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Marriage Essay Examples

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Women , Marriage , Love , Life , Family , Children , Social Issues , Relationships

Published: 04/05/2021

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Marriage is a term that signifies an agreed union or vow between two consenting adults who signified intentions of living together within the conditions stipulated in their religious, civic, or cultural affinities. As could be deduced, since people come from diverse cultural, ethnic, racial and religious orientations, the beliefs and value systems incorporated within the matrimonial vow or ceremony differs accordingly. For one’s personal understanding and perspective, marriage is conceptualized as one of the sacraments of the Catholic Church that unites man and woman from the time of the matrimony until their demise – or the famous words: until death which is the only rational and justified reason for the dissolution of this sacrament.

This was therefore accurately corroborated in the following definition as shown in the Vatican Archives, the sacrament of matrimony was described as “the matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament” (Vatican: The Holy See, n.d., par. 1). Therefore, it is confirmed from the definition, that the essential ingredients for marriage include union between a man and a woman, the whole life time frame, for the purpose of the betterment of the spouses, for the procreation of children, as wel as for raising and educating children. Likewise, it was clearly stipulated that the union should be between two baptized persons.

In this regard, to be married means being able to withstand the challenges and trials encountered by the spouses. This includes staying by the side of a spouse in times of health and in times of illness; in good times, as well as in bad times; in times of poverty or in times of good wealth; and most especially in enduring the ups and downs of raising children, in the process. Being married during bad times mean finding solutions to problems together. The real challenge to the marriage comes in trials and difficulties when partners’ abilities to withstand adversities are aptly tested. Usually, problems in marriage, such as financial, emotional, social (third-parties), family or relatives, and even work, need to be resolved together. If one partner assumes sole responsibility and accountability for looking solutions to these dilemmas, there are tendencies for greater pressures and anxieties for the spouse who is burdened with the insurmountable tasks.

Likewise, to be married means acknowledging that there are roles and responsibilities to be undertaken, as spouses; and eventually, as parents. In decision making processes, there must be consensus of both partner, as well as those of the children, when needed, to resolve matters and issues pertaining to them.

Also, to be married means accepting the person who one loved and who one agreed to love for the rest of their lives – despite shortcomings, mistakes and errors that were committed within the union. However, part of the role and responsibilities of each spouse is to provide constructive criticisms to each partner and provide ways for correcting mistakes and for improvement. To emphasize, being married does not necessarily mean that one or both of the spouses would become subservient to the other, to the extent that personal and professional growth would be stunted and sacrificed. Ways and means should be offered and provided to make needed changes and transformations that would make the union better.

The secret of being happily married, therefore, is retaining the respect, love, and admiration for each other and allowing each spouse to growth in ways which would benefit their union and that of the well-being of their children.

Reference List

Vatican: The Holy See, n.d.. Part Two: The Celebration of the Chrisian Mystery. [Online] Available at: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c3a7.htm[Accessed 6 May 2013].

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The Lure of Divorce

Seven years into my marriage, i hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it..

Portrait of Emily Gould

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind. At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult, and I needed to — had every right to — blow off some steam. Our family was losing its apartment and had to find another one, fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent. My husband, Keith, was preparing to publish a book, Raising Raffi, about our son, a book he’d written with my support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about. To cope with the stress, I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.

I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning? The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy. I grew distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached, even as I planned a giant party to celebrate its launch. At the party, everyone got COVID. I handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl — I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it. When well-meaning friends tried to point out what was going on, I screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives. And most crucially, I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.

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I built a case against my husband in my mind. This book of his was simply the culmination of a pattern: He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting. I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking, most of which had always been my primary responsibility since I was a freelancer and Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism. We were incompatible in every way, except that we could talk to each other as we could to no one else, but that seemed beside the point. More relevant: I spent money like it was water, never budgeting, leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month. Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change; some system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.

Our last fight happened after a long day spent at a wedding upstate. I’d been drinking, first spiked lemonade at lunch alone and then boxed wine during the wedding reception, where I couldn’t eat any of the food — it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease. When we got back, late, to the house where we were staying, I ordered takeout and demanded he go pick it up for me. Calling from the restaurant, he was incensed. Did I know how much my takeout order had cost? I hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low — I never looked at receipts or opened statements. Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance. It was the last straw. I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up, even as Keith stood there begging me to stay. But his words washed over me; I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.

A few days later, still upstate at my friend’s house, I had a Zoom call with my therapist and my psychiatrist, who both urged me in no uncertain terms to check myself into a psychiatric hospital. Even I couldn’t ignore a message that clear. My friend drove me to the city, stopping for burgers along the way — I should have relished the burger more, as it was some of the last noninstitutional food I would eat for a long time — and helped me check into NYU Langone. My bags were searched, and anything that could be used as a weapon was removed, including my mascara. I spent my first night there in a gown in a cold holding room with no phone, nothing but my thoughts. Eventually, a bed upstairs became free and I was brought to the psych ward, where I was introduced to a roommate, had blood drawn, and was given the first of many pills that would help me stop feeling so irrepressibly energetic and angry. They started me on lithium right away. In a meeting with a team of psychiatrists, they broke the news: I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder; they weren’t sure which kind yet. They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.

I wasn’t being held involuntarily, which meant I could write letters on an official form explaining why I ought to be released, which the psychiatrists then had three days to consider. I attached extra notebook pages to the letters explaining that I was divorcing my husband and was terrified I would never be able to see my kids again if I was declared unfit because I was insane. These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay. I got my phone back — it would soon be revoked again, wisely — but in that brief interim, I sent out a newsletter to my hundreds of subscribers declaring that I was getting a divorce and asking them to Venmo me money for the custody battle I foresaw. In this newsletter, I also referenced Shakespeare. The drugs clearly had not kicked in yet. I cycled through three different roommates, all of whom were lovely, though I preferred the depressed one to the borderline ones. We amused ourselves during the day by going to art therapy, music therapy, and meetings with our psychiatrists. I made a lot of beaded bracelets.

In the meetings with the shrinks, I steadfastly maintained that I was sane and that my main problem was the ending of my marriage. I put Keith, and my mother, on a list of people who weren’t allowed to visit me. Undaunted, Keith brought me gluten-free egg sandwiches in the morning, which I grudgingly ate — anything for a break from the hospital food. My parents came up from D.C. and helped Keith take care of our children. I was in the hospital for a little more than three weeks, almost the entire month of October, longer than I’d ever been away from my kids before in their lives. I celebrated my 41st birthday in the hospital and received a lot of very creative cards that my fellow crazies had decorated during art therapy. Eventually, the drugs began to work: I could tell they were working because instead of feeling energetic, I suddenly couldn’t stop crying. The tears came involuntarily, like vomit. I cried continuously for hours and had to be given gabapentin in order to sleep.

conclusion for marriage essay

On the day I was released, I didn’t let anyone pick me up. I expected the superhuman strength I’d felt for months to carry me, but it was gone, lithiumed away. Instead, I felt almost paralyzed as I carried my bags to a cab. When I arrived at my apartment, I couldn’t figure out where I should sleep. It didn’t feel like my home anymore. We couldn’t afford to live separately, even temporarily, but the one thing that our somewhat decrepit, inconveniently located new apartment had in its favor was two small attic bedrooms and one larger bedroom downstairs. I claimed this downstairs room for myself and began to live there alone, coming into contact with Keith only when we had to be together with our children.

