Dear Foxy,

Your account demonstrates well how society is fleeting and unreliable:
one day it values this - the other it values that, one day it fakes "marriage" for the interests of extended families, the next for nuclear families, the next again for individual desires.

If marriage has any meaning, then it cannot be changing subject to social fashion. Either one is married - always, or one is unmarried - never. You can't honestly say, "well now one is married because we value the joining of family wealth and titles" or "well now one is married because we value procreation in monogamous heterosexual couples" or "well now one is married because we value pleasant emotions".

Going back to your original questions: "What does marriage mean to you? Is being married important or not?", true marriage means a lot to me but fake marriage for social purposes, means nothing.

Dear Yuyutsu,

It's not really that confusing. If you read between the lines of what Foxy has been saying you will be able to identify that marriage - and all the things associated with it - have taken on new forms and meaning as a consequence of modernity. It's that simple.

Mr Opinion, Sunday, 7 February 2016 2:14:04 PM,

That is laughable. The sort of tosh one hears in a public bar.

Are you seriously asking anyone here to believe you have an engineering Degree and Engineers Australia membership?

As for your multiple Arts Degrees, that would be a likely story too.

For once we are of the same opinion about something (someone), Onthebeach.
You took the words right out of my mouth...

Dear Mr. Opinion,

What I read in Foxy's account is not about real marriage, but about how different societies of different eras produced different forgeries of counterfeit, artificial "marriage" to suit their varying agendas.

Only that which is constant is real.

From this discussion we can see that marriage
means different things to different people.

Each society views its own patterns
of marriage, family, and kinship as self-evidently
right and proper, and usually as God-given as
well. Much of the current concern about the
fate of modern family and marriage stems from
this kind of ethnocentrism.

If we assume that there is only one "right" family form,
then naturally any change will be interpreted as
heralding the doom of the whole institution.

It is important to recognise, therefore, that there is
an immense range in marriage, family, and kinship
patterns that each of these patterns may be, at least in
their own context, perfectly viable; and above all, that
the family, and marriage, like any other social institution
will inevitable change through time, in our own society,
as well as in others.

I would like to Thank everyone of you who contributed to
this discussion. For me this one has now run its course.
I look forward to our next one.

Enjoy the coming week and happy posting.