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A Biblical View of Marriage

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The biblical view of marriage is of a God-given, voluntary, sexual and public social union of one man and one woman, from different families, for the purpose of serving God.

Marriage was first instituted by God in the order of creation, given by God as an unchangeable foundation for human life. Marriage exists so that through it humanity can serve God through children, through faithful intimacy, and through properly ordered sexual relationships. This union is patterned upon the union of God with his people who are his bride, Christ with his church. Within marriage, husbands are to exercise a role of self-sacrificial headship and wives a posture of godly submission to their husbands. This institution points us to our hope of Christ returning to claim his bride, making marriage a living picture of the gospel of grace.

This study will comprise three main parts. First, we consider what kind of “thing” marriage is. This may seem a strange beginning, but it is foundational to our study. Next, we discuss the point or purpose of marriage. Finally, we ask the definitional question: what is marriage?

The Nature of Marriage

Marriage is an Institution of God’s Creation Order

When cultures debate marriage-related questions and discuss the ethics of sexual relationships, there is a fundamental divide between those who consider marriage to be, in its essence, a thing “given” from God, and those who regard it as a cultural construct. In Matthew 19, when Jesus is asked a question about divorce, he begins by affirming the teaching of Genesis 1 and 2:

“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female [Gen. 1:27] and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh’ [Gen. 2:18]” (Matt. 19:4-5).

By taking us back to Creation, Jesus affirms what Genesis teaches, that the two-part sexuality of humankind (created male and female) and the institution of marriage are a “given” from God. This is “given” in the double sense of “given and non-negotiable” and “given as gift.” Professor Oliver O’Donovan writes that created order is “not negotiable within the course of history” and is part of “that which neither the terrors of chance nor the ingenuity of art can overthrow. It defines the scope of our freedom and the limits of our fears” (Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, 2nd ed., 61). Marriage is a good and stable institution. Human cultures may seek to reinvent it or reshape it, but under God it stands as an unchangeable foundation for human life.

Marriage has, of course, many culturally variable expressions. People enter marriage through varied ceremonies and engage in marriage in different ways. But, in its essence, the institution is a part of the Created Order. For this reason, we may explore from the Bible its purpose and definition (see G.W. Bromily, God and Marriage ).

The Purpose of Marriage

Marriage is created that we may serve God through children, through faithful intimacy, and through properly ordered sexual relationships.

It is both theologically important and pastorally helpful to ask the question, “For what purpose has God created marriage?” We naturally begin by asking what hopes and ambitions a particular couple may have as they enter into marriage. But before we do this, it is foundational to ask why God has created the marriage institution. The Bible teaches three main answers to this question. But before we consider them, we should note one over-arching theme: the service of God in his world.

In Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” The man is the gardener; his is the guardian and the farmer in God’s garden. In this context we read in Genesis 2:18, “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make a helper fit for him.’” A careful study of Scripture establishes what the context here suggests, which is that the problem with the man’s aloneness is not a relational loneliness but rather that there is too great a task to be achieved; the man needs, not so much a companion or a lover (though the woman will be those) but a “helper” to work alongside him in the guarding and farming of the garden (see ch. 7 of Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God ).

To acknowledge this transforms the study of marriage from a consideration of what pleases us or what we enjoy into a focus upon what will serve the purposes of God. Paradoxically, the most secure and happiest marriages are those that look outwards beyond their own (often stifling) self-absorption (or introspective “coupledom”) to the service of God and others in God’s world, through love of God and neighbor.

Under this over-arching heading of the service of God we may place the three traditional biblical “goods” (or benefits) of marriage: procreation, intimacy, and social order.

Procreation

In Genesis 1:27–28, the creation of humankind as male and female is immediately linked with the blessing that we are to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over” it. That is to say, the first way in which marriage leads to the service of God is through the procreation, and then the godly nurture, of children. Children are a blessing from God. Not every married couple is given this blessing. When they are not, it is a cause of sadness. A marriage is still a marriage, and can honor God deeply, without children. But we are to esteem the procreation of children as a costly and sacrificial blessing. Our prayer is that children will grow up in “the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4) and become—in the language of Genesis 2—fellow-gardeners under God to care for his world.

Sexual desire and delight within marriage are wonderfully affirmed within Scripture (e.g. Proverbs 5:18–19; Song of Songs). To deny the goodness of marriage is to side with the snake in the garden of Eden, when he questions the goodness of God (Gen. 3:1; 1 Tim. 4:1–5).

The relationship of the covenant God with his people is portrayed as a marriage in which the Lord is the husband and the people of God are his bride (e.g. Isa. 62:5). In the New Testament this theme moves into a new key as the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom with the church of Christ, his bride (e.g. Eph. 5:22–33).

Sexual intimacy within marriage is designed to serve God by building a relationship of God-honoring delight and faithfulness, an intimacy that portrays the eschatological intimacy that the whole church of Christ will enjoy with Christ her bridegroom. It would be hard to imagine a higher calling for couples embarking upon marriage (see Timothy and Kathy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage ).

Social Order

The Bible is realistic about the power of sexual desire, both male and female (with all their differences), and the possibilities of chaos and disorder that arise from those desires when they are not channeled in God’s proper order. The seventh commandment’s prohibition of adultery (Exod. 20:14) functions as the tip of an iceberg of teaching in both Old and New Testaments that forbid sexual immorality of all kinds. All sexual intimacy that lies outside of the covenanted union of one man with one woman in marriage comes under the biblical definition of sexual immorality. The Bible protects “nakedness” (sexual nakedness, in the context of sexual arousal) and thereby prohibits pornography, rape, the abuse of women, sex between a man and a man, between a man and many women, between a woman and a woman, between a woman and many men, and between human beings and animals.

This boundary around sexual expression is a good and necessary protection of sexual order in any society. When it is broken, and especially when it is broken by a whole culture, sexual chaos ensues, and lives are desperately damaged.

The Definition of Marriage

Marriage is the voluntary sexual and public social union of one man and one woman, from different families. This union is patterned upon the union of God with his people who are his bride, Christ with his church. Intrinsic to this union is God’s calling to lifelong exclusive sexual faithfulness (see chs. 11–15 in Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God ).

We may summarize the Bible’s definition in terms of the following elements.

Marriage is a voluntary union. The Bible condemns rape and forced marriage (e.g. 2 Sam. 13:14). A man and a woman need to give their consent to be married. With this consent they agree each to give to the other all that they are as sexual beings (1 Cor. 7:2–4). Such consent ought to be given with some understanding of the nature of the institution into which they both enter.

Marriage is a public union. While the intimacy is, and must be, private, the nature of the union is to be public. The man and the woman promise before witnesses that each will be faithful to the other until one of them dies.