You might assume that my fixation on divorce would have subsided now that my mental health had stabilized and I was on strong antipsychotic medication. But I still did not want to stay in my marriage. If anything, I felt a newfound clarity: Keith and I had fundamentally incompatible selves. Our marriage had been built on a flaw. My husband was older, more established and successful in his career. These were the facts, so it had to be my job to do more of the work at home. Unless, of course, I decided to take myself and my work as seriously as he took his. But that was unappealing; I had managed to publish three books before turning 40, but I didn’t want to work all the time, like he does.

I wondered if my marriage would always feel like a competition and if the only way to call the competition a draw would be to end it.

We picked the kids up from school and dropped them off, or really mostly Keith did. I appeared at meals and tried to act normal. I was at a loss for what to do much of the time. I attended AA meetings and the DBT meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, and I read. I read books about insanity: Darkness Visible, The Bell Jar, An Unquiet Mind, Postcards From the Edge. I tried to understand what was happening to me, but nothing seemed to resonate until I began to read books about divorce. I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming. The first book I read was Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, which has become the go-to literary divorce bible since its 2012 publication. In it, Cusk describes the way her life shattered and recomposed after the dissolution of her marriage, when her daughters were still very young. She makes the case for the untenability of her relationship by explaining that men and women are fundamentally unequal. She posits that men and women who marry and have children are perpetually fighting separate battles, lost to each other: “The baby can seem like something her husband has given her as a substitute for himself, a kind of transitional object, like a doll, for her to hold so that he can return to the world. And he does, he leaves her, returning to work, setting sail for Troy. He is free, for in the baby the romance of man and woman has been concluded: each can now do without the other.”

At our relationship’s lowest moments, this metaphor had barely been a metaphor. I remembered, the previous winter, Keith going off on a reporting trip to Ukraine at the very beginning of the war, leaving me and the kids with very little assurance of his safety. I had felt okay for the first couple of days until I heard on the news of bombing very close to where he was staying. After that, I went and bummed a cigarette from a neighbor, leaving the kids sleeping in their beds in order to do so. It was my first cigarette in 15 years. Though that had been the winter before my mania began, I believe the first seeds of it were sown then: leaving the children, smoking the cigarette, resenting Keith for putting himself in harm’s way and going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” The book begins by detailing how Lenz’s husband rarely did household chores and hid belongings of hers that he didn’t like — e.g., a mug that said WRITE LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER — in a box in the basement. “I didn’t want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup,” Lenz writes. “What was compelling about my marriage wasn’t its evils or its villains, but its commonplace horror.”

This was not quite the way I felt. Even though I could not stand to see my husband’s face or hear his voice, even though I still felt the same simmering resentment I had since I entered the hospital, I also found myself feeling pangs of sympathy for him. After all, he was going through this too. When we were inevitably together, at mealtimes that were silent unless the children spoke, I could see how wounded he was, how he was barely keeping it together. His clothes hung off his gaunt frame. And at night, when we passed in the kitchen making cups of tea that we would take to our respective rooms, he sometimes asked me for a hug, just a hug. One time I gave in and felt his ribs through his T-shirt. He must have lost at least 15 pounds.

It began to seem like I only ever talked to friends who had been through divorces or were contemplating them. One friend who didn’t know whether to split up with her husband thought opening their marriage might be the answer. Another friend described the ease of sharing custody of his young daughter, then admitted that he and his ex-wife still had sex most weekends. In my chronically undecided state, I admired both of these friends who had found, or might have found, a way to split the difference. Maybe it was possible to break up and remain friends with an ex, something that had never happened to me before in my entire life. Maybe it was possible to be married and not married at the same time. Then I went a little further in my imagination, and the idea of someone else having sex with my husband made me want to gag with jealousy. Maybe that meant something. I was so confused, and the confusion seemed to have no end.

I read more books about divorce. I received an early copy of Sarah Manguso’s Liars, marketed as “a searing novel about being a wife, a mother, and an artist, and how marriage makes liars out of us all.” In it, John, a creative dilettante, and Jane, a writer, meet and soon decide to marry. Liars describes their marriage from beginning to end, a span of almost 15 years, and is narrated by Jane. The beginning of their relationship is delirious: “I tried to explain that first ferocious hunger and couldn’t. It came from somewhere beyond reason.” But the opening of that book also contains a warning. “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” I felt perversely reassured that I was merely adding another story to the 10 billion. It made it seem less like it was my fault.

The beginning of my relationship with my husband wasn’t that dramatic or definitive. I thought I was getting into something casual with someone I didn’t even know if I particularly liked, much less loved, but was still oddly fascinated by. I wanted to see the way he lived, to see if I could emulate it and become more like him. He lived with roommates in his 30s — well, that was the price you paid if you wanted to do nothing but write. I wanted what he had, his seriousness about his work. We went on dates where we both sat with our laptops in a café, writing, and this was somehow the most romantic thing I’d ever experienced. On our third date, we went to his father’s home on Cape Cod to dog-sit for a weekend, and it was awkward in the car until we realized we were both thinking about the same Mary Gaitskill story, “A Romantic Weekend,” in which a couple with dramatically mismatched needs learn the truth about each other through painful trial and error. Our weekend was awkward, too, but not nearly as awkward as the one in the story. On the way home, I remember admiring Keith’s driving, effortless yet masterful. I trusted him in the car completely. A whisper of a thought: He would make a good father.

In Liars, cracks begin to form almost immediately, even before John and Jane get engaged; she is accepted to a prestigious fellowship and he isn’t, and he is forthright about his fear that she will become more successful than he is: “A moment later he said he didn’t want to be the unsuccessful partner of the successful person. Then he apologized and said that he’d just wanted to be honest. I said, It was brave and considerate to tell me. ”

Through the next few years, so gradually that it’s almost imperceptible, John makes it impossible for Jane to succeed. He launches tech companies that require cross-country moves, forcing Jane to bounce between adjunct-teaching gigs. And then, of course, they have a baby. The problem with the baby is that Jane wants everything to be perfect for him and throws herself into creating a tidy home and an ideal child-development scenario, whereas John works more and more, moving the family again as one start-up fails and another flourishes. Jane begins to wonder whether she has created a prison for herself but pacifies herself with the thought that her situation is normal: “No married woman I knew was better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person.” The story John tells her about herself becomes her own story for a while. For a while, it’s impossible to know whose story is the truth.

