What are the Benefits of Marriage?

From: Randy Alcorn

Marriage encourages men to share the burdens of child rearing and binds fathers to their children.

Marriage provides the optimal setting in which mothers and fathers can raise their own boys and girls to enter a world that consists exclusively of men and women.

A procreative marriage, one where children are the offspring of the husband and wife, is more stable and long lasting—the husband and wife have the added incentive of keeping the relationship healthy and alive since leaving it involves leaving their natural children.

As the societal building block, the family has also developed as the best gauge—the canary in the mine—that protects culture from harmful change. Since change can harm men, women, and children (and the family as a whole), the most effective harbinger of detrimental societal change is the traditional family.

Marriage between one man and one woman is perfectly integrated by sex. An identical number of men and women get married each year, side-by-side, hand-in-hand. The mechanism of marriage is perfectly balanced. No man may become a husband unless a woman becomes a wife at the same moment.

Marriage has been the societal building block for millennia; it has developed as the method by which cultures pass on, from generation to generation, who and what they are. Since cultures are made up of men, women and children, to effectively pass on cultural values the family should reflect the cultural makeup of one man, one woman (an equal number), and their natural children where possible.