There are plenty of folks in great relationships without the marriage certificate, but we felt there was something meaningful and important in the declaration of our feelings, something that for us was essential. That’s why there is a statement of vows, a public promise, a blessing of your union, a celebration. When you do this in front of your friends, your family, your world, it’s a coming out of sorts, an announcement to everyone that this is how we’re going to officially roll from here on in, together, two for the road.

Marry right; if you must marry, marry someone who believes in YOU. Your gifts and talents, your vision and your future. Don’t marry because the guy has a fine car or is rich or whatever other ephemeral reason people choose spouses for these days.

Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family - a domestic church.

Marriage is a public declaration of
a man and a woman that they have
formed a secret alliance, with the
intention to belong to, and share with
each other, a mystical estate; mystical
exactly in the sense that the real
experience cannot be communicated to
others, nor explained even to oneself
on rational grounds.

I think it’s important to write this column not to gloat (though I’ll be glad to), but to speak up for all of the young couples that have also done things the right way. When people do marriage right, they don’t complain so much, and so their voices are silenced by the rabble of promiscuous charlatans, peddling their pathetic world view as “progressive.” https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/waiting-till-the-wedding-night-getting-married-the-right-way

Marry someone who respects your intrinsic worth! Be prepared for marriage it’s not by force, girls don’t marry boys, mature men marry mature women.

It would seem that the full meaning of the word marriage can never be known by those who, at their first outspring into life, are surrounded by all that money can give. It requires the single sitting-room, the single fire, the necessary little efforts of self-devotion, the inward declaration that some struggle shall be made for that other one.

When I tell you not to marry without love, I do not advise you to marry for love alone: there are many, many other things to be considered. Keep both heart and hand in your own possession, till you see good reason to part with them; and if such an occasion should never present itself, comfort your mind with this reflection, that though in single life your joys may not be very many, your sorrows, at least, will not be more than you can bear. Marriage may change your circumstances for the better, but, in my private opinion, it is far more likely to produce a contrary result.

Do I have to say the words?
Do I have to tell the truth?
Do I have to shout it out?
Do I have to say a prayer?
Must I prove to you how good we are together?
Do I have to say the words?

We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties, older than our school system. Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in our prior decisions.

Marriage is a philosophy that should be entered without many philosophize.

The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

First of all, you have to marry the right person. If you marry the wrong person for the wrong reasons, then no matter how hard you work, it's never going to work, because then you have to completely change yourself, completely change them, completely — by that time, you're both dead. So I think you have to marry for the right reasons, and marry the right person.

Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes.