[xyzone]

Originally Posted by MMM

"As a whole" is a bit misleading, as it doesn't paint a detailed picture.

Well, that's debatable, and we could be here all day back and forth to no avail. Glass half empty, glass half full.

So you say "1 bullet in 10 chambers" but that also means you have a 90% chance of living your life through a happy and successful marriage (if you wait until 30). It is hard to deny those are pretty good odds.

They're good odds if you're just into odds for the sake of odds. But I'm not going to dismiss the hot-lead of the other 10%. Not to mention that these statistics may be incomplete, as I comment below.

No, actually my statement that a marriage is a religious and spiritual contract isn't just my opinion, but is true for the majority of marriages in the US. I am sure you have heard the vows each party generally says in a marriage ceremony.

The ceremony is, perhaps. The contract is just a contract in my view.

And maybe cohabitation tells society "I am off the market" but society isn't listening. People that cohabitate rather than get married tend to cheat on each each other more.

That's between the two people. I don't see any reasonable thinker believing that an adult couple needs a contract to slap their hand with a ruler in case they want to cheat. Cheating is something a person decides, not something that comes their way externally due to lack of posted signs.

Men cheat 4 times as much if they are living together, but not married, and cohabitating women cheat 8 times more than married women.

I'll really take these stats with a grain of salt. I'll also return the argument of "misleading". The only way to really test my theory wrong would be to end marriage in an experimental world and see how much cheating happens in couples who pledge themselves to each other without the state getting involved. Short of that, it's just flawed precisely because the existence of the marriage contract taints the results.

So there is SOMETHING about the institution of marriage that either has an effect on society, on the participants, or (more than likely) both.

And I'm calling attention on the bad things.

Again, this is extremely cynical. What you are striking at is the fundamental structure of society itself.

One of the good things about American society is the significant encouragement of self-criticism which ideally leads to adapting to changing situations. When this gets snuffed out, said society pretty much has nothing.

Marriage rates are dropping,

They're not really dropping as a fact. It's only speculated so far that many of those marriages over 30 will last for life. The precedence and trend weakens that argument, imo. What if many of those people get divorced in their 50s or later and it's still just as bad if not worse. That is beyond the time table we can analyze today.

Besides all that, I haven't seen a sensible and tangible argument in favor of the tangible marriage contract itself, other than one person bringing up economic reasons. Not unless tradition and "love celebration" are tangible reasons, which I don't think they are. If we argue tradition, then every violent or absurd tradition we have in our history might as well be valid just for the sake of being tradition. So basically, in a nutshell, the argument in favor of the marriage contract I'm seeing here is "because it's tradition and because of economic reasons". Not strong enough reasons to offset the risks.