The absolute most I've herd in that direction are things like "People shouldn't feel like they need to get married if they don't want to" and "people should be supported if they want to leave an abusive marriage."
My gripe is that marriage, as an institution, ought to evolve to meet the people's changing needs, and by codifying it, the government locks in features (like the assumptions about gender or money or about who gets to make medical choices of certain kinds) which might then later fail to match up with how the people are living.
So it's not that I think it's irrelevant, it's just that I think it could serve us better if we kept a cleaner divide between what we practice socially and what we legislate. Whatever it is that you might need a reference to marriage for in the law, instead create separate decoupled systems for handling those things. More flexible that way.
We weren't going to bother with the marriage paperwork, because who cares what the state thinks. But then we did our taxes both ways and decided to swallow our pride and take the money.
I think the point of this article is that marriage works surprisingly (to a modern expectation) well. If you take everything out of it, then maybe the benefits would get stripped as well.
> Marriage is good, actually.
> Society treats unmarried women poorly, so much so that it damages their health.
It would be interesting to see if the results replicate with a sample of men.
I think we might live in different universes.
What my observations are right now is that many women are choosing to remain single because they are thriving just fine without a man in their lives.
Unmarried Men are turning into incels who are bitter, angry at the world and they are unquestionably socially damaged and ostracized.
Perhaps I'm struggling to see past my own perspective here though.
A year or so later, my wife decided she wanted to have a party and make a big deal about it--the primary driver for this decision was that she noticed that her female co-workers weren't treating her like a professional, and she suspected it was because they didn't see her as really married.
I didn't press the issue, we had a party, it was great. But apparently, women treat unmarried women differently in professional contexts.
Also, men do. Also, the IRS does. Also, parents do. Do nurses without a family end up working different hours? There are a lot of factors.
I'm just saying that it's really difficult to sort out whether being married helped these women because it's so great, or whether not being married harmed the other ones because they were treated poorly in ways we don't understand.
1. constitutes a denigration of the institution 2. actually materially causes the decline in marriage rates we see, especially among the economically exploited.
Poverty causes significant stress on couples which almost certainly explains the differences between the marriage rates of different classes in our society. I'm pretty sure that people having kids out of wedlock aren't doing it because they read about it in GOOP or whatever. In fact, further down this thread someone has posted a survey which suggests that people more likely to get divorced actually have a stronger belief in marriage than people less likely to. This suggests strongly that it isn't the opinions of the upper classes that actually cause divorces and points to other economic causes.
Except this gap is new. In 1979, marriage rates in the top four income quintiles were quite similar: https://www.brookings.edu/research/middle-class-marriage-is-...
a) https://news.gallup.com/poll/316223/fewer-say-important-pare...
b) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/14/as-u-s-marr...
Gee, I wonder if there is a material, economic, explanation for the stability of various family structures in different classes?