You are typing “reasons to get married” into a search bar at some odd hour, and the question is not academic. Something in you is standing at a threshold. Maybe you have been with this person for years and the ring conversation keeps coming up and keeps going sideways. Maybe you love them and still cannot shake the voice that says committing to one human being for the rest of your life is either naive or insane. Maybe you are already married and quietly asking yourself what the hell you signed up for, because the fairy tale faded and nobody warned you about what came next.
I want to tell you what I see when people bring this question into my office, because it is almost never the question they think they are asking.
Underneath “reasons to get married” there is usually a much older ache. You want to know if the longing you feel for a steady, safe, chosen other is reasonable. You want to know if it is okay to want somebody to be yours in a way the culture keeps telling you is possessive, outdated, or codependent. You want to know if your nervous system is broken for wanting this, or if the modern story about freedom and optionality is the thing that is actually broken. I have been a couples therapist for over sixteen years. I will tell you what I think, straight.
The longing is not the problem. The longing is accurate. Your body is asking for the thing it was built to ask for.
Recognize yourself in this?
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The Real Reason, Clinically, To Get Married
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I am going to give you the frame that reorganizes everything else in this article. In my clinical experience, there are really only two reasons to get married that hold up under the weight of a whole life. One is to have and raise children together. The other is to do the work. Everything else, the party, the tax code, the Instagram grid, the family pressure, the fear of being alone at forty, those are not reasons. Those are weather. They will not hold the house up when the storm comes.
“The work” is a specific thing, and I need you to understand what it is before you can decide whether you want in.
You and your future spouse each walk around with a couple of small, tender parts inside you that never got what they needed. The one who learned, somewhere around age four, that reaching too hard gets you called needy. The one who learned that being yourself was a disappointment to the person whose face you watched most closely. Those parts did not die. They went underground and built a very competent adult over the top of themselves. That adult is who shows up on the first date.
But your limbic system was never fooled. Grounded in attachment theory, your nervous system was scanning the room for one thing when you met this person, and it was not whether they were fun at parties. It was whether this one might, finally, be the one who could meet the little hurt one inside you with something different than what you got the first time.
That is why you chose each other. Not consciously. Underneath. You married your wound, and so did they. The reason to get married, if you want the real one, is because you have found a person your body has already decided is worth doing this with, and now you are going to spend decades letting them meet the youngest parts of you, and meeting theirs, and failing at it, and finding your way back.
That is the project. Nothing smaller than that justifies the contract.
Officializing Your Primary Attachment Figure
Here is what I think marriage actually is, biologically. It is the ceremonial, public, I-mean-it designation of your primary attachment figure.
From the cradle, we are a species wired for one specific thing: the presence of a good enough other on the other side of us who will stay. The infant does not need food first. The infant needs a face. If the face is there and attuned, the nervous system settles enough to grow a human. If the face is absent or unpredictable, the nervous system learns to brace, and the brace becomes a personality, and the personality walks into every adult relationship for the next sixty years.
That need does not expire. It gets more sophisticated, more hidden, more wrapped in competence and irony and productivity, but it does not go away. Adults co-regulate the same way babies do. Your body treats the body next to you in bed the way an infant’s body treats a caregiver. That is the biology. Marriage is the act of saying, out loud, in front of witnesses, with legal and spiritual weight: this is the one. This is the person my nervous system chooses as its anchor.
That is a big deal. Underneath every conversation you ever have with this person, two ancient questions will be running, and never in words. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you. You will feel one of those louder than the other. They will feel the opposite one louder. And the whole marriage, really, is the thousand small moments where you answer those questions for each other with your body, your presence, your turning toward.
If you want more on how the pattern you bring into that container was built, I have written at length about attachment styles in relationships and how they shape the particular dance you and your partner keep doing.
Why The Culture Keeps Telling You Not To
I want to name something, because I think it is poisoning a lot of young people’s capacity to make this choice cleanly.
The culture you are living inside right now is high time preference. It rewards swiping, optimizing, keeping options open, upgrading, trading up. It has made a virtue out of what used to be called avoidance. The Gestalt Prayer gets quoted a lot (“I do my thing, you do your thing, if we find each other it’s beautiful, if not it can’t be helped”) as if hyper-individualism is the mature endpoint of human development. It is not. In my view, that posture is often orphan sovereignty dressed as wisdom. It is a nervous system that learned early no one was coming, decided that was philosophy instead of injury, and built a whole identity around not needing.