I thought about Keith’s side of the story when I read Liars. Maybe it was the lack of alcohol’s blur that enabled me to see this clearly for the first time — I began to see how burdened he had been, had always been, with a partner who refused to plan for the future and who took on, without being asked, household chores that could just as easily have been distributed evenly. Our situation had never been as clear-cut as it was for Lyz Lenz; Keith had never refused to take out the trash or hidden my favorite mug. But he worked more and later hours, and my intermittent book advances and freelance income could not be counted on to pay our rent. As soon as we’d had a child, he had been shunted into the role of breadwinner without choosing it or claiming it. At first, I did all the cooking because I liked cooking and then, when I stopped liking cooking, I did it anyway out of habit. For our marriage to change, we would have needed to consciously decide to change it, insofar as our essential natures and our financial situation would allow. But when were we supposed to have found the time to do that? It was maddening that the root of our fracture was so commonplace and clichéd — and that even though the problem was ordinary, I still couldn’t think my way out of it.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison , is in some ways the successor to Aftermath — the latest divorce book by a literary superstar. It is mostly an account of Jamison’s passionate marriage to a fellow writer, C., and the way that marriage fell apart after her career accelerated and they had a child together. It then details her first months of life as a single mother and her forays into dating. In it, she is strenuously fair to C., taking much of the blame for the dissolution of their marriage. But she can’t avoid describing his anger that her book merits an extensive tour, while his novel — based on his relationship with his first wife, who had died of leukemia — fails commercially. “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for,” Jamison writes, and now, “I could feel him struggling. He wanted to support me, but there was a thorn in every interview.” C. grows distant, refusing to publicly perform the charming self that Jamison fell in love with. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own,” Jamison writes.

For all my marriage’s faults, we never fought in public. Friends encouraged us to reconcile, saying, “You always seemed so good together.” (As if there were another way to seem! Standing next to each other at a party, it had always been easy to relax because we couldn’t fight.) And we never did anything but praise each other’s work. Until this last book of my husband’s, that is. I had read Raising Raffi for the first time six months before it was published, while I was out of town for the weekend. I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it — it was refreshing, in a way, to see someone else’s perspective on a part of my own life. I even felt a certain relief that my child’s early years, in all their specificity and cuteness, had been recorded. This work had been accomplished, and I hadn’t had to do it! There had been only a slight pang in the background of that feeling that I hadn’t been the one to do it. But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger . The opening chapter described my giving birth to our first son, and I didn’t realize how violated I felt by that until it was vetted by The New Yorker ’s fact-checker after that section was selected as an excerpt for its website. Had a geyser of blood shot out of my vagina? I didn’t actually know. I had been busy at the time. I hung up on the fact-checker who called me, asking her to please call my husband instead. (In case you’re wondering, Keith has read this essay and suggested minimal changes.)

I related to the writers in Splinters trying to love each other despite the underlying thrum of competing ambitions. But most of all, Jamison’s book made me even more terrified about sharing custody. “There was only one time I got on my knees and begged. It happened in our living room, where I knelt beside the wooden coffee table and pleaded not to be away from her for two nights each week,” she writes. Envisioning a future in which we shared custody of our children made me cringe with horror. It seemed like absolute hell. At the time we separated, our younger son was only 4 years old and required stories and cuddles to get to bed. Missing a night of those stories seemed like a punishment neither of us deserved, and yet we would have to sacrifice time with our kids if we were going to escape each other, which seemed like the only possible solution to our problem. Thanksgiving rolled around, and I cooked a festive meal that we ate without looking at each other. Whenever I looked at Keith, I started to cry.

We decided to enter divorce mediation at the beginning of December. On Sixth Avenue, heading to the therapist’s office, we passed the hospital where I’d once been rushed for an emergency fetal EKG when I was pregnant with our first son. His heart had turned out to be fine. But as we passed that spot, I sensed correctly that we were both thinking of that moment, of a time when we had felt so connected in our panic and desperate hope, and now the invisible cord that had bound us had been, if not severed, shredded and torn. For a moment on the sidewalk there, we allowed ourselves to hold hands, remembering.

The therapist was a small older woman with short curly reddish hair. She seemed wise, like she’d seen it all and seen worse. I was the one who talked the most in that session, blaming Keith for making me go crazy, even though I knew this wasn’t technically true or possible: I had gone crazy from a combination of sky-high stress and a too-high SSRI prescription and a latent crazy that had been in me, part of me, since long before Keith married me, since I was born. Still, I blamed his job, his book, his ambition and workaholism, which always surpassed my own efforts. I cried throughout the session; I think we both did. I confessed that I was not the primary wronged person in these negotiations, and to be fair I have to talk about why. Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband. I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way. I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in. There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.

At the end of the session, we decided to continue with the therapist but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. It was a service she also provided, and as a bonus, it was $100 cheaper per session. She didn’t say why she made this recommendation, but maybe it was our palpable shared grief that convinced her that our marriage was salvageable. Or maybe it was that, despite everything I had told her in that session, she could see that, even in my profound sadness and anger, I looked toward Keith to complete my sentences when I was searching for the right word and that he did the same thing with me. As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.

My husband would have to forgive me for cheating and wasting our money. I would have to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life. My husband would have to forgive me for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing us thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted, for years, that I would be available on a sick day or to do an early pickup or to watch the baby while he wrote about our elder son. I would have to forgive him for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there. He would have to forgive me for never taking out the recycling and never learning how to drive so that I could move the car during alternate-side parking. I would have to forgive him for usurping the time and energy and brain space with which I might have written a better book than his. Could the therapist help us overcome what I knew to be true: that we’d gone into marriage already aware that we were destined for constant conflict just because of who we are? The therapist couldn’t help me ask him to do more if I didn’t feel like I deserved it, if I couldn’t bring myself to ask him myself. I had to learn how to ask.

No one asked anything or forgave anything that day in the couples therapist’s office. After what felt like months but was probably only a few days, I was watching Ramy on my laptop in my downstairs-bedroom cave after the kids’ bedtime when some moment struck me as something Keith would love. Acting purely on impulse, I left my room and found him sitting on the couch, drinking tea. I told him I’d been watching this show I thought was funny and that he would really like it. Soon, we were sitting side by side on the couch, watching Ramy together. We went back to our respective rooms afterward, but still, we’d made progress.

After a few more weeks and a season’s worth of shared episodes of Ramy, I ventured for the first time upstairs to Keith’s attic room. It smelled alien to me, and I recognized that this was the pure smell of Keith, not the shared smell of the bedrooms in every apartment we’d lived in together. I lay down next to him in the mess of his bed. He made room for me. We didn’t touch, not yet. But we slept, that night, together. The next night, we went back to sleeping alone.

Pickups and drop-offs became evenly divided among me and Keith and a sitter. Keith learned to make spaghetti with meat sauce. He could even improvise other dishes, with somewhat less success, but he was improving. I made a conscious effort not to tidy the house after the children left for school. I made myself focus on my work even when there was chaos around me. Slowly, I began to be able to make eye contact with Keith again. At couples therapy, we still clutched tissue boxes in our hands, but we used them less. Our separate chairs inched closer together in the room.

That Christmas, we rented a tiny Airbnb near his dad’s house in Falmouth. It had only two bedrooms, one with bunk beds for the kids and one with a king-size bed that took up almost the entirety of the small room. We would have to share a bed for the duration of the trip. The decision I made to reach across the giant bed toward Keith on one of the last nights of the trip felt, again, impulsive. But there were years of information and habit guiding my impulse. Sex felt, paradoxically, completely comfortable and completely new, like losing my virginity. It felt like sleeping with a different person and also like sleeping with the same person, which made sense, in a way. We had become different people while somehow staying the same people we’d always been.

Slowly, over the course of the next months, I moved most of my things upstairs to his room, now our room. We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure. We check in to make sure we’re not bowing to the overwhelming pressure to cede our whole lives to the physical and financial demands, not to mention the fervently expressed wants, of our children. It’s the work that we’d never found time to do before, and it is work. The difference is that we now understand what can happen when we don’t do it. I’m always surprised by how much I initially don’t want to go to therapy and then by how much lighter I feel afterward. For now, those sessions are a convenient container for our marriage’s intractable defects so that we get to spend the rest of our time together focusing on what’s not wrong with us.

The downstairs bedroom is now dormant, a place for occasional guests to stay or for our elder son to lie in bed as he plays video games. Some of my clothes from a year earlier still fill the drawers, but none of it seems like mine. I never go into that room if I can help it. It was the room of my exile from my marriage, from my family. If I could magically disappear it from our apartment, I would do it in a heartbeat. And in the attic bedroom, we are together, not as we were before but as we are now.

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In My Marriage Money Was a Trap. After My Divorce It Was My Freedom

conclusion for marriage essay

F our months after my divorce, I went to a party in New York City where a wine-drunk woman grilled me about my split. How did I manage? Did I get the house?

 This line of questioning was not unfamiliar. In the aftermath of my divorce, a lot of women asked me how I’d done it, and at this party, flushed from wine myself, I told her honestly that I was broke. But, I added, I was happy. She looked at me skeptically and said, “Money is important.” I’d think of her two years later when I finally dug myself out of divorce debt.

When I married my husband at 22, I barely knew how to balance a checkbook (we still did that then), and I had no idea what a 401(k) was. Before we got married, when my father-in-law wanted to talk to us about money, I was a compliant pupil. He’d mapped out my husband’s annual salary for his new job as an engineer in Excel, walking us through how much we could spend. It was immediately clear to me that the two of them had already worked on this together. In the box marked “rent” was the correct figure for the apartment my husband was living in, the one I’d move into after the wedding. The spreadsheet also factored in payments for my college loans.

Read More: I Got Divorce. But My Family Is Still Whole

The power dynamic was clear – I had nothing; I knew nothing. And I would adhere to the rules of the budget because I was the one bringing in debt and no assets. The concepts my husband’s father talked us through were a blur: high-yield savings account, 401(k) matching, Roth IRAs. But other things came into sharp focus. He said my debt would have to be paid down immediately. Debt was shameful; you could tell by the way my husband and his father looked at each other. We’d use every penny of my job (and I was still unemployed) to pay it down and live entirely off my husband’s income until it was gone.

Here was how we were going to do that:

$10 a month for haircuts

$200 a month for groceries

$10 for personal items.

"How does that even work?" I said, too embarrassed to tell them tampons would cost more than $10 a month.

"Even cheap shampoo costs $5, and..." I was also thinking about makeup. Even the cheap stuff, which was all I had, could set you back $50, and I needed that if I was going to find a job to pay off my loans.

"The $10 a month accumulates," my husband explained like I was a toddler. "So, in five months, when you need to restock, you’ll have $50." Five months to make a bottle of Suave 2-in-1 last. This was the start of a pattern that would continue throughout our marriage: even when I made money, I didn’t have control of how it was spent.

Marriage has always been about money. The first marriages were alliances between families to strengthen economic ties. A woman exchanged for gifts to ally the two families, to ensure the continuity of inheritance and of course purity of blood. As Western culture evolved, marriage, still a contract, became about mutual understanding and affection. But laws governing the economic freedom of women were slow to catch up. Women couldn’t apply for mortgages or open credit cards in their own names until the 1970s.

Read More: Why I Stayed in a Marriage That Was Making Me Miserable

There is an enduring narrative that marriage is about love. That the guiding light of our unions is the sweep-me-off-my-feet romance depicted in movies. And we convince ourselves that what underpins our unions isn’t economic. But the reality is different than the fairy tales. People rarely date or marry outside their socioeconomic status, which reinforces privilege and class boundaries. Wealth inequality between married partners overwhelmingly favors the husband in a heterosexual relationship, which can leave the wife with little financial freedom and stuck in a relationship that can be uncomfortable or even dangerous. And while more and more women are out-earning their husbands, they are still in the minority . Women in the U.S. still earn only 82 cents to the male dollar , and mothers earn 74 cents on average to a father’s dollar. Even if a woman comes into a marriage earning the same as her husband, that equality drops o ff as women age. And while wives still manage the day-to-day expenses of grocery shopping, it’s men who retain the majority of financial control.

A 2021 YouGov poll found that 35% of women are completely or somewhat financially dependent on their partner, compared to 11% of men. And a Glamour survey found that one in three women have stayed in a relationship because they didn’t have the money to leave . A culture that underpays women is a culture that forces them into economic codependence and traps them when they want out. But no one wants to think about that when they are walking into a relationship – love is supposed to be bigger than all of that.

Read More: You're Fighting With Your Partner All Wrong

I knew money would be tight when I left. I didn’t have access to our joint account and had to set up a secret account to save money for a lawyer. I wrote marketing copy for extra money and would deposit the checks there. Despite this, I was poor during the divorce. Friends loaned me money for groceries. I ghost-wrote op-eds and wrote even more marketing copy. My parents bought my kids their Christmas gifts. Even then, my life mostly ran on nearly maxed-out credit cards.

Still, a few months after I moved out, I went to buy new mascara and realized how free I felt. If I wanted the $30 mascara, there would be no disapproval. No argument. No silent treatment until I relented and admitted I’d screwed up. It felt like a small thing, just mascara, but it was everything. While most women who divorce find themselves financially struggling, the majority don’t regret their decision. According to one study, 73% of divorced women are happier than they were when they were married, even if they were poorer.

A recent spate of books and articles argue for marriage as a solution for our financial woes, as women outside the heterosexual family structure do not do as well economically as those who are married, but what is often excluded from that conversation is the unpaid labor that allows a man to work all day. If marriage is a means of keeping and preserving wealth, it’s at least in part because often one partner performs the functions of cook, house cleaner, chauffeur, shopper, all without compensation. Even women who outearn their husbands still perform this unpaid labor at higher rates than male partners.

When my friend was divorcing his stay-at-home wife, his lawyer told him he should have paid her a salary. Paying her would have been a way to value her work and give her an income. And it would have amounted to less in alimony. When my friend told me this, I was stunned. Imagine: Paying a woman for her work would have benefited everyone in the end. It was certainly a far cry from my husband’s request during our divorce that I compensate him $10,000 for his contributions to my brain. I laughed and the joke became a punchline I employed in my group chats and on my lady dates. Until once, my friend Serena said, “You should have replied, ‘I wonder what my other body parts cost? My virginity?’ You should have charged him for damage to your uterus for having children.” I was sitting in her kitchen, watching her cook, and hearing her say a thing that cut me to my core because it was true. Is that all I was? Just a calculation?

Three years after my divorce, I sat down with a financial consultant named Stephanie, because I refused to talk to men about money. I was terrified, remembering the shame that the budget talks with my husband had given me.

I’d been recently fired from my job at a newspaper, the one I’d taken to level out my finances, and I knew my income would be inconsistent. I wanted a plan. I wanted to be able to feed my kids, but also still afford more than $10 a month for toiletries. I sat for two hours, explaining my business, my haphazard income and spending habits, feeling sick and a little ashamed. But eventually Stephanie began to smile.