Unmarried cohabitations labor under an ambiguity about what exactly the man and the woman have consented to. Often there are different understandings between the two of them. But when a man and a woman marry, there is no such uncertainty. Each has publicly pledged their lifelong faithfulness before the wider society in which they live. In a healthy society, this means that societal support is given for a married couple. There is a social cost to pay by a husband or a wife who breaks a marriage.

One man and one woman: heterosexual

Marriage is between a man and a woman. This is how God has created humankind. A society may call a relationship between two people of the same sex “marriage”; but in the sight of God it can never be so.

One man and one woman: monogamous

Marriage is between one man and one woman. Polygamy in the Old Testament is recorded but never affirmed. Jesus explicitly affirms the Genesis order of one man and one woman (e.g. Matt. 19:5–6 “no longer two , but one flesh”).

From different families

The Bible consistently condemns incest, which is sexual intimacy between those who are too closely related, whether by blood (kinship) or through marriage (affinity). Leviticus 18 is the clearest and most sustained Old Covenant text addressing this question. 1 Corinthians 5 condemns the sexual relationship of a man with his stepmother.

Christians have not always agreed either about the rationale underlying the incest prohibitions or about just where the incest lines ought to be drawn. The most likely answer is that the rationale is to protect the family circle from the destructive confusions arising when someone views a near relative (other than their spouse) as a potential sexual partner. If this rationale is correct, then the precise extent of the incest prohibitions may depend on what counts, in a particular culture, as “close family” (See Christopher Ash, Marriage: Sex in the Service of God , 266–271).

The pattern of Christ with his church

Three New Testament passages explicitly address husbands and wives: Ephesians 5:22–33; Colossians 3:18–19; 1 Peter 3:1–7. In these we are taught that husbands are to exercise a role of self-sacrificial headship and wives a posture of godly submission to their husbands. Such a pattern is widely derided and dismissed in much contemporary culture and in some of the church.

In considering this question, we ought to begin with the idea of “order” or “arrangement” (Greek taxis ) from which the word “submission” is derived. In the New Testament this concept is applied to (a) the submission of all things to God and to Christ (e.g. Eph. 1:22), (b) the submission of Christ to God (1 Cor. 15:24–28), (c) the submission of the believer to God (e.g. James 4:7), (d) the submission of the believer to the civil authorities (e.g. Rom. 13:1–7), (e) the submission of slaves to masters (e.g. Titus 2:9), (f) the submission of church members to their leaders (e.g. Heb. 13:17), (g) the submission of children to parents (e.g. Eph. 6:1), and (h) the submission of wives to husbands (e.g. Eph. 5:24). Submission of slaves to masters is the odd one out in this list, for it has no theological grounding in creation, and in fact the Bible radically undermines the institution of slavery.

The submission of a wife is to be a voluntary submission, an expression of her godly submission to God. The headship of a husband is to be a costly headship, patterned on Christ’s love for his church. At its best this pattern is beautiful and life-giving. It may be subverted (1) by a tyrannical husband, (2) by a wife who fails to be a partner with her husband but is simply passive, (3) by a rebellious wife, and (4) by a husband who abdicates his responsibilities.

Lifelong faithfulness

Faithfulness, or faithful love, is to lie at the heart of the marriage relationship. Marriage is not at root about our feelings (which come and go) but about keeping a promise. Scripture speaks of marriage as a covenant to which God is witness (e.g. Mal. 2:14). When a man and a woman marry (whether or not they are believers), they are joined together by God (e.g. Mark 10:8,9). Neither one of the couple nor any other person is to break what God has joined.

Conclusion: Marriage and the Grace of God

The gospel of Jesus offers grace for sexual failures. After a list that focuses especially on sexual sins, Paul writes, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11). We are all scarred by sexual sins, whether our own, in what we have thought, what we have seen, what we have read, or what we have done. In the gospel we find forgiveness and the joy of being washed clean. Joyfully, we hold out to others the cleansing we ourselves have found in Christ.

A Feminist Critique of Marriage

At a time of unparalleled social freedom, can we imagine a better way of living.

Updated June 24, 2024 | Reviewed by Kaja Perina

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Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.

With technological advances such as mechanization and birth control, the male advantage has become largely if not entirely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialization of children, which emphasizes man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.

From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage , which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor, and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors, but aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman.

A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve:

Never say never…
You just need to find the right man…
There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet…
Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
Have you tried one of those dating apps?

On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low-value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.

These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love , are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.

Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes:

I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.

It would be hard to imagine these lines in the mouth of a man.

And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler:

Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit nervous/ That the best of all the years have gone by/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit terrified/ And then I see the look in your eyes/ Turnaround bright eyes, but every now and then I fall apart.

Now consider these lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China :

It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.

The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolizes her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring.

Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.

Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens?

By legitimizing a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who, for various reasons, are less likely to marry.

Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalized inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.

In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding generates spending of, on average, £31,974 (around $38,000), and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the £230,000+ required to raise a child, let alone two or three.

The laws that govern marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce . Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on around 40% of the marriages it sanctions, amounting in the US alone to one divorce approximately every 36 seconds. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.

Here are the closing lyrics of Hotel California :

Mirrors on the ceiling/ The pink champagne on ice/ And she said, ‘we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’ ... Last thing I remember, I was/ Running for the door/ I had to find the passage back to the place I was before/ ‘Relax’ said the night man/ ‘We are programmed to receive/ You can check out any time you like/ But you can never leave!'

To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.

Until recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma . In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.

The rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalization of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced.

Forced marriage is still practised all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape, or so much as talk to another man, risk being beaten or murdered in an ‘honour killing’. Some time ago, an eight-year-old Yemeni girl died from internal bleeding after being raped by her forty-year-old husband on ‘their’ wedding night.

When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just twenty or thirty years ago, and men are much more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony.

But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.

In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritized, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.

The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness , or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’

There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness .’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women.

In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession.

The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it: and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a profoundly conservative institution.

Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another.

In The Second Sex (1949), the feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’.

At a time of such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy?

Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot imagine a better way of living?

Read more in For Better For Worse: Essays on Sex, Love, Marriage, and More .

Supremes, The (1966): You Can’t Hurry Love. Holland-Dozier-Holland for Motown.

Tyler, B (1983): Total Eclipse of the Heart. Jim Steinman for Columbia Records.

Brown, C (2013): Fine China. Chris Brown, Eric Bellinger, Leon ‘Roccstar’ Youngblood, and Sevyn Streeter for RCA Records.

Brides (2016): How much does a wedding cost? Bridesmagazine.co.uk, 12 September 2016.

Collinson P (2016): Cost of raising children in UK higher than ever. Theguardian.com, 16 February 2016.

CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System: National marriage and divorce rate trends 2000-2015. Retrieved on 26 August 2017.

