why get married?

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Good analogy!

I hate this 'throwaway culture' that is completely dominant in my generation. I believe in fidelity and commitment - which makes it extremely difficult to find someone.
As for marriage, I view it as a good but hugely misused institution - it is a convenient legal framework for a committed relationship, but too many people with no real commitment (or even without the maturity to be capable of such a thing) get married; hence, you get plenty of disastrous marriages. I view marriage as a symbol of commitment, not as the commitment itself; I could be happy with a girl that didn't want to to get married just to be contrarian, for example, but I myself would prefer getting married, because of the legal advantages and because it's a symbol for me (as for society, it's tempting to not get married just because there is so much social crap around the whole thing)

You think it's bad over there, it's WAY worse here in the States..We're the ones who invented the culture you're talking about, and it still permeates American thinking to this day in a way that disgusts me...

I know, I've lived in the US. In a couple of years at the most I'll be quitting the Anglo-Saxon world for good; the more time I spend in it, the more I miss home.

That is what I used to think too. When I married my wife, I said that I wanted us to get tattoos that were special to us, I designed the tattoo which we both loved. I said that if we weren't ready to have a tattoo then we weren't ready to get married, that I believed in the vows of marriage and should uphold them.

We didn't end up getting the tattoo's due to procrastination, time, money etc

However, now, my marriage is on the verge of collapse, and I am glad I didn't get the tattoo, because i feel very different now (as my wife does too) to how we felt when we got married. You feel like now is forever when you get married, that you are ontop of the world, there's noone else, and you want to spend the rest of your lives together. Then when it gets to a point, all you want to do is be by yourself.

Before I met my wife, i never believed in marriage, I said that whats the point when you can break up just as easily, that people who are married are as in love as people who are not married, that marriage is an institution that isn't relevant anymore. Then I met my wife and everything changed, I didn't want to be with anyone else, I wanted to declare from the heavens that she was my wife and my life partner to the exclusion of all others.

But now, it seems as easy to leave a marriage than if we were going out, or just de-facto, that when things get bad enough for long enough, you walk away.

And now I don't think I believe in marriage anymore again, if we don't work it out, then I don't want to marry someone ever again, I don't want to go through this again and have words like family thrown in my face.

When I brought up Asperger Syndrome, my wife wanted to leave me because she saw it as me being unhappy in our marriage, and that I was looking for a way out of our marriage, she then chose to attack me over AS, and try and disprove I had AS, and when I would explain why I think I have it, she would attack and attack and attack.

A marriage is supposed to be understanding, loving and accepting no matter what.

Marriage seems like bullsh*t to me at the moment, an excuse. A reason for people to eat their cake and have it too, that they can do whatever they want and they "have" to stay together, that they "have" to have sex regularly even if they aren't attracted to each other anymore, and they "have" to stay together, when the truth of the matter is that if they weren't married they would have left each other long ago and probably been happier for it.

I don't know, sorry for the negative vibe.

tbam,

Marriage is very much like forging. You have to burn to become stronger.

My wife and I were on the verge of a breakup a three years ago but are now stronger than ever. We'd both moved out and I figured we'd probably gone too far to recover.

Counselling wasn't working - In fact, I believe that Marriage Counselling doesn't work.

What worked for us was a Marriage Encounter weekend where we were taught how to communicate effectively and then were given sets of questions to answer (one at a time).

I won't kid you - the weekend was very, very hard... but it was worth it.

If you're interested, go to their home page and locate a weekend in your area;
http://www.wwme.org/

Lets see....Marriage to me is sorta like a "rites of passage", and I don't "do" rites of passage, (aside from birth and death of course)...so it is only befitting that I don't ever have an actual marriage.....I do have a "life partner" though...and our relationship has taken all kinds of beatings and breakups, and we are stonger than ever (I think)

Well done poopy,

I you can get that level of committment outside of marriage, then go for it.

If marriage is just a rite of passage then it's useless.

For many couples, the only way they feel they can guarantee a decent level of committment is to get married. Not everyone has the morals and committment that you obviously do.