I have worked as a celebrant for years, and yet I still wonder – why do people get married?
Ihave been married for 14 years and have no plans to update my relationship status. But that doesn’t stop me from wondering – why do people still get married? Why did I? For years I have worked as a celebrant, mostly at funerals, but recently I started conducting weddings. I felt like it would be good to have a little more balance in my life and schedule. In the preliminary meeting with couples, I always ask them why they decided to get married. Their answer helps me to write their ceremony and also satisfies my nosiness.
People’s answers, perhaps unsurprisingly, converge around the theme of commitment. A young bride once replied: “It’s about seeing something through.” On another occasion, a groom told me: “We share the same values.” A middle-aged couple asked me to emphasise respect, loyalty and kindness in their ceremony. They told me the story of their earlier relationships and divorces, the narrative of their lives framing this marriage as an evolution, stepping into the people they wanted to continue to become.
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Making a promise is one of the oldest known human mechanisms for supporting social cohesion and trust.
Scientists have identified the neural correlates of making and breaking promises, and researchers hypothesise that for many humans, promises have a “commitment power” because of an inbuilt preference to keep one’s word.
Over much of recorded history, marriage was more about property than love. Now that people don’t need to get married to have (many of) the rights of a married couple, perhaps marriage can become something else, beyond its roots in patriarchal dominance.
I almost never cry when I conduct funerals, having trained myself to remember that the grief is not mine. I steward people through to the other side of the threshold between their loved one’s life and the life after their loved one. At weddings, I sometimes get unexpectedly teary. It’s not the “love story,” or the “happily ever after.” It’s the way the couples look at each other when they say their vows. They are saying to each other, This is me. Will you love me? And the other person says, I will.
There is an old-fashioned rule under the Marriage Act that, to be legally married, you have to publicly declare it to be so. Maybe this is, in part, the power of getting married. Funerals create communities; marriages help create extended families. Wedding guests are not just there for the free drinks. They have a responsibility to be present, to bear witness, to see these people, and welcome them, and agree to support them in their lives together.
Marriage as a public declaration of love and commitment does not have to be restricted to people. In 2021, more than 70 women donned traditional wedding clothes and “married” 74 mature trees in the city of Bristol, Great Britain. Three years previously, women of San Jacinto Amilpas, Mexico, had done the same, seeking to draw attention to the importance of preserving their local environment.
As well as being a fun publicity stunt, for these women, marriage to trees meant something. It was a promise – I will take care of you, as you take care of me. By making this public commitment, the women of Bristol and San Jacinto Amilpas were declaring a lifelong bond to the tree, and through it, to the planet.
Weddings don’t have to retain their traditional form, and hopefully marriage will continue to evolve to be as inclusive and diverse as relationships. But making a public vow can transform people, already lovers and friends, into fellow travellers. When you get married, you promise to take life’s great road trip together. This means packing snacks that you know the other person will like, too.
• Jackie Bailey is the author of the award-winning autofiction novel, The Eulogy. She is an ordained interfaith minister with a Masters of Theology, and is currently writing a nonfiction book about how to live a spiritual but non-religious life