Eagles, The (1977): Hotel rfornia. Don Felder, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey for Asylum.

Russell B (1929): Marriage and Morals 11: Prostitution.

Elie J (2013): Yemeni child bride, eight, ‘dies on wedding night’. Theguardian.com, 11 September 2013.

Brontë C (1852): Letter to Ellen Nussey dated 25 August 1852 in Smith M (2004): The Letters of Charlotte Brontë Vol. 3. Clarendon Press.

Gide, A (1897): Les Nourritures Terrestres IV. Trans. Neel Burton.

Guardian, The (2011): David Cameron’s Conservative party conference speech in full. Theguardian.com, 5 October 2011.

Beauvoir S (1949): The Second Sex (Vintage, 1989) 444. Trans. HM Parshley.

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

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Pride & Prejudice and the Purpose of Marriage

J ane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is often lauded as one of the greatest romances in British literature. Its comedic structure entertains readers with the fluctuations of Elizabeth Bennet’s relationship with Mr. Darcy. However, this novel is more than a simple love story. Although almost everyone marries by the end of the novel, some of the women of Elizabeth’s world are not as well-matched with their husbands as she is with hers. Unlike Elizabeth and Darcy’s affectionate relationship, many characters in the story make marriages of convenience. The monetary and social stability that the marriage offers women is more important than the compatibility of the spouses. Austen develops the plot to hint at a more considered view on marriage. Certain formal aspects of the work further inform us on Austen’s opinion of matrimony. In Pride and Prejudice , Jane Austen uses satire, characterization, and narrative voice to explore the vocational nature of marriage for women in her society.

From the first line of Pride and Prejudice , the narrator reveals her satirical approach to matrimony. If it was “a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” then the women in the novel would not have to struggle so much. i Mrs. Bennet would not have to actively seek husbands for her five daughters. The marriageable women of the novel would not have to debate between choosing spouses by preference and marrying for financial stability. There would not be any kind of jealousy or competition between Miss Bingley and Elizabeth, or Elizabeth and Miss King. The premise of this first line in the narrative opposes the action in the novel. A more straightforward description of reality would have been that a single woman in possession of no fortune must be in want of a husband. The irony of this initial sentence introduces the novel masterfully. While Austen flips this truth to provide humor in her narrative, she simultaneously sets the tone for the entire novel and tips readers off to her proposition that marriage is a type of career for the women in her society. The opening line of the novel is an especially amusing statement when read in conjunction with Mrs. Bennet’s subsequent scheming to secure Mr. Bingley for one of her daughters, which would be completely unnecessary if he was so desperate for a wife. Austen’s witty reflection on marriage is not confined to the implication that it is women who need husbands; it also indicates that financial situation plays a foremost role in the selection process. Austen wastes no time emphasizing her point that marriage is all about economics.

Furthermore, the idea of marriage being less about one’s heart and more about one’s wallet is repeated throughout the story. The narrator again employs her biting wit in her description of Mrs. Bennet as a woman whose “business of her life was to get her daughters married”. ii In the context of what the narrative has already revealed of Mrs. Bennet and what will further be revealed of her, this quip seems to criticize the farcical nature of Mrs. Bennet’s life. Nevertheless, her incessant efforts to find suitors for her children are described as a “business.” This description almost begs the question of what one would expect to be her vocation and forces readers to acknowledge that a woman in Mrs. Bennet’s situation would not have any professional options available to her. The narrator encourages readers to laugh at Mrs. Bennet to help them realize the ridiculousness of Mrs. Bennet’s “business” being marrying off her daughters. The negative portrayal of Mrs. Bennet’s preoccupation with beaux reflects the greater tragedy of marriage being the only available means of income for any upper-class woman at this point in England’s history. Mrs. Bennet’s job is presented as frivolous because it is frivolous that it is her only option. There are numerous other instances throughout the novel of Austen’s satire exposing the vocational nature of marriage in her culture. The Bennet women are said to entertain “very lively hopes of Mr. Bingley’s heart” before they even meet him. iii The rumor of Bingley bringing twelve women with him to his first ball is a point of grief for the ladies of the neighborhood. Mr. Darcy is admired greatly, primarily for his financial situation, until it is obvious that those riches would not benefit any of the ladies present. iv Mr. Darcy’s disinterest in the women present is so abhorrent to them because it means that he is unlikely to marry any of them and is therefore of no material value to them. In true satirical style, Austen makes readers laugh at something that at the time would have been commonplace.

Another way that Austen exposes the occupational nature of marriage is through her characterization. Again, Mrs. Bennet’s whole life is about marrying off her daughters, and the readers are prompted to disparage her for it. There are several other characters who are presented primarily because of their views or actions concerning marriage, and one prime example is Mr. Collins. He is undeniably a ridiculous character, and it is easy to identify what makes him so absurd. Mr. Collins does not execute social norms properly and is consequently the fool of the story. One of his laughable qualities is his vocalization of implicit social norms, such as his telling Mr. Bennet that he practiced compliments for women before he talked to them. v He repeats this mistake when he is proposing to Elizabeth. Not only does he attribute his decision to marry as a response to his belief that it is part of his job, but he also claims that perhaps the most important reason for his proposal is that it is the “recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness”. vi This “very noble lady” is more than Mr. Collins patroness; she is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy’s wealthy, condescending aunt. She encourages Mr. Collins to marry as part of his duty as a clergyman and tells him to marry a “useful sort of person…able to make a small income go a good way”. vii Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine vocally recognize the economics involved in marriage, but their opinions are by no means praised by the narrator (or by Elizabeth). Everything about Mr. Collins—from his letter writing to his disastrous dancing to his incessant discussion of Lady Catherine—is preposterous. His and Lady Catherine’s views on marriage can therefore indicate what Austen considers most ridiculous. He essentially uses matrimony to get ahead in his career and Austen has no sympathy for this attitude. We see that her characterization of Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins emphasizes their occupational views of marriage relationships. However, it is unclear whether Austen criticizes them individually for having these views on marriage or commenting on the condition of a society in which this is the reality of the matrimonial state. Perhaps Austen’s opinion can be elucidated through investigation of a positive characterization in the novel.

Charlotte Lucas is characterized favorably as a sensible and thoughtful young woman, worthy to be the best friend of the hero, Elizabeth. Charlotte advises Elizabeth early on about Jane’s behavior toward Bingley being too guarded. She warns that Bingley “may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on”. viii While Elizabeth laughs at Charlotte and tells her that rushing into marriage without knowing much about one’s partner “is not sound,” Charlotte is ultimately proven correct. ix All of Jane’s misery over Bingley was caused in part by Darcy’s conviction of her indifference toward his friend. x We see Austen’s admiration for Charlotte in her characterization as a smart woman. In addition to her accuracy in assessing Jane and Bingley’s relationship, Charlotte is successful in her schemes to swindle Mr. Collins. The fact that Mr. Collins is inferior to many other men in the novel does not lessen Charlotte’s accomplishment. She is aware of his shortcomings when she accepts him. Her thoughts at the time are described as “in general satisfactory”. xi Mr. Collins fills a need for her. She is practical and sees matrimony for what it truly is to her – not an emotionally fulfilling relationship, but a business deal.

While Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet’s business-like attitudes toward marriage are laughable, Charlotte’s opinion is sensible. Austen casts these characters in very different lights, even though their sentiments on this subject are somewhat similar. The idea of marriage being a job is a common thread in all three views, but their situations and the implications of their attitudes are significantly different. Mr. Collins is the most negatively portrayed character of the three. Making blunder after social blunder, he is at best silly and at worst slightly malicious. This characterization is connected to how he regards marriage as a career advancement. Mr. Collins inhabits a very different station in society than the women of the novel. He already has a career and is stable and provided for very well. Marriage is not as necessary for men in this world as it is for women. His treatment of marriage as a career move, without any thought to how complimentary or gratifying a match might be, is so odious because it makes light of the reality of marriages of necessity for women. Mrs. Bennet is also portrayed as a ludicrous character, but she is not nearly as loathsome as her husband’s nephew. Her determination to get her daughters suitably married is in fact a determination to provide for them; she can do no better within the restrictions of her society. This is more critical of the culture than of her intellect. She is working within a system that may not be fair, but it is the world she lives in. Similarly, Charlotte does the same thing for herself. Her characterization, although not romanticized or idealized, is positive and flattering. She reflects the best possible reality for many women at the time.

The satirical humor and characterizations that Austen employs in Pride and Prejudice contribute to the novel’s themes. However, Austen influences our perceptions of matrimony by using the narrative voice with devices such as irony, word choice, and free indirect discourse. The narrative voice in this novel is typically ironic rather than serious. This tone betrays the cynical view that the narrator has of marriage. For example, before Mr. Collins and Charlotte marry, they are described as having “a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity”. xii However, readers can easily discern that there is no real affection on either side of such a hasty match. It begs the question of whether courtships of greater length can produce more affection, or if all courtships are “spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity” that mean no more than those of Collins and Charlotte.

Although the tone of the novel is overwhelmingly ironic, there are times when marriage is spoken of in more straightforward and serious terms. The narrator uses unique word choice to reveal the serious nature of marriage. When Mr. Darcy becomes initially attracted to Elizabeth, the narrator tells us that he “really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger” and later that he “began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention”. xiii Darcy is in danger of tarnishing his family’s good name and losing out on the opportunity of acquiring greater monetary advantage through marriage if he involves himself with Elizabeth. This concept of marriage being a risky venture recurs throughout the story. Jane is under painful “anxiety” when her hopes for marriage are disturbed. xiv Losing Bingley’s affection also means losing the security that he can offer her. Mrs. Gardiner, Elizabeth’s aunt, is “suspicious” of Elizabeth’s regard for Wickham and cautions her against entertaining it, since she knows that Elizabeth’s marrying a man who is her equal in monetary deficiency would be highly imprudent. xv The narrator’s use of words like “danger,” “anxiety,” and “suspicious” indicates to us the risk involved in matrimony. In these instances, the narrator uses serious and straightforward language to describe the nature of matrimony.

Another tactic of Austen’s narration is the use of free indirect discourse. As previously discussed, Charlotte is a positive character in the story and she can at times be a mask the narrator uses to divulge her own opinions. The narrator slips into expressing Charlotte’s thoughts and feelings after she agrees to marry Mr. Collins. It is almost as if the narrator is reflecting with Charlotte when Austen writes:

Mr. Collins to be sure was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. – Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it. xvi

In many ways, this inner dialogue of Charlotte’s that the narrator relates to us is the book’s central commentary on marriage. Of course, Elizabeth gets the idealized ending with the man who is rich, respectable, and loves her. On the other hand, Charlotte gets the realistic ending. A wedding is not always the heart-warming event some like to imagine, since a wedding at times simply begins a business deal. It is not glamorous or necessarily fulfilling, but it is her “pleasantest preservative from want”. xvii

Pride and Prejudice is inundated with criticism toward the realities of marriage. Elizabeth and Darcy are the model couple in the novel, but there are numerous reminders in the other couples that this goal is seldom achieved. They marry for love, but not everyone has that luxury. Darcy marries Elizabeth because of her merits and his affection for her—instead of marrying to advance his career and economic situation, as Mr. Collins did. Additionally, even while Elizabeth seems unconcerned with Darcy’s wealth when she initially rejects and eventually accepts him, there is no avoiding how advantageous a match it is for her. Not only has she provided for herself, but she is also able to support her sister. It is obvious that Elizabeth is the narrator’s favorite and that her marriage is the ideal. This supremacy of such an unusual marriage for love indicates that this is what Austen wishes could be the reality. However, she is honest enough to emphasize that it is by no means an everyday occurrence—the truth is much bleaker.

Through her satirical tone, Austen displays her skepticism toward the institution of matrimony. Her varied characterizations reveal which views of marriage she finds most repulsive and which are simply unavoidable actualities. The narrative voice that Austen employs vacillates between communicating humorous indictments of and serious reflections on marriage. Additionally, the narrator’s opinions are communicated through the mask of certain characters when Austen uses free indirect discourse. These formal devices undergird an important theme of the novel: marriage—as the only career option for women—results in sensible women being wedded to foolish men and young girls’ thoughtless actions either forever ruining their chances for a stable life or chaining them to men who do not genuinely care for them. Austen exposes and denounces occupational marriage and the limits on females in her society. It is no surprise that this book—filled with such insight and as well as wit—remains a classic.

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice . London: Penguin Books, 2003.

i Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 5.

ii Ibid, 7.

iii Ibid, 11.

iv Ibid, 12.

v Ibid, 67.

vi Ibid, 103.

vii Ibid, 103.

viii Ibid, 23.

ix Ibid, 24.

x Ibid, 192.

xi Ibid, 120.

xii Ibid, 137.

xiii Ibid, 51, 57.

xiv Ibid, 127.

xv Ibid, 140.

xvi Ibid, 120.

xvii Ibid, 120.

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The story of marriage equality is more complicated — and costly — than you remember

Danielle Kurtzleben

Same-sex marriage supporters wear "Just married" shirts while celebrating the U.S Supreme Court ruling regarding same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015 in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Same-sex marriage supporters wear "Just married" shirts while celebrating the U.S Supreme Court ruling regarding same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015 in San Francisco.

Americans' views on same-sex marriage have undergone a revolution in a few short decades.