"This is so exciting," she said. "You are making twice as much as you did three years ago, and next year, you’ll be making four times as much! You got this!" She was impressed by the fact I’d sold and written an original audiobook, while also freelancing, working full-time for the newspaper, and taking care of two kids. It was a lot of work that I was suddenly able to do because with 50/50 custody after the divorce, I was no longer the primary caretaker of our children. And without a spouse, I was no longer performing the unpaid mental and emotional labor I’d been doing for years. Free from the mental load, I had a lot of time to earn money and it was beginning to pay off.

“Girl, you know how to work hard,” she said. She was the kind of blonde woman who called you “girlfriend” and said “you go, girl” unironically. The kind of woman I just loved with my whole heart because I knew she meant every word of it. She told me I had this. And I did.

When we were done, I was relieved and angry. Angry that for so long money had been a cudgel used against me. Angry that I’d been told everything I was doing was wrong. Angry that I’d looked to someone else for my stability, to provide for me, when I could have done it for myself all along. And I was angry that I was made to believe my labor wasn’t enough—when the reality was it just wasn’t valued.

In my relationship, money had been a trap, but when I had the support and the equality I needed, I finally could earn enough that money became my freedom.

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Guest Essay

The Key to a Happy, Stable Marriage

A close-up of the clasped hands of a man and a woman.

By Rhaina Cohen

Ms. Cohen is the author of “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.”

When Bert Ellison experienced intense mood swings, the first person he turned to was usually not his wife but Dan Driscoll, his close friend of more than two decades. During the first year of his Ph.D. program, Mr. Ellison was an emotional yo-yo, one day telling his wife that he wanted to quit, the next that all was well. Mr. Driscoll suggested that Mr. Ellison take the concerns to him first, easing the stress on their marriage.

“I didn’t make a vow to Dan on my wedding day,” Mr. Ellison told me, “but I’m able to uphold my vows, I think, more fully because I can process some stuff with my best friend before I bring a more polished version to my wife.”

Research has affirmed Mr. Ellison and Mr. Driscoll’s approach. A study measuring the stress hormone cortisol in married people found that spouses who felt satisfied with the social support they had outside marriage showed less physiological stress from day-to-day marital conflicts than those who weren’t as satisfied. Just as in finance, in our social life, it’s wise to diversify our portfolio .

I’ve reaped these rewards from my own living situation: I share a home with my husband, two close friends and their two children. Our friends’ perspectives, passions and social communities have made my and my husband’s lives fuller and more dynamic. Sharing a space with friends has also created opportunities for me to discover different dimensions of my husband. One afternoon, I noticed him happily engrossed on the living room floor with our housemates’ toddler, who was repeatedly uncapping and recapping markers. My husband was fascinated, he said, by how the toddler had developed, and in that moment, I admired his exquisite patience and attentiveness.

Through our setup, I’ve arrived at a clearer sense of what an ideal marriage looks like to me: not one in which my husband and I are cocooned, gazing into each other’s eyes — as lovers are so often depicted — but looking outward, anchored in a circle of people we love.

This is something the ancient Romans would have understood. Some classicists argue that friendship played the central role in ancient Roman society that marriages do today. A Roman might refer to a friend in terms that people now use only for a spouse, such as “half of my soul” or “the greater part of my soul.” In the Byzantine Empire, pairs of male friends (who, in some cases, may have also been lovers) would enter Christian churches to be ritually turned into brothers, united for life. Some were buried together.

But as mores shifted, a spouse took on the role once played by a friend. During the Victorian era, an increased emphasis on romantic love encouraged young people to expect more from marriage, not just pragmatic benefits but also deep connection and companionship.

Since then, expectations of marriage have continued to balloon. Now movies, songs and books tell us that a spouse should be not just your greatest love but your “ everything ,” as the Michael Bublé song goes — your confidant, soul mate and best friend.

It’s only in recent years that we’ve come to understand just how harmful this kind of approach can be. Sociologists have found that married people have weaker relationships with neighbors, relatives and friends than single people do. We end up undermining romantic relationships by expecting too much and weakening friendships by expecting too little.

But there’s a way to fix this. Start by trying a simple drawing exercise: Get a piece of paper, write your name in the middle and draw circles that represent the most important people in your life. Closer relationships — like a dear friend or romantic partner — should sit closer to your name, and relationships that take up more space in your life should have a bigger circle. If you’re left with one enormous circle for a romantic partner and small bubbles in the distance, it’s a sign that the romantic relationship may be taking on too much significance.

Consider establishing a routine to ensure you see your friends regularly. A close friend and I have a standing date every other week to hang out at her house after her baby goes to sleep. A pair of best friends I know dedicate Friday mornings to coffee and conversation together, a ritual they now consider sacred.

Friendships enrich romantic relationships. But of course, they’re also an end in themselves, providing deep meaning and connection — far deeper than most of us have been told is possible. By opening up space to prioritize our friends, both types of relationships become more satisfying.

So if you have plans with a romantic partner this Valentine’s Day, savor the time together. Then make your next date night with a friend.

Rhaina Cohen ( @rhainacohen ) is a producer and editor for NPR’s “Embedded” podcast and the author of “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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The Journey of Married Life

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Published: Sep 16, 2023

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The foundation of love and commitment, the joys of partnership, the challenges and growth, the fulfillment of family, the importance of continuous investment, conclusion: the ever-evolving journey.

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Essay on marriage: meaning, functions and forms.

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Introduction :

Marriage and family sociologically signifies the stage of greater social advancement. It is indicative of man’s entry into the world of emotion and feeling, harmony and culture. Long before the institution of marriage developed, man and woman may have lived together, procreated children and died unwept and unsung. Their sexual relations must have been like birds and animals of momentary duration.

Marriage

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Marriage as an institution developed over the time. It may have been accepted as a measure of social discipline and as an expedient to eliminate social stress due to the sex rivalry. The growing sense and sensibility may have necessitated the acceptance of norms for formalising the union between man and woman.

Meaning of Marriage :

Marriage is the most important institution of human society. It is a universal phenomenon. It has been the backbone of human civilisation. Human beings have certain urges like hungers, thirst and sex. Society works out certain rules and regulation for satisfaction of these urges.

The rules and regulations, which deal with regulation of sex life of human beings, are dealt in the marriage institution. We can say that the Marriage is as old as the institution of family. Both these institutions are vital for the society. Family depends upon the Marriage. Marriage regulates sex life of human beings.

Marriage creates new social relationships and reciprocal rights between the spouses. It establishes the rights and the status of the children when they are born. Each society recognises certain procedures for creating such relationship and rights. The society prescribes rules for prohibitions, preferences and prescriptions in deciding marriage. It is this institution through which a man sustains the continuity of his race and attains satisfaction in a socially recognised manner.

Sociologists and anthropologists have given definitions of marriage. Some of the important definitions are given below. Edward Westermark. “Marriage is a relation of one or more men to one or more women which is recognised by custom or law and involves certain rights and duties both in the case of the parties entering the union and in the case of the children born of it.

As B. Malinowski defines, “Marriage is a contract for the production and maintenance of children”.

According H.M. Johnson, “Marriage is a stable relationship in which a man and a woman are socially permitted without loss of standing in community, to have children”.

Ira L. Reiss writes, “Marriage is a socially accepted union of individuals in husband and wife roles, with the key function of legitimating of parenthood”.

William Stephens, the anthropologist, says that marriage is:

(1) A socially legitimate sexual union begun with

(2) A public announcement, undertaken with

(3) Some idea of performance and assumed with a more or less explicit

(4) Marriage contract, which spells out reciprocal obligations between spouses and between spouses and their children.

