Contrary to propaganda, marriage hasn't always existed, and societies did just fine without it. It came into existence around 5,000 years ago for a specific reason, and that is it was considered a property transfer arrangement between fathers and husbands. Women were part of the property to be exchanged, and any children resulting from the marriage became the property of the man. Marriage seems to have come into existence around the time people realized there was such a thing as paternity, and of course the creation of the concept of property furthered the necessity of a man making sure "his" offspring were really "his." Women weren't considered human beings, just vessels to be fucked and have children.
Religion had little to do with the creation of marriage. It always was a legal or quasi-legal arrangement to guarantee men's paternity rights. All the metaphors about marriage being representative of Christ and the church (in Christianity) are just that--metaphors. They have nothing to do with why it ever existed in the first place. Societies continued without it for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years prior to its existence.
However, marriage has had its day, and marriage rates (plus birthrates) have declined over the decades. The baby boomers, especially the second half of the cohort, started paving the way for the decline in the institution. I say the second half because the first half was still like previous generations (especially the two prior generations who came of age during WW II and the fifties) and did the early marriage bullshit that seems so damned repulsive in retrospect but was still rampant throughout the sixties and early seventies. The median age of first marriage for women (half before, half after), hovered around 20-21 years of age (men around 22-23) until 1980, when it hit 22 for the first time in years, if ever. Women who were getting married, if they were, and the vast majority of the baby boom generation did at least once, were starting to do it later. More and more women were working in jobs, whether married or not, and this meant they were less inclined to get married and have children or have fewer children. This has continued to this very day, with the millennials being less inclined to do the marriage and babies lifestyle than even the baby boomers, and generations X and Y.
One could argue that marriage started falling out of fashion even before the baby boomers were born, and that is likely true, as women started getting more and more rights and gaining access to more occupations, starting in the late 19th century. One could argue, and I do, that the postwar mania for early marriage and lots of kids was an aberration, an aberration fostered by the kicking out of millions of women from factory and other "male" jobs they held during World War II in order to make way for the returning servicemen, plus tax incentives and the G.I. Bill. However, things did change, especially with the economy and the decline of the "family wage," which began in the mid-1970s. Economy or not, though, women were not going back once they got a taste of the world outside the confines of the home.
As an aside, I received in the mail the other day a copy of a book I obtained on Amazon of an old, old, old book I read years ago by the psychologist Lawrence Casler, who I don't know if he is still alive (he was early in the 21st century). This book is titled, Is Marriage Necessary? It was published in 1974, when I was a mere 19 years old, but it was a favorite of mine for many years. Despite the afterward by the horrible pervert Albert Ellis--believe me, this was NOT a selling point in favor of this book--Casler's tome was way, way, way ahead of its time. As I remember, he sympathized with feminists who said that abolishing marriage was necessary for the liberation of women, but he wasn't in favor of it "at this time" as he thought a more gradual decline in marriage with alternative arrangements was more likely to have public acceptance. He was right, and marriage rates have declined over the decades since, with more and more people cohabiting before or instead of marriage or not bothering with doing either at all. This despite same-sex marriage having been legalized, of which there was admittedly a big boom in, but gay/lesbians are a small segment of the population. Overall, the die has been cast. Now we are at the point in 2019 where married people over 18 make up only half the adult population whereas 60 years ago, in 1960, 72 percent of adults were married. This is a huge change that will not, in my view, reverse itself ever again despite attempts by the right to return to the 1950s and ban abortion. It is not going to happen at all.
There was a time years ago, when there was something called "developmental tasks," I believe based on Erik Erikson's ideas, that were largely shaped by the postwar early marriage/lots of babies era in which he lived. Marriage and having kids were seen as important "developmental tasks" that ALL adults had to do in order to be seen as truly "adult." Of course, being an adult is a chronological reality, not something as a result of doing certain tasks society peddles on them to try and con them to do. Lots of people STILL believe the nonsense that marriage and parenthood confer "adulthood" despite the human wreckage such beliefs often cause. Single people, especially women, were regarded as failures and subhumans, and they still are to a great degree by many, most often acute in religious communities. Most people these days are not following these "developmental tasks," at least not under certain time frames, but the propaganda is still there peddled by the likes of Jordan Peterson and James Dobson.
There is really little good about marriage despite the tons upon tons of sentimentality about it, and there is definitely nothing in it for women apart from the much-higher standard of living, a standard of living that requires women put out sexually to men in order to get it in the case of heterosexual marriage.
Snip from the article linked:
Of course, some would argue that, regardless of divorce statistics, marriage is a stabilizing force for relationships, that the commitment itself helps couples stay together when they otherwise might not. It’s true that marriages are less likely to end in breakup than are cohabiting relationships, but that might simply be because married people are a self-selected group whose relationships were already more committed. Many people anecdotally report that getting married deepens their sense of commitment, even when they didn’t expect it to.link
But other studies have shown that it’s the level of commitment that matters to relationship satisfaction or the age at which the commitment is made—not a couple’s marital status. A further problem is that social norms surrounding marriage, divorce, and cohabitation have changed rapidly in the past few decades, so getting a reliable longitudinal data set is hard. And though divorce is certainly difficult, it’s not as though cohabiting unmarried couples can just walk away: Mark and I own property together and may someday have kids; beyond our own sense of commitment, we have a lot of incentives to stay together, and disentangling our lives would be hard, even without divorce.
The psychologist Bella DePaulo, who has spent her career studying single people, says she believes there are serious repercussions of putting marriage at the center of one’s life. “When the prevailing unquestioned narrative maintains that there is only one way to live a good and happy life, too many people end up miserable,” she says. The stigma attached to divorce or single life can make it difficult to end an unhealthy marriage or choose not to marry at all. DePaulo thinks people are hungry for a different story. She argues that an emphasis on marriage means people often overlook other meaningful relationships: deep friendships, roommates, chosen families, and wider networks of kin. These relationships are often important sources of intimacy and support.
In other words, marriage and the nuclear family tend to cut people off from other relationships and from society as a whole, which is a great argument against it. I can't disagree with it.
It is just that the downward trend of marriage has been in the works for decades, and, in my view, in a 100 years or so, it will be seen what the late feminist writer Eva Figes wrote nearly fifty years ago in Patriarchal Attitudes as the "hollow sham" that it is.
In my own life, the only way I would ever marry would be only for the benefits like taxes, pensions, and Social Security, and only if I didn't live with the man at all. That is the only way it would work for me.
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