Public opinion on the issue swung so swiftly and decisively — and so little uproar resulted once it was legal nationwide — that one might easily assume the march toward marriage equality was a neat, steady progression.

But it was in fact a decades-long project that moved in fits and starts. As with pretty much any other political movement, there was disorganization and internal squabbling — many in the LGBTQ+ community didn't even see marriage equality as a priority (or even a worthy goal at all) a couple of decades ago.

And, as with other political movements, copious amounts of money provided a lot of the momentum.

All of that is recounted in The Engagement , journalist Sasha Issenberg's exhaustive, engrossing account of the decades-long fight for marriage equality. The NPR Politics Podcast 's Danielle Kurtzleben spoke with him for the show's regular book club feature. Their conversation is transcribed below and is edited for length and clarity.

Danielle Kurtzleben: Let's start with a very basic question: Why was this book important to write for you? Was the goal just to lay out the history of same-sex marriage, or was it something bigger?

Sasha Issenberg: I came to realize as I was working on it, that this was a kind of history of the American culture wars over the last generation — basically over my lifetime.

You know, I'm 41 years old. I started work on this 10 years ago, and it was the point when we were starting to talk about this as the defining civil rights movement of my generation, and I realized I'd been alive for the whole life of this as an issue. And I did not understand how it had emerged, and in many ways eclipsed not only other concerns to the LGBT community, but lots of other points of conflict or tension within our politics. It came in many ways to dominate American social policy debates for much of my adult life.

More same-sex couples eligible for Social Security survivors benefits

DK: This book also gets at how many of the people fighting for marriage equality were in the same boat, but rowing in different directions, is maybe a way of putting it. What are some good examples of how strategy got so messy?

SI: One thing that I think we as political journalists do terribly, and are often unaware of how terribly we do it, is write about conflicts within movements. You'll read or hear stories that say, 'the labor movement is doing X' or 'evangelicals are doing Y,' and anybody who has spent any time talking to labor leaders or evangelical clergy will realize that they spend much more time often bickering among themselves than they do necessarily thinking about how to work in a unified way.

As I dug into this history, that really became clear. What we would call the "gay rights movement" or the "LGBT community," that's a very big coalition, and there are a whole lot of different constituencies: gay men and lesbians who are invested in marriage, [as well as] bisexual and transgender people who often could marry the people that they love, regardless of what state law was about marriage.

And within the LGBT community, there are a lot of different policy concerns. You go back to the 1990s when this debate emerged, and there were people whose top priority was desegregating military and government service so openly gay people could serve, or who wanted just basic nondiscrimination protections, [like] writing sexual orientation into hate crimes laws.

And one of the sort of remarkable parts of the story is not just how ultimately gay marriage campaigners triumphed over opponents of same-sex marriage, but how within their own LGBT community and political movement, they raised the issue of marriage so that it went higher and higher on the list of priorities.

More Republican leaders try to ban books on race, LGBTQ issues

Frankly, a lot of that was driven by money. I told the story of a circle of very wealthy donors led by Tim Gill, who had been a software pioneer. And [he] decides that a lot of his philanthropy is going to be about gay rights. And marriage is the issue that resonates most with him.

Tim Gill attends a charity event to support LGBTQ youth in New York City on June 1, 2015. Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for GLSEN hide caption

And he ends up bringing together a circle of like-minded donors, almost all of whom are men who have either made their money through founding companies or through inheritance, who are very concerned about marriage — I think in part because very wealthy people spend a lot of time worrying about estate planning.

They build an infrastructure that is focused on marriage above — and maybe at the expense of — some of these other priorities and help bring together some of the leading lawyers and strategists in the movement.

I write about a meeting that they had in the spring of 2005, when a lot of gay rights activists saw this cause at a low point, and they set out a path to get a winning case before the Supreme Court within 20 years.

That forced other, established gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to adjust their priorities, because they realized that the major money within their community cared about marriage. And if they weren't doing marriage work, they were going to lose out on some of that funding.

The U.S. Navy has christened a ship named after slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk

DK: Let's talk about the Supreme Court, which of course is a huge part of this book. You really get at the complex relationship between the Supreme Court and public opinion, and this is the thing that I'm always curious about: is it something justices pay attention to, and how does it affect them?

SI: We have a tough time figuring out what justices pay attention to because they're often not in real time public about their thoughts. But all the folks who are working on this issue operated from the assumption that the justices were not operating in some sort of vacuum — purposeful or inadvertent — in which they were oblivious to what was going on in the world around them.

And so in that 2005 strategy meeting I mentioned, they map out a 20-year path to a successful Supreme Court decision. What is seen as wildly optimistic at that point is getting before the Supreme Court in 2025. What they assumed was that the court would be willing to take bold stands for civil rights, as it has in its history, but that they did not want to be seen as working from a minority position — that the court wanted to be in a position where they were happy sort of reining in outlier states, as they did when they struck down school segregation, for example.

Plaintiff Jim Obergefell holds a photo of his late husband John Arthur as he speaks to members of the media after the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in favor of same-sex marriage rights on June 26, 2015 outside the court in Washington, D.C. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

DK: But why would the court be worried about public opinion if they're ruling on constitutionality?

As people have said, the court gets its legitimacy from the other branches of government, from state and local governments, and thus from the public. And so, whatever the joke was that the Supreme Court doesn't have any army — they have no ability to enforce their decisions with anything other than both the public and governments that will go along and accept them.

One of the things I certainly expected after the Supreme Court ruled in 2015, that there would be more examples of local resistance in conservative states, mostly in the South and the rural West, where I thought there would be county clerks, county executives, governors, state attorneys general who said, "We will not enforce this order." And ultimately almost all of them dropped their opposition pretty quickly. I think that is a sign of a legitimacy that the court has earned over years by not taking decisions that public opinion and local politicians would not be willing to sustain. I think that's the big deal that we've had since the founding of the republic that gives court decisions their force.

DK: Another big question that I think a lot of us have continually had is, how exactly did opinion on same-sex marriage change? It has swung so decisively towards marriage equality during our lifetimes.

SI: Yeah, this is one of the things that drew me into this mystery 10 years ago. I was having a lot of conversations with pollsters who would tell me they had not seen opinion on a single issue move as quickly as it moved on marriage. And at that point, attitudes were moving 4 or 5 percentage points a year, only in one direction.

People now, in part, I think because of pop culture or general cultural acceptance, feel more comfortable coming out than they did a generation ago. People are realizing that they know people who are gay. Social scientists call this "contact theory" — the idea that we become more sympathetic or friendly due to the concerns of people once we've had personal contact with them. And it becomes a lot easier to be open, I think, to the arguments for same-sex marriage and more resistant to the arguments that were made against it when you know somebody in your life who is gay or lesbian and see the fundamental humanity of them, and in a certain way, the fundamental modesty of the demand for them to share their life with somebody they love.

