Why Get Married?

Last week sometime 3 Talk apparently brought in a panel of people to discuss the topic "Why get married". I missed the show but my friend Emma posed the question to me and asked that I write this piece. Enjoy:


Marriage, to most implies a committed, monogamous relationship. Yes, Jacob Zuma will dispute that because in many cultures one may take multiple partners. Polygamy aside, marriage is seen by a fair majority of society as a coming together of two souls as one...biblically anyway. To the modernists who constitue a fairly sizable amount of people will argue that if two people really love each other, a wedding won't enhance that, they can just live together and make each other happy. To the pessimists (for want of a better word), marriage is just a sham to legally chain two individuals together in what eventually devolves into a loveless, sexless, unhappy, monotonous boredom.

So then, why get married? I posed the question on Facebook and Twitter and was inundated with 5 responses. One of my tweeps said that getting married is like investing in the person your with. Some Facebook friends said things like "because she wants to", "because it's tradition and vat en sit (living in sin) is frowned upon" and "weddings are fun, so if both are keen, why not?" All fair points with some truth to them in my opinion.

I'll be honest, I've always wanted to get married, have kids and do everything in my power to make my wife happy and my kids proud. It's always been a dream of mine because I was raised in a home like that, and it made me happy. It brought stability to my life. However, while I'm being honest, as I've grown and as I've learnt what it really means to love someone completely and what it means to be there for someone, I've also come to see getting married in a more black and white sense.

To be honest, be it the fairytale destination wedding you've had in your head since you were 5 years old with volcanoes erupting and waves crashing in the distance to signify your love, or a visit to the local municipal court to "sign the papers", getting married all boils down to a legal contract. A contract which determines what will happen in the event that one of you wants to buy a sofa from Russels on account. A contract which can protect some of your assets if one of you goes into bankruptcy. A contract which says who gets what property and how many kids should things not work out. This contract can also provide you with certain other financial benefits, lower insurance premiums and loan interest rates. For the economists and rationalists, getting married just puts everything on paper, organizing, simplifying love. It takes all the emotion out of things and rationalizes it. Logically, it makes sense to get married.

I'm almost certain that at this juncture half of you think I'm nothing more than a cold, calculating individual. Fair enough, but while I hold all of those views of getting married, I don't hold the same view of marriage, and let's all face it, any one can say "I do", which is what getting married is. The marriage on the other hand, the tumultuous ups and downs, the fights, the bitterness, the second guessing, all of that is what actually matters in my view. When, not if, your MARRIAGE gets tough and you start to weigh the joy you get out of the relationship against the misery it brings you, will your desire to walk away to 'greener pastures' outweigh your desire to stay? After every fight will you want to run away? If leaving is what you'll want to do, then I have two simple words I'd advise you use on your wedding day: "I don't."

However, if you'll always want to stay, if you'll always want to work things out, if you'll always be prepared to put your pride aside to deal with the real issues I ask you now, why not get married?