Is marriage an outdated institution?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is marriage an outdated institution?". Your opponent's style: Norm Macdonald

Marriage has been a social ritual for millennials but to call it outdated is an exaggeration. Marriage is a ritual where two people bonded mutually in the eyes of society. It is an ritual where the bonding of two people has been accepted by the society. This Institute provides a assurance that two people will live in harmony together. Yes it is an ancient ritual but there is no better alternatives to call marriage outdated. Every other ritual that involve the bonding of two people has shown very tragic outcome in statistics..

Look, you're describing what marriage *was*, not what it *is*. You say it provides "assurance of harmony"—but half of marriages end in divorce. That's not assurance, that's a coin flip. And you claim there are no better alternatives, but millions of unmarried couples live together perfectly fine without the legal contract. They've got the bonding, the society acceptance, none of the messy dissolution. Your whole argument rests on marriage being necessary for stability, but the data shows it's just as likely to explode. If it's truly not outdated, why does it keep failing so spectacularly at the one job you say it does?

It is not true that half of the married people are divorced. If you look at eastern side of the world you can see that more than 90 percent of the married people are still living together and you are kinda stating the marrital perspective of the western liberal idea where it is believed that marriage is a imprisonment if that were true than why couples that are not legally binded have always end up marrying each other. Because it is in our instinct, the social instinct in which people believe that they need the approval of other members of society to live together in harmony..

You're cherry-picking regions to avoid the real problem. Yeah, 90 percent stay married in the East, but ask yourself why—it's not because marriage works better there, it's because women have fewer options to leave. That's not a feature, that's coercion dressed up as tradition. And your instinct argument destroys your own case. If people *naturally* want to bond and get society's blessing, then marriage as a *legal institution* is redundant. They'd do it anyway without the paperwork. The fact that you need laws, contracts, and property division means marriage isn't natural—it's enforcement. People bond fine without it. Marriage is just the legal cage around something that should be voluntary.