Latin America

Chile's congress approves same-sex marriage by an overwhelming majority.

DK: There's one question that we got from various listeners, including Vidya Ravella. She asked, "What's the action plan for all the legal challenges that are expected? If there's a concerted effort to overturn this right, as is expected, this is the next fight, particularly if Roe is overturned this summer."

So before we even get to this question, maybe let's back up and ask how likely do you think it is that Obergefell could be overturned?

I do not think that there is any serious likelihood that the core holding of Obergefell , that the fundamental right to marry should extend to same-sex couples, is in doubt. And I think a large part of that is that it is politically unappealing. There's not a political demand for it the way there is a political demand for a change in abortion laws around the country.

I certainly understand why the fear is there for folks. But I think it's worth looking at the intersection of law and politics. Since the Obergefell decision, there were three Supreme Court justices appointed by a Republican president. Many people wanted to know their positions on Roe v. Wade . Nobody cared [about] their positions on Obergefell . Groups are focused on other issues now. Once you get to a point where these justices see 70% of the country looking the other way, regardless of what their sort of personal preferences might be, I think that that becomes a really significant impediment to them taking up this cause.

DK: Does that make marriage equality a unique issue, in that it's much harder to make the case that a same-sex marriage infringes upon your personal rights if you are in a heterosexual marriage? It's harder to make that case than, for example, to make the case that abortion opponents do, that an abortion hurts someone, or as another example, that affirmative action takes something away from someone. Is marriage equality just in its own class?

SI: You can look back at the history of social movements in the United States as on one hand, as these sort of contests over public values, over justice, liberty, freedom, privacy, fairness. You can also often read them very clearly as competitions for scarce resources.

So when women demanded property rights, husbands and fathers saw that as a challenge to their wealth. When women and African Americans demanded the vote, white men saw it as a threat to their political power, and the effort to expand rights or opportunities for immigrants has been seen by native-born people as a threat to their jobs and public benefits. Desegregation of schools set up this rivalry for places in neighborhood institutions on which people saw their property values implicated.

As you say, affirmative action, maybe in the purest sense, sets up a rivalry for jobs or places in academic institutions. Even the Americans with Disabilities Act may force landlords or developers to shift some of their budgets to paying for things that they might not have wanted to pay for. In every case, the majority had to give something up, something tangible to the demands of justice by a minority, right? And I think that that is a really important difference here, and I think made it very difficult to sustain opposition to this, because there weren't really stakeholders on the other side.

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Opinion: As conservatives target same-sex marriage, its power is only getting clearer

An LGBTQ+ Pride flag outside the Supreme Court building

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It’s been two years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs case that overturned the federal right to an abortion, and the troubling concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas in which he expressed a desire to “revisit” other landmark precedents, including the freedom to marry for same-sex couples, codified nationally by the Obergefell Supreme Court decision, nine years ago Wednesday

Since that ruling, the LGBTQ+ and allied community has done much to protect the fundamental freedom to marry — passing the Respect for Marriage Act in Congress in 2022; sharing their stories this year to mark the 20th anniversary of the first state legalization of same-sex marriages, in Massachusetts; and in California , Hawaii and Colorado launching ballot campaigns to repeal dormant but still-on-the-books anti-marriage constitutional amendments.

Boyle Heights, CA - March 05: Brandon Ellerby, right, of Los Angeles, casts his ballot during Super Tuesday primary election at the Boyle Heights Senior Center in Boyle Heights Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

California Democratic Party endorses ballot measures on same-sex marriage, taxes, rent control

The party’s executive board voted Sunday on which measures they would endorse.

May 19, 2024

This winter, I worked with a team at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law to survey nearly 500 married LGBTQ+ people about their relationships. Respondents included couples from every state in the country; on average they had been together for more than 16 years and married for more than nine years. Sixty-two percent married after the court’s 2015 Obergefell marriage decision, although their relationships started before before that. More than 30% of the couples had children and another 25% wanted children in the future.

One finding that jumped out of the data: Almost 80% of married same-sex couples surveyed said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the Obergefell decision being overturned. Around a quarter of them said they’d taken action to shore up their family’s legal protections — pursuing a second-parent adoption, having children earlier than originally planned or marrying on a faster-than-expected timeline — because of concerns about marriage equality being challenged. One respondent said, “We got engaged the day that the Supreme Court ruled on the Dobbs decision and got married one week after.”

Eddie Daniels, left, and Natalie Novoa get married at the L.A. County Registrar office in Beverly Hills.

World & Nation

Same-sex marriage ruling creates new constitutional liberty

The Supreme Court’s historic ruling Friday granting gays and lesbians an equal right to marry nationwide puts an exclamation point on a profound shift in law and public attitudes, and creates the most significant and controversial new constitutional liberty in more than a generation.

June 26, 2015

As we examined the survey results, it became clearer than ever why LGBTQ+ families and same-sex couples are fighting so hard to protect marriage access — and the answer is really quite simple: The freedom to marry has been transformative for them. It has not only granted them hundreds of additional rights and responsibilities, but it has also strengthened their bonds in very real ways.

Nearly every person surveyed (93%) said they married for love; three-quarters added that they married for companionship or legal protections. When asked how marriage changed their lives, 83% reported positive changes in their sense of safety and security, and 75% reported positive changes in terms of life satisfaction. “I feel secure in our relationship in a way I never thought would be possible,” one participant told us. “I love being married.”

The evolution of same-sex marriage

I’ve been studying LGBTQ+ people and families for my entire career — and even still, many of the findings of the survey touched and inspired me.

Individual respondents talked about the ways that marriage expanded their personal family networks, granting them (for better and worse!) an additional set of parents, siblings and loved ones. More than 40% relied on each other’s families of origin in times of financial or healthcare crisis, or to help out with childcare. Some told of in-laws who provided financial assistance to buy a house, or cared for them while they were undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.

In his dissent in the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, seen here in 2011, showed contempt for his colleagues.

Analysis:: Antonin Scalia’s dissent in same-sex marriage ruling even more scornful than usual

The legal world may have become inured to wildly rhetorical opinions by Justice Antonin Scalia, but his dissent in the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision Friday reaches new heights for its expression of utter contempt for the majority of his colleagues.

And then there was the effect on children. Many respondents explained that their marriage has provided security for their children, and dignity and respect for the family unit. Marriage enabled parents to share child-rearing responsibilities — to take turns being the primary earner (and carrying the health insurance), and spending more time at home with the kids.

The big takeaway from this study is that same-sex couples have a lot on the line when it comes to the freedom to marry — and they’re going to do everything possible to ensure that future political shifts don’t interfere with their lives. As couples across the country continue to speak out, share their stories — and in California, head to the ballot box in November to protect their hard-earned freedoms — it’s clear to me that it’s because they believe wholeheartedly, and with good reason, that their lives depend on it.