William J. Goode, the famous family sociologist has tried to combine the two objectives of marriage i.e. to regulate sex life and to recognize the newborn. It was perhaps for this reason that American sociologists came out with the statement that no child should be born without a father.

Although different thinkers have tried to provide definition of marriage, but there is no universally acceptable definition of marriage. There seems to be, however, a consensus that marriage involves several criteria that are found to exist cross-culturally and throughout time. For example, Hindu marriage has three main objectives such as Dharma, Progeny and Sexual Pleasure.

Individual happiness has been given the least importance. It is considered to be sacrament, a spiritual union between a man and a woman in the social status of husband and wife.

In Western countries, marriage is a contract. Personal happiness is given the utmost importance. People enter into matrimonial alliances for the sake of seeking personal happiness. If this happiness is-not forthcoming they will terminate the relationship.

Marriage is thus cultural specific. The rules and regulations differ from one culture to another. We can, however, identify certain basic features of this institution.

(1) A heterosexual union, including at least one male and one female.

(2) The legitimizing or granting of approval to the sexual relationship and the bearing of children without any loss of standing in the community or society.

(3) A public affair rather than a private, personal matter.

(4) A highly institutionalized and patterned mating arrangement.

(5) Rules which determine who can marry whom.

(6) New statuses to man and woman in the shape of husband and wife and father and mother.

(7) Development of personal intimate and affectionate relationships between the spouses and parent and children.

(8) A binding relationship that assumes some performance.

The above discussion helps us to conclude that the boundaries of marriage are not always precise and clearly defined. It is, however, very important institution for the society as it helps in replacement of old and dying population.

Functions of Marriage :

Marriage is an institutionalized relationship within the family system. It fulfills many functions attributed to the family in general. Family functions include basic personality formation, status ascriptions, socialization, tension management, and replacement of members, economic cooperation, reproduction, stabilization of adults, and the like.

Many of these functions, while not requiring marriage for their fulfillment, are enhanced by the marital system”. In fact, evidence suggests marriage to be of great significance for the well-being of the individual. Researchers have shown that compared to the unmarried, married persons are generally happier, healthier, less depressed and disturbed and less prone to premature deaths. Marriage, rather than becoming less important or unimportant, may be increasingly indispensable.

The functions of marriage differ as the structure of marriage differs. ‘For example, where marriage is specially an extension of the kin and extended family system, then procreation, passing on the family name and continuation of property become a basic function. Thus, to not have a child or more specifically, to not have a male child, is sufficient reason to replace the present wife or add a new wife.

Where marriage is based on “free choice,” i.e. parents and kinsmen play no role in selecting the partner, individualistic forces are accorded greater significance. Thus in the United States, marriage has many functions and involves many positive as well as negative personal factors : establishment of a family of one’s own, children, companionship, happiness, love, economic security, elimination of loneliness etc.

The greater the extent to which the perceived needs of marriage are met, and the fewer the alternatives in the replacement of the unmet needs, the greater the likelihood of marriage and the continuation of that marriage. At a personal level, any perceived reason may explain marriage, but at a social level, all societies sanction certain reasons and renounce others.

Forms of Marriage :

Societies evolved mannerism and method for selection of the spouses, according to their peculiar socio-economic and political conditions, and in accordance with their levels of cultural advancement. This explains on the one hand the origin of the various forms, of marriage and on the other the differences in the attitude of societies towards the institution of marriage.

Some have accepted it as purely a contractual arrangement between weds, while others hold it as the sacred union between man, and woman. Forms of marriage vary from society to society. Marriage can be broadly divided into two types, (1) monogamy and (2) polygamy.

1. Monogamy :

Monogamy is that form of marriage in which at a given period of time one man has marital relations with one woman. On the death of the spouse or one of the partners seek divorce then they can establish such relationship with other persons but at a given period of time, one cannot have two or more wives or two or more husbands.

This one to one relationship is the most modern civilized way of living. In most of the societies it is this form, which is found and recognized. It should be noted that on a societal basis, only about 20 per cent of the societies are designated as strictly monogamous, that is, monogamy is the required form.

When monogamy does not achieve stability, certain married persons end their relationship and remarry. Thus, the second spouse, although not existing simultaneously with the first, is sometimes referred to as fitting into a pattern of sequential monogamy, serial monogamy or remarriage.

Advantages:

Keeping in view the advantages of monogamy the world has granted recognition to monogamous form of marriage. The following are its advantages:

1. Better Adjustment:

In this form of marriage men and women have to adjust with one partner only. In this way there is better adjustment between them.

2. Greater Intimacy:

If the number of people in the family will be limited there will be more love and affection in the family. Because of which they will have friendly and deep relations.

3. Better Socialization of Children:

In the monogamy the children are looked after with earnest attention of parents. The development of modes of children will be done nicely. There will be no jealously between the parents for looking after their children.

4. Happy Family:

Family happiness is maintained under monogamy which is completely destroyed in other forms of marriage because of jealousy and other reasons. Thus, in this form of marriage, family is defined as happy family.

5. Equal Status to Woman:

In this form of marriage the status of woman in family is equal. If husband works she looks after the house or both of them work for strengthening the economic condition of the family.

6. Equalitarian way of Living:

It is only under monogamous way of living that husband and wife can have equalitarian way of life. Under this system husband and wife not only share the familial role and obligations but also have joint decisions. The decision making process becomes a joint venture.

7. Population Control:

Some sociologists have the view that monogamy controls the population. Because of one wife children in the family will be limited.

8. Better Standard of Living:

It also affects the standard of living within limited resources. One can manage easily to live a better life. It helps in the development of independent personality without much constraint and pressure.

9. Respect to old Parents:

Old parents receive favouring care by their children but under polygamy their days are full of bitterness.

10. Law is in favour:

Monogamy is legally sanctioned form of marriage while some are legally prohibited.

11. More Cooperation:

In such a family there is close union between the couple and the chances of conflict are reduced and there is cooperation between husband and wife.

12. Stability:

It is more stable form of marriage. There is better division of property after the death of parents.

Disadvantages :

1. Adjustment:

Monogamy is a marriage between one husband and one wife. So if the partner is not of choice then life loses its charm. They have to adjust between themselves but now-a-days divorce is the answer to their problem.

2. Monopoly:

According to Sumner and Keller, “Monogamy is monopoly.” Wherever there is monopoly, there is bound to be both ‘ins and outs’.

3. Childlessness:

Some inpatients can’t have kids or some barren cannot have kids. If one of the partners has some problem couples cannot have children. They have to suffer from childlessness.

4. Economic Factors:

Marriage in monogamy does not play part of income. They have to depend upon their own occupation for living. If they are poor they will remain poor. So monogamy effects the economic condition of man and woman.

5. Better status to Women:

Monogamy provides better status to women in the society. They are counted equal to men. Some people do not like this form of marriage.

6. Adultery:

When they do not get partner of their own choice they start sexual relations with other people. This also leads to the problem of prostitution.

2. Polygamy :

Distinguished from monogamy is polygamy. Polygamy refer to the marriage of several or many. Polygamy is the form of marriage in which one man marries two or more women or one woman marries two or more men or a number of men many a number of women. According to F.N. Balasara, “The forms of marriage in which there is plurality of partners is called polygamy”.

