits and body types. In Skyrim, we'll see characters with connections to groups and organizations, and they will have a name and face. This sets them infinitely apart from Fable 3, as instead of killing one of a thousand 'Thems' you're killing John or Jane Doe, who were perhaps connected to the fighters guild. Or the Mages guild, perhaps.
For players who like playing in the dark, having someone to watch your back might be helpful, and if it's like companions in Fallout, where you can give them armor and weapons, you could make them entirely invisible, give them a spell or a bow and arrow, and while you charge in relentlessly tearing things apart in your own way, your invisible Dark-Brotherhood spouse sets upon them with poisoned arrows and spells.
On the whole, it seems like an attempt to have compantions, but have them in a closer bond than "we're in it only because we have a common goal" rather than making it a slightly more murderous "family vacation." It might be used to up the stakes in the story, but since most players won't care, it might not go over so well. The mechanic is an experiment, and if it is as easily ignored as in Fable 3, then it should work fine, if random NPC's start asking for marriage at every turn, then it will become incredibly annoying, and in some people's games, I'm sure the marriage mechanic might be the only reason Skyrim has about 117,000 less NPC's on the world map.