ABSTRACT
Marriage is a social and cultural institution, a way a community chooses to conceptualize partnership and family life. Marriage is also highly personal, involving an intimate commitment to care for and love the other person. One of the many contested questions about marriage is whether it is primarily an institutional matter, related to laws and policies, or whether it is primarily a private matter, something two people make an agreement or contract about. The practical and legal difficulty of divorce is sometimes considered one of the positive aspects of marriage. As a social institution, marriage used to be embedded in a certain set of social ideas: that sex was only appropriate within marriage that marriage was between a man and a woman that marriage would last until one partner died. Marriage is rooted in a patriarchal past, and its meaning used to be linked to inflexible, gendered social assumptions.