Marriage, done honestly, is low time preference love. It is the opposite move. It is saying, I am going to stop shopping. I am going to put my chips down on this one bond and spend the rest of my life finding out what we can build on it.
That requires something the culture no longer teaches you how to do. It requires accepting that volatility inside the bond is not a sign the bond is broken. It is a feature. Two nervous systems locked together are going to shake each other. The question is not whether you fight. The question is whether you can repair. The hard asset of a marriage is not harmony. It is the proven, embodied knowledge that when you lose each other, you know how to find your way back.
Couples who come into my office in real trouble are almost never the ones who fight hard. They are the ones who stopped fighting, drifted into separate rooms of the same house, and never figured out the repair. Distress in a bonded body is normal. The absence of repair afterward is the actual danger.
The Two Babies Inside, And Why This Is Fertile Soil
Let me go back to the two little hurt ones inside each of you, because this is the piece people most need to hear before they decide to marry.
Dating culture teaches you to run when a partner touches an old wound. You felt that familiar panic in your chest? Must be the wrong person. Red flag. Move on. The algorithm will serve you another one tomorrow.
What I see in sixteen-plus years of clinical work is almost the opposite. The person who will touch your oldest wound is almost always the person your body has unconsciously selected because they can. That is not a mistake. That is the design. Marriage, properly understood, is the container inside which the youngest, most guarded parts of you can finally come out of hiding and be met by somebody who stays.
I call these two parts, in the dance of adult love, the Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover. One of you tends to protest when the bond wobbles. You reach, escalate, bring up the thing, insist on the conversation. Your deepest fear is being left, being irrelevant, not mattering enough for the other to turn toward. The other one tends to retreat. You go quiet, go analytical, go somewhere in your head where the heat cannot reach you. Your deepest fear is being seen fully and found inadequate, being revealed as not enough, failing the person you most love.
Neither of these is a character flaw. Both are old survival strategies that got promoted into adult relationship habits. Both were intelligent in the family they came from. And both will almost certainly collide with each other, because the pursuer’s protest lands on the withdrawer as proof of failure, and the withdrawer’s silence lands on the pursuer as proof of abandonment. You will do this dance. The question is whether you decide to do it on purpose, with somebody willing to meet you underneath it.
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Figlet is AI relationship coaching grounded in attachment science and Figs O’Sullivan’s clinical work, LMFT. First messages free, no signup.
Love As Proof Of Work
I think love is proof of work. By which I mean it is not a feeling you catch or lose, not an ethereal thing that either lives in you or doesn’t. It is caloric. It is the actual, measurable expenditure of energy, attention, and presence over time. It is the Tuesday night where your chest tightens because your spouse said the thing in the tone that always lands wrong, and instead of defending or withdrawing you take a breath and say the softer, truer thing underneath your reaction. That is a rep. Do ten thousand of those over a lifetime and you have built a marriage. Skip them and you have a legal arrangement with a shared mortgage.
A good reason to get married is because you want to do that work with this person. Not because you believe they will make you happy. Not because you are tired of dating. Not because the biological clock is loud. Because something in you, when you are honest, knows this is the one you want to put the reps in with.
If you want to understand more about how the specific protective moves between you get built, I have written in depth about when your husband shuts you out completely and the clinical picture underneath that shutdown. The same frame applies to wives, to partners of any configuration. The dynamics are human before they are gendered.
If you want to name your pattern first before you decide anything, you can take the free Figs Quiz.
The Sovereign Us
A lot of the current advice around marriage treats the goal as two self-actualized individuals who happen to share a life. Each person is supposed to arrive at the altar already whole, already regulated, already fully themselves, so that the marriage is a kind of partnership between two complete sovereign nodes.
I think that model is wrong and I think it is making people miserable.
Nobody arrives complete. Nobody self-regulates in a vacuum. The thing that makes adult sovereignty possible is almost always the presence of a secure base underneath the person. You get brave because somebody has your back. You take creative risk in your life because there is a bond at home that will hold you if you fall. Individual sovereignty is not the starting condition for marriage. It is an emergent property of it. You become more yourself inside a secure bond, not before you find one.
