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@gorge talks mostly about the changes to the conception of marriage from the perspective of a religious conservative, at least as I understand him. But I think even from a secular centrist state-based perspective, there are a lot of problems with it. In the old conception, the justification why the state should support marriages is very straightforward: For retirement, but also just the continued existence of the state in the future, children are necessary. Therefore, an institution for the purpose of family-formation is highly beneficial.
On the other hand, in the new framework, if we consider marriage primarily about love, it's pretty hard to argue why two people loving each other means they should get, say, a tax rebates or similar: Nice for them I guess, but why shouldn't two very good friends living together? Why not a lonely single? The latter is arguably most disadvantaged, so maybe he should get the biggest tax rebate? The answer from my left-leaning friends is mostly: No, actually, we care about children, so we should just support children directly. Fine, but now we have lost something! The old system also supported children, in particular if their parents couldn't. But in addition the old system had a clear framework, a path towards becoming parents before actually having children yet, and supported people who made a credible effort in this direction.
The new system offers nothing in its place, if anything it actively discourages people to have kids. It's like as if we said that well obviously we need plumbers in the future, but any training in plumbing needs to be inclusive towards non-plumbers, and actually you are not allowed to even claim that "plumbing training" is in any way related to the profession or task of "plumbing", and no, you're also not allowed to create a new category of "totally not plumbing training" that trains people to be plumbers. It's just that if someone just so happens to be capable of plumbing and performs the task, he is allowed to be paid for this. And everyone acts surprised that plumbing becomes rarer and rarer.
It gets worse! The new system claims to be about "love". But actually, there is no obvious criteria for "love". It's merely a claim people make. And most countries still offer tangible benefits for marriage.
So in the old system, we would support people in family formation, and then once they actually have children, we support them further. The evaluation of this was mostly straightforward, and the incentives line up nicely between what the state wants (children) and what the family was incentived to do (have children).
In the new system, there is, again, nothing like this. As said before, there isn't even a reason why the state should care that these two people "love" each other, and it isn't controlling or setting up incentives anyway. So this also explains why marriage often looks so outdated and pointless nowadays; It literally is, at least the way it is treated by the state. It changed from a system with a clear purpose and clear criteria to one with an unclear purpose and no criteria.
But at the end I still have to disagree on one point. I think the old conception can be rescued while still including some new means of family formation. Adoption, for example, can be set up in a variety of formats that allows homosexual relationships to still take part. Likewise, IVF can even allow them to have (partially) genetic children. While I have absolutely no problem giving heterosexual relationships a special status as the most common, most simple, most robust approach to family formation and which accordingly should be treated as the default, that doesn't mean we need to outright exclude all others.
What seems to be missing here is common household. That's what most married couples do, and most friendships and other arrangements don't. Me and my wife have common bank account, which each of us can use independently, common property that we both use, etc. Treating it on the individual basis, ignoring that fact, would both clearly unjust (a family with one income would pay radically different taxes than a family with the same income but earned by two people, for example, even though they essentially are in the same financial situation) and would create a huge mess in practice. That aspect makes the marriage unique, as there aren't many other arrangements in the society where people essentially form a single economic unit long-term. Theoretically you could do it with your good friend, in practice pretty much nobody does. This is much more important, IMO, than "love".
I see a few issues with this view. The first is simple: If you changed marriage to explicitly define it as a "common household", with no allusions to families, love, sex etc., how would you think people would react? In my experience, most are quite protective about the definitions of modern marriages. I'm pretty sure you'd be extremely unpopular on both the right (which still mostly clings to the old definition, even while it hasn't been enforced for decades at this point) as well as the left (which will badger you about how some marriages don't share a house, others not an account, but they all love each other, and you can't take that away from them!).
The second is at least two pairs of (male) friends from my old school clique did in fact share a common household for nearly a decade each, living together, pooling money for the majority of expenses, such as grocery buying, furniture & shared electronics, even (more than) yearly vacations together. They were as close, and the arrangement was stable for as long as, quite a few marriages, so from this perspective it was a great injustice that they got treated differently! It also didn't create a mess in practice, it was just kind of unfair.
The third, basically the counter-side to the second, is that it's actually pretty common for marriages nowadays to not at all be a single economic unit. The average marriage I know has three accounts, One for each and one shared, and how much is actually pooled into the shared account varies widely. Many keep the majority of the money to themselves once they earn well enough so that the basic necessities are just a small part of the expenses. Retirement accounts are generally kept strictly separated with no pooling except maybe informal arrangements. Arguably, messes happen in practice because too much was pooled together, not the other way around.
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To add to this, until Griswold v. Connecticut was decided in 1965, many states had laws prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, so great was their governments’ interest in promoting children and preventing vice.
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