Polygamy, like other forms of marriage is highly regulated and normatively controlled. It is likely to be supported by the attitudes and values of both the sexes. Polygamy itself has many forms and variations. Polygamy is of three types: (i) Polygyny, (ii) Polyandry and (iii) Group marriage.

Let us now discuss forms of polygamy in details,

(i) Polygyny:

Polygyny is a form of marriage in which a man has more than one .wife at a time. In other words it is a form of marriage in which one man marries more than one woman at a given time. It is the prevalent form of marriage among the tribes, Polygyny also appears to be the privilege of the wealthy, in many African societies the rich usually have more than one wife.

This type of marriage is found in Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. In India, polygyny persisted from the Vedic times until Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. Now polygyny is visible among many tribes of India.

Viewing polygyny cross-culturally, poiygynous families evidence specific organisational features:

1. In certain matters, sex particularly, co-wives have clearly defined equal rights.

2. Each wife is set up in a separate establishment.

3. The senior wife is given special powers and privileges.

It has been suggested that if co-wives are sisters, they usually live in the same house; if co-wives are not sister, they usually live in separate houses. It is believed that sibling can better tolerate, suppress and live with a situation of sexual rivalry than can non-siblings.

Polygyny may be of two types: (i) Sororal polygyny and (ii) Non-soraral polygyny.

Sororal polygyny is one in which all the wives are sisters. Non-sororal polygyny means the marriage of one man with many women who are not sisters.

Causes of Polygyny :

1. Disproportion of sexes in the Population:

When in any tribe or society male members are less in number and females are more, then this type of marriage takes place.

2. Out-migration of male Population:

To earn the livelihood male members migrate from one society to another. This way there is a decrease in the number of males than females and polygyny takes place.

3. Hypergamy:

Hypergamy also gives rise to polygyny. Under this system the parents of lower castes or classes want to improve their social status by marrying their daughters in the higher caste or classes.

4. Desire for male Child:

Among the primitive people importance was given to make children than females. Thus man was free to have as many marriages as he liked on the ground to get male children.

5. Social Status:

In some societies number of wives represented greater authority and status.

Particularly the leaders of primitive society increased number of wives in order to prove their superiority. A single marriage was considered a sign of poverty. So where marriage is taken as sign of prestige and prosperity the custom of polygyny is natural.

6. Economic Reason:

Where the people of the poor families were unable to find suitable husbands for their daughters they started marrying their daughters to rich married males.

7. Variety of Sex Relation:

The desire for variety of sex relations is another cause of polygyny. The sexual instincts become dull by more familiarity. It is stimulated by novelty.

8. Enforced Celibacy:

In uncivilized tribes men did not approach the women during the period of pregnancy and while she was feeding the child. Thus long period of enforced celibacy gave birth to second marriage.

9. More Children:

In uncivilized society more children were needed for agriculture, war and status recognition. Moreover, in some tribes the birth rate was low and death rate was high. In such tribes polygyny was followed to obtain more children.

10. Absence of children:

According to Manu, if wife is unable to have children, man is permitted to have more marriages. He further says if a wife takes her husband then he should live with her one year and take another wife.

11. Religious Reasons:

Polygyny was permitted in the past if wife was incapable of forming religious duties in her periodic sickness because religion was given significant place in social life.

12. Patriarchal Society:

Polygyny is found only in the patriarchal society where more importance is given to males and male member is the head of the family.

Advantages :

(1) Better status of children:

In polygyny children enjoy better status. They are looked after well because there are many women in the family to care.

(2) Rapid growth of Population:

In those societies where population is very less and birth rate is almost zero, for those societies polygyny is best suited, as it increases the population at faster rate.

(3) Importance of Males:

In polygyny males occupy higher status. More importance is given to husband by several wives.

(4) Division of Work:

In polygyny there are several wives. Therefore, there is a proper division of work at home.

(5) Variety of Sex Relations:

Instead of going for extra marital relations husband stays at home because his desire for variety of sex relations is fulfilled within polygyny.

(6) Continuity of Family:

Polygyny came into existence mainly because of inability of a wife to produce children. Polygyny provides continuity to the family tree. In absence of one wife other women in the family produce children.

Disadvantage :

1. Lower status of Women:

In this form of marriage women have very low status; they are regarded as an object of pleasure for their husbands. They generally do not have a right to take decisions about their welfare; they have to depend upon their husband for fulfillment of their basic needs.

2. Jealousy as stated by Shakespeare:

“Woman thy name is jealousy”. When several wives have to share one husband, there is bound to be jealousy among co-wives. Jealousy leads to inefficiency in their work. They are not able to socialize their children in a proper manner in such atmosphere.

3. Low Economic Status:

Polygyny increases economic burden on the family because in many cases only husband is the bread winner and whole of the family is dependent on him.

4. Population Growth:

This type of marriage is harmful for developing society and poor nations because they have limited resources Further increase in population deteriorates progress and development of that society.

5. Fragmentation of Property:

In polygyny all the children born from different wives have share in father’s property. Jealousy among mothers leads to property conflicts among children as a result property is divided and income per capita decreases.

6. Uncongenial Atmosphere:

Polygyny does not promise congenial atmosphere for the proper growth and development of children. There is lack of affection among the members. As such families have large number of members. They fail to provide proper attention to all of them. This gives rise to many immoral practices in the society.

(ii) Polyandry :

It is a form of marriage in which one woman has more than one husband at a given time. According to K.M. Kapadia, Polyandry is a form of union in which a woman has more than one husband at a time or in which brothers share a wife or wives in common. This type marriage is prevalent in few places such as tribes of Malaya and some tribes of India like Toda, Khasi and Kota etc. Polyandry is of two types:

(i) Fraternal Polyandry and

(ii) Non-Fratemai Polyandry.

(i) Fraternal Polyandry:

In this form of polyandry one wife is regarded as the wife of all brothers. All the brothers in a family share the same woman as their wife. The children are treated as the offspring of the eldest brother, it is found in some Indian tribes like Toda and Khasis. This type of marriage was popular in Ceylon (Srilanka at present).

(ii) Non-Fraternal Polyandry:

In this type of polyandry one woman has more than one husband who is not brothers. They belong to different families. The wife cohabits with husbands in turn. In case of Fraternal Polyandry, the wife lives in the family of her husbands, while in case of non-fraternal polyandry, the wife continues to stay in the family of her mother. This type of polyandry is found among Nayars of Kerala.

Causes of Polyandry :

1. Lesser number of Women:

According to Westermark, when the number of women is lesser than the number of males in a society, polyandry is found. For example, among Todas of Nilgiri. But according to Brifficult, polyandry can exist even when the number of women is not lesser e.g. in Tibet, Sikkim and Laddakh polyandry is found even though there is not much disparity in the number of men and women.

2. Infanticide:

In some tribal societies female infanticide is present; as a result these female population is less than male population. Further males do not enjoy good status. Therefore, one female is married to a group of brothers and polyandry exists.

3. Matrilineal System:

Just in contrast to above noted point, it has also been argued that polyandry exists in matrilineal system where one woman can have relationship with more than one man and the children instead of getting the name of father are known by mother’s name.

4. Poverty:

Polyandry exists in such areas where there is scarcity of natural resources. It is for this reason many men support one woman and her children.

