the real disadvantage of deconstructing your culture is that you end of like Socrates. you criticize, ridicule, and the way everyone else does things in herds without thinking about them, but then you have to admit that you don't really have any better ideas...still working on those...yeah.

as a side note, John Locke views the conjugal society (that's marriage) as the product of a social contract between a man and a woman. In Lockean political theory, social contracts take shape according to their purpose; the only rational purpose that can be derived for such a union from the Laws of Nature is that of procreation. Why procreate? In order to propogate one's genes, according to Darwin, but Locke insists that we procreate because in return for birthing and governing children until they become old enough to reason for themselves, children will honor their parents and take care of them in their old age (not from any inherent altruism, but because they want the inheritance from the parents).

Soo...that's a pretty cold look at the world. And it means that the marriage, according to Locke, is only solvent as long as it is needed for the procreating, protection and education of children to maturity.

One might instead take the functionalist sociological perspective and say that marriage is an institution carefully socialized into the members of a society in order to provide a stable unit for the procreation and enculturation of children, thus ensuring the survival of the society. Status as an adult, romantic notions of love and marriage, sexual legitimacy, and religious obligation and emotional attachment are tools (lures as you will) to bring men and women into this arrangement.

Sigh. All of this deconstruction just rips right through beauty.

Most recent political theorists emphasize the depravity and individuality of mankind. They don't talk a lot about loneliness, the need for fellowship, community, and belonging, affirmation, laughter, celebration, beauty. and romance. In reducing life to the material essentials of survival, they often forget the reason for survival: for people who no longer have to struggle to live often surrender all that progress and kill themselves.

Yes, the men and women of mankind are dirty, fearful, self-serving individuals who will subordinate pretty much everything to surviving feared threats. But once survival has been achieved, we go right back to those other things: we need them. Too many theorists miss that very real aspect of other human needs and desires than just survival; so Locke misses a very many good reasons for conjugal society.

Not the least of which, according to CS Lewis, is laughter.

So...questions. Just for kicks and giggles.

What is the purpose of marriage?
What criteria does one use to find a partner for this joint endeavor?
How does one persuade this partner to enter into this agreement?
Do these processes make sense in light of their goal?

And why is it that fifty percent of these ventures fail in our society? Why do we do things the way that we do them, as a society? What are our motives, conscious and unconscious, as individuals, for playing these games?

And my favorite:

Taking into consideration a lack of knowledge about the future, a lack of understanding of the opposite sex, an impossibly wide field of candidates (in this very small world), a complete inability to predict personal changes in self and other over the next sixty years, clumsy and ill-advised courtship institutions, the sheer overwhelming power of arbitrary notions such as physical beauty and romantic attractiveness, not to mention undiscovered psychological preferences skewed by positive and negative interactions with members of the opposite sex over the course of life, and the individual's ingrained and sometimes dysfunctional social behaviors from years of living in sometimes painful and sometimes rewarding social systems, the inevitable build-up of the presented, social self...

is there any way you can expect twenty-somethings to make intelligent decisions about these sort of things? it's a wonder than fifty percent of these marriages do survive.