Abbie E. Goldberg is an affiliated scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law and a psychology professor at Clark University, where she directs the women’s and gender studies.

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How people around the world view same-sex marriage

A same-sex couple walks outside their home with their children in Bengaluru, India. (Manjunath Kiran/AFP via Getty Images)

Attitudes about same-sex marriage vary widely around the world, according to several Pew Research Center surveys fielded in 32 places in the last two years. Among the surveyed publics, support for legal same-sex marriage is highest in Sweden, where 92% of adults favor it, and lowest in Nigeria, where only 2% back it.

Bar chart showing that views of same-sex marriage vary across 32 publics around the world. Favorability is highest in Sweden, where 92% somewhat or strongly favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. In Nigeria, only 2% support this.

In the United States, where the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationally in 2015, 63% of adults support it and 34% oppose it. But views are highly fractured along political and demographic lines.

For example, Democrats and independents who lean toward the Democratic Party are nearly twice as likely as Republicans and Republican leaners to support same-sex marriage rights (82% vs. 44%). Similarly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans under the age of 40 say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally – 16 percentage points higher than the share of Americans 40 and older who agree (57%).

Related : In places where same-sex marriages are legal, they account for a small share of all marriages

Below is a closer look at how attitudes about same-sex marriage differ around the world, based on our surveys. This analysis looks at how attitudes vary by geography, demographic factors, political ideology and religion, as well as how views have changed over time.

This Pew Research Center analysis focuses on public opinion of the legality of same-sex marriage in 32 places in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. This is the first year since 2019 that the Global Attitudes Survey has included publics from Africa and Latin America, which were not included more recently due to the coronavirus outbreak .

For non-U.S. data, this analysis draws from three nationally representative surveys conducted across 31 publics. In 21 publics, we conducted a survey of 24,546 adults from Feb. 20 to May 22, 2023. All interviews were conducted over the phone in Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in Hungary, Poland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In Australia, we used a mixed-mode probability-based online panel.

Data for Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam draws on another survey of 10,390 adults conducted in five Asian publics from June 2 to Sept. 17, 2023. All interviews in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan were conducted over the phone. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in Vietnam.

Data for Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Thailand draws on a third survey of 10,551 adults conducted in five South and Southeast Asian publics from June 1 to Sept. 4, 2022. All interviews in Malaysia and Singapore were conducted over the phone. Interviews were conducted face-to-face in Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Both the survey in East Asia and the one in South and Southeast Asia are part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project , which analyzes religious change and its impact on societies around the world.

In the United States, we surveyed 3,576 U.S. adults from March 20 to 26, 2023. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Respondents for all surveys were selected using probability-based sample designs. In Thailand, we conducted additional interviews in the Southern region, which has larger shares who are Muslim. The data in all publics is weighted to account for different probabilities of selection among respondents and to align with demographic benchmarks for adult populations.

This post is an update of one published June 13, 2023. This new post includes more publics surveyed. It also uses a different rounding procedure to generate the “total” figures, so results may differ slightly from previously published estimates. The accompanying topline figures are unchanged.

Here are the questions used for the analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

How attitudes about same-sex marriage vary geographically

People in Western Europe stand out as staunch supporters of same-sex marriage. At least eight-in-ten adults support it in Sweden (92%), the Netherlands (89%), Spain (87%), France (82%) and Germany (80%). In each of these places, the practice is legal .

Maps and bar charts comparing countries and other places where same-sex marriage is legal in 4 regions: the Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. The bar charts indicate which publics in each region say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

In Italy, where issues of LGBTQ+ rights have been in the headlines , 73% of adults favor same-sex marriage rights, though it is not legal there.

Around three-quarters (74%) of adults in the United Kingdom also support same-sex marriage. The practice is legal in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, although those laws were approved at various times over the past decade.

At the other end of the spectrum in Europe, just 41% of adults in Poland and 31% in Hungary support same-sex marriage. In both places, same-sex marriage is not legal, and LGBTQ+ rights are a political and social flashpoint .

In North America, around eight-in-ten Canadians (79%) support same-sex marriage, as do 63% in both the U.S. and Mexico. Same-sex marriage is legal in all three places.

Related : About six-in-ten Americans say legalization of same-sex marriage is good for society

In South America, 67% of Argentines and 52% of Brazilians support the right of gay and lesbian people to marry. Both places have also legalized the practice.

Asia-Pacific

In the Asia-Pacific region, support for same-sex marriage is highest in Australia and Japan. Three-quarters of adults in Australia and nearly seven-in-ten (68%) in Japan favor legal same-sex marriage. But while many Australians who favor same-sex marriage say they strongly support it (52%), support is weaker in Japan , where a 56% majority somewhat favor legal same-sex marriage. Australia has legalized same-sex marriage, but Japan has not .

Views toward legalizing same-sex marriage are similarly favorable in Vietnam, where 65% say they support it.

In India , 53% of adults say same-sex marriage should be legal, while 43% oppose it. The Indian Supreme Court recently rejected a petition to legalize same-sex marriage. (The survey there was conducted prior to the ruling.)

And in Taiwan, roughly equal shares say they support (45%) and oppose (43%) same-sex marriage, with the remainder providing no answer. Taiwan is the only place in Asia where same-sex marriage is legal .

In South Korea, same-sex marriage is not legal, though some lawmakers have proposed changing this . Among South Koreans, 41% favor legal same-sex marriage and 56% oppose it.

Indonesians are highly opposed to same-sex marriage legalization. Roughly nine-in-ten (92%) oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry, including 88% who say they strongly oppose it. Just 5% of Indonesians support same-sex marriage.

Related : Asian views of same-sex marriage

Africa and Middle East

South Africa remains the only place in Africa where same-sex marriage is legal, having codified it in 2006. Nevertheless, 59% of South Africans oppose the practice.

Nigerians and Kenyans are the least supportive of same-sex marriage rights among the places in Africa surveyed. In Nigeria, where homosexuality is illegal, only 2% of adults say they support allowing gays and lesbians to marry. And in Kenya, just 9% favor it.

In the Middle East, 56% of Israelis are also opposed to making same-sex marriage legal. Religious affiliation and political leanings heavily shape views of same-sex marriage rights in Israel .

How attitudes about same-sex marriage vary by demographic factors

Dot plot chart showing that in many places around the world, younger adults are more likely than older adults to say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. The age gap is greatest in Taiwan, where 75% of adults under 35 express support for same-sex marriage vs. 33% of those 35 and older.

In 21 of the places surveyed, adults under the age of 35 are more likely than their older counterparts to say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. And in some places, older adults are less likely to provide a response than younger adults.

