why get married?

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If you split up after kids, regardless of whether you're married or not, you're in legal/financial and emotional trouble.

Marriage is about commitment - formally agreeing to give it your best shot. Religion has very little to do with it.

The law is there to protect everything else.

My advice to most people; If your partner isn't willing to make a commitment to you, then they're probably not ready to raise a family.

Well legally anyway, it allows a couple to share health insurance, credit scores, and also allows ease of inheritance, etc. If conveys a lot of social benefits to the married couple. Admittedly, it's not for everybody. My wife and I got married because we essentially decided that we were never going to break-up, so why not enjoy the benefits too?

There are far better ways of showing your commitment to someone than by going through some fatuous ceremony in a registry office. Besides, I'm contrary and very private by nature and thus I hate the legal expectations that go along with marriage -- the expectations that you'll live together, share your income etc. Those feel to me like the state is meddling in something it ought to keep its nose out of.

What is marriage? Stripped of all the modern silliness, it is something present in all human societies and entailing, in Donald E. Brown's words, a man's "publicly recognised right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing". That's all. Marriage? You can keep it.

incentives made by the government suck i think, why should i be punished if i dont want kids? or have all these cool features that a married person has?

I used to ask this question as a teenager. I got a fair amount of hostility but no responses that made sense to me until financial benefits were mentioned. Now I'm pretty sure I'd eventually like to marry someone I like.

Elaborate

There are a myriad of legal reasons, as pointed out. These are meant to be bestowed on couples who have commited themselves to each other for life, even though there is no way to accurately or humanely require or enforce it.

The social reason is that it is an agreement to stay with the other person, not just for the good times, but through the bad times as well. If your partner becomes chronically ill, has employement issues, the relationship has a rough patch, etc., you are supposed to stay with them. Not that many people do, but I for one still take such commiment seriously.

This also, in theory if not in actual practice, allows people to rely on their partner, and lean on the them when they have problems, and to admit when they have made mistakes. It allows you to accept them for despite their failings, and for them to do the same.

Marriage sounds quite romantic to me.

Of course, everything today is about questioning what society does, so of course, marriage would be questioned.

I have no problem with it. I have no problem with people who choose not to get married.

Each to their own.

Um...I think it's called "acceptance". I don't understand how people can think that "God's laws," as outlined in the Bible, are as rigid as our own laws here. My theory is "God doesn't judge...people judge in God's name".

How you wrote that was a little funny...it sounds like your family won't want anything to do with you because you'll be in hell. I knew what you meant, but it still made me giggle.
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I think that a legally binding union is very necessary for the aforementioned reasons of legality. BUT there are some couples that can't or at least shouldn't get married because of the other person's criminal record, credit history, car accidents, etc.
When you get married, you're pretty much considered one entity. The wife's jail time can impact the husband's ability to get a security clearance. The husband's lousy credit can make it much more difficult to purchase a home and get decent financing. If the wife has had a lot of speeding tickets and car accidents, and the husband has a perfect driving history, his rates will still go up (even though traditionally, when men get married their rates go down), and they might even have to go with a high-risk company.

Also, I still believe that marriage is a lifelong commitment. So...if 2 people need 5 years to figure out if they can make it another 50, more power to them, as long as they aren't going to drag each other through the mud down the road in a divorce.

Tim,

Hell must be really, really crowded.

But full of fun people.

Spousal Visa

Ditto to that.

To me it's an issue of respect.

What would be the point of opening myself up like that to someone who doesn't really love me enough to look out for my best interests?

If I wanted casual sex and didn't care about an enduring committment, I wouldn't bother living with somebody at all. It's not right to toy with someone's emotions by entering a living arrangement resembling marriage if you have no intention of staying. People tend naturally to expect that such arrangements imply some level of loyalty, whether they claim to want that or not.

If your concern lies with having the easiest means of ending it if something were to not go perfectly, then, no, of course you don't want marriage.

(I hate comparing two very different things, but I wanted to come up with some sort of analogy, and this is the "best" I could come up with. >_< )

If you don't want your tattoo to be permanent, you get a temporary one. If you're stressing over the cost (financial and otherwise) of getting at tattoo removed, then you don't want it to be permanent in the first place, or at the very least you aren't ready for it.

Of course, you could enter a pre-nupital arrangement.

I'm just trying to be as good a Christian as I can. I apologize for sounding a bit brash in my post.

Good analogy!