The importance of the marriage ceremony

The importance of the marriage ceremony, not only for the newlyweds, but also for the whole family, is becoming more and more obvious as the youth rejects it. A ritual that may seem superficial to young people can be an important demarcation line between stages. This ritual can help each family member make the transition to a new relationship with each other. In most cultures, ceremonies accompanying the birth of puberty, marriage, and death are inviolable, as they are considered critical conditions for a stable life.
Whatever the relationship of a young couple before marriage, the marriage ceremony changes this relationship in an unpredictable way. For many couples, the honeymoon and the period before the birth of children is the happiest time for their entire married life. For others, this is not the case at all; there are strong stresses tearing the bonds of marriage or causing mental illness before the beginning of living together.
The very purpose of certain marriages itself can lead to violations of family life starting from the first moments of the family’s existence. For example: young people who got married mainly because they didn’t want to live at home anymore, may find that once they are already married, the purpose of the marriage has already been achieved and the reasons for it have disappeared. They have already left the family, but the marriage has no other purpose, and if it continues, it would be necessary to find some other purpose. The illusions about what a marriage should be are very often far from reality.
Although the symbolic act of marriage has an individual meaning for everyone, first of all it represents the agreement that young people devote their lives to each other. In our time of easy divorce, marriage can also be an attempt. But to the extent that marriage is a dedication, young people find that they react to each other differently. Sometimes they feel that they have fallen into a trap and begin to protest and a problem of authority arises, or they find themselves wanting to “be themselves” and start behaving like they have never been before, because their spouses do not expect it. Marriage frees young people from having to keep a distance in communicating with each other, and this movement toward unlimited intimacy can be welcomed by them, but it can also frighten them. Many conservatively-minded young people still do not enter into premarital sexual relationships and different ideas about sex as well as exaggerated expectations can lead to frustration and emotional disorders.
As young people begin to live together, they must establish a huge number of agreements necessary for each pair of intimate relationships. They must agree on how they will interact with parent families, with friends, how they will manage the household and what the subtle and expressed differences between them as individuals are. Implicitly or explicitly, they must resolve a great many questions about the existence of which before marriage they did not even suspect. They must decide where they will live, the extent to which the wife should influence her husband’s career, whether her husband’s friends can be condemned, whether the wife should work or be a housewife, and who will take care of the clothes. Information about marriage and the experience of experiencing marriage are two completely different kinds of knowledge.