Marriage, for me, is a bit different. In my humble opinion, just about every normal man and woman was designed for marriage. It's a mixture of all the things you NEED from an intimate, monogamous, lifetime opposite-gender relationship
If you believe in evolution as a reality, this statement is actually not supportable. By evolution, men are not monogamous - they scatter their seed all over the place. By evolution, women are not necessarily monoandrous. They don't care who does the planting. As wandering tribes became more settled, though, long-term domestic relationships developed socially. I therefore don't think "designed for marriage" is accurate. More like "became convinced of benefits" through social situations.
The benefit of a long-term marriage is domestic stability, and I won't challenge any statement that emphasizes that concept. I MIGHT challenge the "opposite gender" part of the statement because the same stability that affects hetero couples can also benefit homosexual couples. I've seen it myself in at least four sets of married gay friends I've known for years.
But modern marriage differs from marriages even a couple of hundred years ago in that a woman then didn't have the opportunities that she has now. Which means if her hubby is a jerk but was good at initially disguising it before the marriage, she has the potential to live without him and still have a more comfortable lifestyle. That lifetime relationship viewpoint caused my father to be doomed to never know his own father due to my grandmother's childish viewpoint that bound my grandfather to her legally even though they lived as far apart as Los Angeles and New Orleans. It's a long story but the point in this discussion is that my father would have benefited from his parents getting divorced so that he could have had a two-person family instead of growing up with a mother legally married but situationally single.
The problem with the religious viewpoint of marriage is that the strict orthodoxy of never divorcing simply places an undue burden on married couples who have grown out of touch with each other. My grandparents were victims of that viewpoint. My own life would ALSO be totally different - or even non-existent - without divorce. I am the son of my mother and her second husband. I am my first (and only) wife's second husband. I cannot find fault with divorce because both of the two most important women in my life came into that position after a divorce.
Fortunately, churches are being forced to recognize that people CAN make mistakes. Even the Catholics provide a loophole via church annulment, because my dear wife had to use it in order to get divorced so she could marry me in a church setting. That's another long story that would wander far afield and I'll skip it for now.
Understand, Isaac, that I am actually in favor of marriage. I just don't have church-imposed illusions about its meaning or origins. And in case anyone asks, my dear wife and I have been married over 28 years now. (28th anniversary was last November.) So we are pretty stable.