The age gap is greatest in Taiwan. Three-quarters of Taiwanese adults under 35 express support for same-sex marriage, compared with roughly a third of those 35 and older.

Dot plot chart showing that in many places surveyed worldwide, women are more likely than men to favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

In 19 of the surveyed places, women are more likely than men to say they support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

For example, in Australia, 83% of women favor it, compared with 67% of men.

There are similar gender differences in Argentina, Cambodia, Germany, Greece, Japan, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.

Education and income

In 22 of the surveyed places, people with more education are more likely than those with less education to support allowing gays and lesbians to marry. In some places, those with less education are less likely to provide a response than those with more education.

Similarly, in 10 places, people with incomes over the national average are more likely than those with incomes at or below the median to support same-sex marriage. In one of these places – Poland – those with lower incomes were less likely to provide a response.

How attitudes about same-sex marriage vary by political ideology

Dot plot chart showing that in many countries, support for same-sex marriage tends to be much higher on the ideological left. This is especially true in the U.S. where liberals are 54 points more likely than conservatives to say they favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally

Views on same-sex marriage are related to political ideology in 15 of the 18 places where we asked about respondents’ ideology this year. In these places, those on the ideological left are significantly more likely than those on the right to favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally.

The ideological difference is greatest in the U.S., where liberals are 54 points more likely than conservatives to support same-sex marriage (90% vs. 36%). Still, in nine surveyed places, majorities of those on both the right and left say they support same-sex marriage.

How attitudes about same-sex marriage vary by religion

Support for legal same-sex marriage tends to be lower in places where more people say religion is somewhat or very important in their lives. Support is higher in places where fewer people consider religion important.

Scatterplot chart showing that support for legal same-sex marriage tends to be lower in places around the world where more people say religion is somewhat or very important in their lives. Support is higher in places where fewer people consider religion important.

In Nigeria, 99% of adults say religion is at least somewhat important in their lives and only 2% favor legal same-sex marriage. In Indonesia, where 100% of Indonesians say religion is important to them, 5% support legal same-sex marriage. In Sweden, by comparison, just 20% of adults consider religion important to them – and 92% favor allowing gay and lesbian people to wed.

Similarly, people who are not affiliated with a religion are much more likely to say they support same-sex marriage. In Australia, for example, 89% of religiously unaffiliated adults say they favor same-sex marriage, compared with 64% of adults with a religious affiliation.

Together, the most recent surveys show some additional patterns by religion:

Religiously unaffiliated Americans (85%) – especially atheists (96%) – are the most likely to favor same-sex marriage legality. White, non-Hispanic evangelical Protestants are the least likely religious group to say they favor it (30%). Around two-thirds of U.S. Catholics (65%) favor same-sex marriage, as do 70% of White nonevangelical Protestants.
In Brazil , Catholics (56%) are more likely than Protestants (32%) to support same-sex marriage.
In Israel , Jewish adults (41%) are more likely than Muslims (8%) to support same-sex marriage. Among Israeli Jews, 4% of those who are Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) or Dati (“religious”) support legal same-sex marriage, compared with 29% of Masorti (“traditional”) Jews. Around three-quarters of Hiloni (“secular”) Jews support this policy.
In Nigeria , Christians and Muslims are equally likely to oppose same-sex marriage (97% and 98%, respectively).

How attitudes about same-sex marriage have changed over time

It is difficult to directly compare these new survey findings with past surveys on whether people favor or oppose same-sex marriage. Earlier Center surveys focused more on religion and its influence in society, rather than political attitudes and international affairs. And in some places, the mode of the survey (e.g., face-to-face vs. phone vs. web) has changed over time.

However, a comparison with surveys conducted in Latin America in 2013-14 , in Europe in 2015-17 , and the long-term trend in the U.S. generally shows increased public support for the legalization of same-sex marriage over the past decade.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published June 13, 2023. Here are the questions used for the analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

International Affairs
LGBTQ Acceptance
LGBTQ Attitudes & Experiences
Religion & LGBTQ Acceptance
Same-Sex Marriage

Sneha Gubbala is a research assistant focusing on global attitudes research at Pew Research Center .

Jacob Poushter is an associate director focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

Christine Huang is a research associate focusing on global attitudes at Pew Research Center .

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Marriage in Pride and Prejudice

Categories: Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

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Published: Mar 20, 2024

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Abortion Debate Shifts as Election Nears: ‘Now It’s About Pregnancy’

Two years after Roe was struck down, the conversation has focused on the complications that can come with pregnancy and fertility, helping to drive more support for abortion rights.

Share full article

A crowd of people holding signs that support abortion rights in front of the Supreme Court building.

By Kate Zernike

In the decades that Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, abortion rights groups tried to shore up support for it by declaring “Abortion Is Health Care.”

Only now, two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, and just six months before the presidential election, has the slogan taken on the force of reality.

The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?

That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29 . Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.

“When the Dobbs case came down, I told my friends — somewhat but not entirely in jest — that America was about to be exposed to a lengthy seminar on obstetrics,” said Elaine Kamarck, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, referring to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Abortion opponents say that stories about women facing medical complications are overblown and that women who truly need abortions for medical reasons have been able to get them under exceptions to the bans.

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344 Marriage Essay Topics & Samples
344 Marriage Essay Topics & Examples. Updated: Feb 29th, 2024. 25 min. Whether you're writing about unconventional, traditional, or arranged marriage, essay topics can be pretty handy. Consider some original ideas gathered by our experts and discuss divorce, weddings, and family in your paper. Table of Contents.
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The biblical view of marriage is of a God-given, voluntary, sexual and public social union of one man and one woman for the purpose of serving God. ... This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution ...
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Debate and different views as to new modes and methods of improving and promoting family and marriage have their place. However, this does not mean that the ideal of family should in any sense be diminished or discarded. ibliography arber, N. (2000) Why Parents Matter: Parental Investment and Child Outcomes. 2000.
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Marriage is an important stage in the personal life which is discussed in many cultures as a kind of the rite of passage. From this point, persons become ready to create a family when they are mature enough to take responsibility for their family and build strong relations with their partner. Get a custom essay on The Future of Marriage.
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Check our 100% free marriage essay, research paper examples. Find inspiration and ideas Best topics Daily updates. IvyPanda® Free Essays. Clear. Study Hub. Study Blog. ... in marriage is optional and economical and that proves the unworthiness of the biblical social system and pre-modern views on marriage and love. Pages: 3;
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To All The World

A Biblical View of Marriage

The Nature of Marriage

The Purpose of Marriage

Procreation

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One man and one woman: monogamous

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A Feminist Critique of Marriage

Pride & Prejudice and the Purpose of Marriage

Bibliography

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Marriage - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

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