My favourite story as a kid was the Paper Bag Princess.  Elizabeth was a princess who was captured by a dragon and waited for her Prince Ronald to rescue her.  Prince Ronald in the story was a massive loser.   Elizabeth got her pretty dress burned to a cinder when she had to save Ronald and in the end told him to go and jump in the lake.  Elizabeth went and saved herself.

Elizabeth could have all she wanted all by herself.  She didn’t need saving or rescuing and her ‘princessness’ was not reliant on her finding a prince.  Yay for Elizabeth!  As a woman in 2015, you can have (almost) whatever you want.  You can buy your own dresses, dance into your own sunsets and have babies all by yourself.

We don’t get married anymore because we have to.  We get married because we want to.  The brave and happy individual humans of 2015 who are getting married choose their partners in life as someone who adds to the one they already have.  Someone to share their sunsets, their dance steps and the first baby steps.

We by nature are social beings.  We live and love by the feelings and reactions we get from others and getting married is one of those.  It’s how we tell our village, the metaphorical one – the family we have and the family we choose, that we found one we’d like to bring into the fold.  That here is someone else who I want to dance in our sunsets.

Marriage is a communal event.  It’s about you and your partner and the initiation into your village. So when people ask next why do you want to get married?  The answer is easy.  Tell them your village needs more dancers.