That is what I mean by the Sovereign Us. Two people whose individual ground is strengthened, not diluted, by the fact that they belong to each other. Marriage, done well, does not shrink you. It gives you a floor so that the taking of your own creative action in the world becomes finally possible. For many of us, especially those who grew up on unstable ground, that floor is the thing we have been hunting for our whole lives without knowing it.
Religion, Culture, And The Shape Of The Container
A quick word on this, because it comes up every week in my office. People searching “reasons to get married” are often really asking whether the religious or cultural weight of the ceremony means something, or whether it is just a performance.
My answer: the container matters. Whether that container is a religious tradition that holds the two of you inside something larger than yourselves, or a secular ceremony witnessed by community, what matters is that the bond gets publicly named, formally held, and socially supported. Marriages that are nothing more than private feelings between two people tend to be harder to protect than marriages woven into a larger fabric. The weave matters. If faith is part of your life, let it be part of the container. I have written more about navigating the differences between religious and secular couples therapy if that is a live question in your relationship.
So, Should You Get Married?
If you are still reading, you probably want me to answer the question directly. I will try.
Get married if you have found a person your body has already chosen, and you are willing to spend the rest of your life learning what it means to be their primary attachment figure and letting them be yours. Get married if you understand that the dance of pursuit and withdrawal will show up in your kitchen, and you are willing to turn toward it rather than away. Get married if you want to raise humans together, or if you want to do the specific work of letting your youngest parts meet their youngest parts, over and over, with increasing tenderness, for decades. Get married if you understand that the hard asset you are building is not the absence of conflict but the proven capacity for repair.
Do not get married because you are lonely and this person is kind. Do not get married because the clock is loud. Do not get married because everyone else is doing it. Do not get married because you believe the right person will finally fix the ache you have been carrying since you were small. They will not fix it. They will meet it. That is a different thing, and it is the only thing that actually heals.
Your attachment pattern is not a life sentence, and marriage is one of the places where real change becomes possible, not through willpower, but through the lived, embodied experience of being met by somebody who stays.
Common Questions
What are the biological reasons to get married?
Humans are a co-regulating species. From infancy to death, our nervous systems settle in the presence of a trusted other and dysregulate in prolonged isolation. Marriage formally designates one person as your primary co-regulating anchor, which gives the body a stable base from which to live, work, and raise children. The ceremony is the public, legal, and often spiritual act of making that bond official.
Is it better to stay together without getting married?
Clinically, what matters more than the paperwork is whether both partners treat each other as their primary attachment figure. Some long-term unmarried couples do this beautifully. Others use the lack of formal commitment as an escape hatch that keeps one foot out the door and prevents the deeper work. The question is not legal. The question is whether you have both actually chosen.
What are bad reasons to get married?
Loneliness, pressure from family, age anxiety, wanting to be rescued from your own unhappiness, wanting the wedding, wanting the ring, wanting to fix a wobbly relationship by raising the stakes. If marriage is being used as a tool to force something that is not already true, it will not hold. The ceremony cannot create a bond that does not already exist underneath.
Does marriage actually make people happier?
In my clinical experience, marriage does not make unhappy people happy. It can, however, make bonded people more themselves. The secure base that a good marriage provides allows both partners to take creative risk in their lives, to parent from steadier ground, and to grow in ways that solo life rarely supports. Happiness is a byproduct of that growth, not the point of the arrangement.
How do I know if my partner is right to marry?
Look at how you fight and whether you repair. Look at how your body feels around them when you are tired, not when you are performing. Look at whether the youngest, most hidden parts of you can imagine being met by them over time, not perfectly, but with enough willingness. The right partner is not the one who never hurts you. It is the one who turns toward you after the hurt.
Do not just close the tab on this.
Bring what surfaced here into a real conversation. Figlet coaches you through whether to marry, stay married, or do the deeper work, grounded in Figs O’Sullivan’s work, LMFT. Free to start.
The real question is not whether to get married. The real question is whether you are willing to do what marriage actually asks of you. Decide that one first. Everything else follows.
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Figs O'Sullivan
Founder · EFT couples therapist
“What I would tell you at 10pm, if I could.”
