Why marriage? The tradition that persists among modern millennials

I didn’t know much as a young adult, but I knew marriage held little appeal to my generation. In my mind, matrimony was archaic and unnecessary, something that staunch traditionalists or people who place importance in religious customs might continue to indulge in, but not most members of my own peer groups, which veered socially progressive. I knew relationships would always exist and in increasingly diverse forms, but the need to seal them with a legal contract or validation from a church would fade. As it turned out, this was another thing I was wrong about.

As I got a little older, my calendar started to become potholed with weddings. Suddenly, my views on marriage seemed to be out of step with the norm. What had I not realised?

Browsing theories on the lasting popularity of marriage put forth by professional relationship experts doesn’t answer this question. They give reasons like companionship – a fine argument for romantic relationships, but not the institute of marriage. They mention the legal benefits, such as simplifying matters of inheritance, parental rights, and other such affairs. I understand this as a motivation, but I tend to believe that the law should change to accommodate societal change, rather than people being forced to adhere to old customs to simplify their lives. And anyway, the advantages of having their relationship recognised in law appear to be a limited driver in getting people down the aisle. The marriage referendum of 2015 solidified the reality that most gay people were not satisfied with the rights, protections and responsibilities brought by civil partnerships. And while the importance of equality was crucial – many gay people with no intention of ever getting married still deserve the ability to do so – it’s clear that many same-sex couples wanted the right to marry because they simply want to be married for all the same reasons opposite-sex couples do.

The question is: What are those reasons? Why does marriage continue to be relevant? To find the answer, I decided to speak to friends who, like myself, are at the older end of millennial, but at various different points on the marriage Ferris wheel.

What’s important to say at this point is that I wasn’t totally wrong – most indicators do show marriage rates all over the world are falling. A quarter of American 40-year-olds have never been married, an all-time high, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Recent data from Ireland is skewered by COVID-19 restrictions (as you can guess, there was a decline in weddings in 2020 and 2021, followed by a surge in 2022) but pre-pandemic matrimony levels were judged to be around 60% lower than they were in 1980. What’s observable to us all is that there is less societal pressure to get married than there was in Ireland four decades ago, and so the reasons people choose to do so have shifted.

One factor, I soon learned, is the importance of the wedding itself. The ritual of declaring their love to family and friends holds an appeal to many couples. As Eimear, a TV production manager who recently got engaged to her boyfriend of about 13 years, tells me: “For me, it’s just really nice to go, ‘See you, I like you, and I like you enough to stand up here in front of all these people and say you’re my person.’ There is something really sweet about that.”

“It was a nice way to celebrate the life we had with the people we loved while the people we loved were still around to share it with,” says George*, who has been married for a number of years now. A couple since they were quite young, George and his wife had already done some travelling and lived together before deciding that marriage would be the next step.

“We did a lot of these things that people would traditionally do after getting married. I don’t think it was as big of a deal getting married as it was, say, living together. In our heads, living together was the bigger thing. And then it kind of seemed like a nice thing to do.”

“It’s a time when I get to see a lot of my family now, because everyone is off living their own lives,” says Barry, a language school teacher from Kildare, living in Dublin. “When a wedding comes it’s a great way for everyone to get back together.”

Barry was married once before, but the motivation for doing so was for largely practical reasons as he and his then-partner were from different continents and had no legal right to live in the same country long-term. Though now divorced, it has not changed his attitude to marriage in any significant way.

“If I was with someone and they wanted to do it, I wouldn’t be against it,” he says, with his perspective now tinged with experience. “When I was younger it was just a foregone conclusion. ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get married someday.’ It was just a gimme. But now, it seems like a massive expense, stressful.”

This mention of the cost attached to getting married invites consideration of how important the ideal, picturesque day out continues to be for many couples. Weddings are expensive undertakings that can often resemble demonstrations of socio-economic or cultural status rather than declarations of love. (Interestingly, a survey in the US found that couples who have big weddings are more likely to get divorced.)

Eimear is not planning on having a luxurious ceremony, though she has been to, according to her own estimate, “four billion weddings” and acknowledges that for some women, the vision of the perfect day can be a powerful one they carry from childhood. For George and his wife, it was actually important not to conform to these trends. They tried not to go too big, partly by doing things George describes as “outside of the machine”.

“I think that conformity comes from the church and capitalism, and because we cut the church out of our wedding, and to the best amount we possibly could, cut capitalism out of our wedding, we had a much freer celebration.”

The linking of marriage and love is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. Its primary purpose in the past was often to bind women to men. The Catholic Church still considers one of the core tenets of marriage to be “the procreation and education of offspring” who are “raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament between the baptised”. It’s clear that marriage needed to mutate to retain relevancy.

Still, some old customs survive, like men predominantly being expected to propose, some asking their partner’s father for ‘permission’ to do so, fathers ‘giving their daughter away’ during the wedding ceremony, and women taking their husband’s surnames (though it’s increasingly common for them not to, or for their husbands to take their name). Rather than burn the institute of marriage to the ground, many who consider themselves progressives are happy to simply shed what they’re uncomfortable with. “With anything that’s a long-standing tradition, you should be able to cherry-pick what you want from it and utilise it to how you want to,” says Eimear, who won’t be taking her fiancé’s name.

With all this considered, I wondered: if it was possible for couples to host an event to celebrate their relationship with their loved ones, but without the state or church giving the ritual the rubber stamp, would they do so in large numbers? “I think it would be just as valid if there was an entirely separate thing [to marriage] like that,” says George, who nonetheless figured that if he and his wife were doing the ceremony, they might as well have their union recognised legally for all the benefits it brings.

Of course, this would also negate the need for divorce should a couple split. Yet George has a soulful response when we discuss divorce as a marriage deterrent. “The most honest thing anyone can say at the point of getting married is you’re making a pledge to someone that you’ll always do your best to make sure their life is as happy as it can be. And I think in certain cases that can be that you’re not together anymore, and I don’t think that’s at odds with what someone who loves someone should do.”

* Name has been changed