Why do you believe in marriage?

Marriage is a crazy concept. There’s a reason humans admire the rare species that evolve the strategy to mate for life. Even in nature, lifelong partnership is unusual enough that we see it as remarkable act.And yet across cultures, across history, across radically different societies, humans have continued to practice marriage in some form.

I wholeheartedly believe in marriage and the strength it can provide for individuals, couples, families, and society as a whole. But despite how universal marriage is, many people I work with still struggle to articulate why they should believe in the marriage system in the first place.

Beyond the legal aspect, many people have difficulty defining what marriage actually is and why we continue this age-old practice. Especially now, with globalization, cultural mixing, and greater freedom in how we define relationships, marriage can feel increasingly abstract.

To me, marriage is first and foremost a promise. The ceremony itself is a ritual that allows a couple to reflect on what their relationship uniquely means to them, express gratitude for the family, community, and systems that helped cultivate their love, meditate on the inherent weak points in their dynamic, and intentionally define (vows) what they hope their relationship will look like 5, 10, or 50 years into the future.

Therapist Terry Real frames marriage as a structure that helps us become more intentional about the emotional environment we create, especially for our children. If done with purpose, marriage can become a vehicle to confront unresolved trauma, break harmful cycles, and cultivate healthier patterns than the ones we inherited, and make a better future for our children.

Marriage has also historically functioned as a contract in many Indigenous cultures. Not merely a legal agreement, but a social and relational promise. Communities survived because there were shared understandings, responsibilities, and systems of reciprocity that ensured people were fed, protected, and able to live in balance with one another and the environments around them.

To live is to love. And to love is to give yourself to something beyond yourself. We already do this in many ways: with our children, our parents, our communities, and even the places we love. Marriage can act as a conduit that channels this love into something intentional and enduring. It makes explicit what it is you hope to cultivate together.

My own definition of love has evolved many times throughout my life.

As a child, I was enamored with the idea of fairy tale love. Princes and princesses. Finding “the one” you would spend the rest of your life with. But after my parents divorced, my understanding of love became much more rigid. Marriage became a very serious and sacred thing to me, and I resented people who treated it carelessly. When I loved people in relationships, I loved fully, believing that promises were meant to be kept. But that rigidity also made it difficult for me to hold space for human imperfection, forgiveness, and the inevitability that people sometimes fail each other.

As I grew older, I began to recognize the humanity in my parents and in the people around me. I started to understand that relationships are not defined by whether rupture happens, but by how people choose to repair those ruptures. Marriage, like any contract, can be breached. But what defines a relationship, and subsequently a marriage, is the willingness to amend, heal, and grow through those breaches. It is understanding the natural cycles of relationships: tension, fracture, repair, and transformation.

Then I met my wife, and my understanding of love evolved again. I became deeply aware that love and marriage are not just about admiring the beautiful parts of another person. They are about accepting the entirety of them: their family, their history, their irrational thoughts, their quirks, their wounds, their dreams, and the experiences that shaped them into who they are.

Marriage asks us to move beyond the initial comfort and magnetism of attraction and toward something deeper. It asks us to fully grasp each other’s imperfections and still choose one another intentionally. And when things inevitably break, as they sometimes do in every long relationship, marriage gives us an opportunity to come back together stronger, more honest, and more deeply understood than before.