5. Bride Price:

In societies where there is bridge price, polyandry exists. Brothers pay for one bride who becomes wife of all of them.

6. Division of Property:

To check the division of ancestral property polyandry is favoured. When all the brothers have one wife then the question of division of property does not arise.

7. Production and labour:

Polyandry not only avoids division of property but it also increases production in agriculture. All the brothers work together because they have to support only one family. Thus production and income increases, further there is no expenditure with regard to labour because all the husbands contribute their share of work.

8. Social Custom:

Polyandry exists in some societies mainly because of customs and traditions of that particular society. Generally, polyandry is found in such areas which are situated far away from modern developed areas.

(1) Checks Population Growth:

It checks population growth because all the male members of the family share one wife. As a result population does not increase at that rapid rate, the way in which it occurs in polygyny Therefore, it limits the size of the family.

(2) Economic Standard:

Polyandry helps to unhold the economic standard of the family. It strengthens the economic position of the family because all the members work for the improvement of the family.

(3) Greater Security:

With large number of males working after the family affairs, other members of the family especially women and children feel quite secure. Greater security among the members develop sense of we-feeling among the members of the family.

(4) Property is kept Intact:

In polyandry family does not get divided. The property of the family is held jointly and thus it is kept intact.

(5) Status of Women:

In polyandry one woman is wife of large number of husbands. As a result she gets attention of all the members and thus enjoys a good status in the family. She feels quite secure because in the absence of one husband other males are there to fulfill her basic needs.

Disadvantages:

(1) Jealousy:

When all the men have to share one woman, family quarrels and tensions are ought to be there. Husbands feel jealous of one another which adversely effect congenial atmosphere of the family.

(2) Lack of Model:

When children have large number of fathers they fail to select appropriate model for themselves. This adversely effects their personality configuration.

(3) Health of the Woman:

It adversely effects health of a woman because she has to satisfy several husbands. It not only has negative effect on the physical health but also on mental health of the woman.

(4) Sterility:

According to biologists if the same woman cohabits with several men, it may lead to sterility, further lack of sex gratification give rise to extra-marital relationship of husbands.

(5) Status of Men:

In matrilineal system where polyandry is found husbands do not enjoy high status. They do not give their name to the children.

(6) Lack of Attachment:

In many tribes where polyandry exists husbands do not live permanently with their families. They are visiting husband who visit the family for a specific period. They do not get love and affection of their children because children feel unattached to their fathers.

(7) Less Population:

This form of marriage decreases population growth. In some tribal societies where polyandry continues to exist may get extinct after a gap of few years.

(8) Loose Morality:

This is another outcome of this practice.

(iii) Group Marriage :

Group marriage is that type of marriage in which a group of men marry a group of women. Each man of male group is considered to be the husband of every woman of female group. Similarly, every woman is the wife of every man of male group. Pair bonded or Multilateral marriage are the substitute term for group marriages.

This form of marriage is found among some tribes of New Guinea and Africa. In India group marriage is practised by the Toda Tribe of Nilgiri Hills. Except on an experimental basis it is an extremely rare occurrence and may never have existed as a viable form of marriage for any society in the world.

The Oneida community of New York State has been frequently cited as an example of group marriage experiment. It involved economic and sexual sharing based on spiritual and religious principles. Like most group marriage on record, its time span was limited. Rarely do they endure beyond one or two generations.

Levirate and Sororate:

(i) Levirate:

In levirate the wife marries the brother of the dead husband. If a man dies, his wife marries the brother of her dead husband. Marriage of the widow with the dead husband’s elder brother is called Senior Levirate. But when she marries to the younger brother of the dead husband, it is called Junior Levirate.

(ii) Sororate:

In Sororate the husband marries the sister of his wife. Sororate is again divided into two types namely restricted Sororate and simultaneous Sororate. In restricted sororate, after the death of one’s wife, the man marries the sister of his wife. In simultaneous sororate, the sister of one’s wife automatically becomes his wife.

Concubinage:

Concubinage is a state of living together as husband and wife without being married. It is .cohabitation with one or more women who are distinct from wife or wives. Concubinage is sometimes recognised by various societies as an accepted institution. A concubine has a lower social status than that of a wife. The children of a concubine enjoy a lower status in the society.

Related Articles:

  • Forms of Marriage: Polyandry, Polygyny and Monogamy
  • Hindu Marriage: Aims, Ideals and Types

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  • Devorah Baum on Marriage, Love, and Divorce

February 14, 2024 | ceb95 | European History , Humanities , Interviews , Philosophy

Devorah Baum, author of On Marriage , talks with us about the proposal that sparked her writing on marriage, the woes of modern dating, and the important role divorce plays in our imaginative life.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity, transcribed from an episode of the Yale University Press Podcast. Some questions have been omitted—listen to the full conversation here.

This book has been described as “a fascinating exploration” by The Guardian , and you as “an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigor to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality.” Can you tell us how you came to write about marriage?

DB: I think the first line of my book is something like writing a book about marriage wasn’t my idea. Someone else someone eligible proposed it to me. And I said, “yes.”. . . .The moment I have a proposal, ideas and images and ways of thinking, begin to just coalesce. And, I’m inspired. I thought to write this book on marriage only when it was proposed. But once it was proposed, I understood the logic of the proposal. I understood that the person who proposed it to me had seen something in me that I haven’t particularly noticed. And what he had seen is that I’m clearly obsessed with marriage.

You talk about the veil, both metaphorically and literally. Why is the veil important to understanding how humans have conceptualized the usefulness of marriage?

DB: So fascinating, because actually, the word nuptial comes from Latin term, nūbere , to veil. In a way, marriage has always been associated with the idea of creating a private life. A space within the world that requires the sanction of the world, because one of the main things about marriage institutionally is that the world has to sanction this relationship between two people. There’s a permission there for the couple, to have a private life that the world does not bestow on anybody else, including single people. That strangeness about it taking the world, the public world to sanction this hiddenness of marriage interests me.

You write extensively about language and marriage, conversation, gossip, vows, and everything having to do with talking or not talking about such a union. How has the invention of social media complicated language and marriage?

DB: It has this sort of propensity to make even more emphatic these aspects of identity of relationship status as though you’re required constantly, no matter who you are, to update the world. I say this as somebody with absolutely no experience of social media myself—I’ve never been on it. But, you know, I’ve heard about it. One of the things it seems to do is demand a constant curation of your identity in the world. If you’ve got any updates to make, you must go online and immediately make them. To that extent, it’s the very opposite of what in its best iteration marriage offers behind its veil, which is the possibility to be indecisive, non-determinate, changing, to be constantly exchanging roles. Being one person one day, somebody else the next.

In the book, you observe that the rise of streaming has changed how couples watch TV, because each person can choose what they want to watch and do it on their own. But you do argue that co-watching is still important for couples. Can you talk about these kinds of joyful benefits of co-watching?

DB: Well, joyful and traumatic. There’s a chapter called co-watching. In a way it’s a sort of code for middle age. Basically, we’re tired. We’ve got jobs and we’ve got children and we’re mostly just mostly our married life, mostly our interactions are just one big management meeting. We do comms with each other. Did you organize this? We need to book that, so on so forth. With our jobs and our children and so on. There is a risk, of course, particularly when in that period of life and marriage that intimacy goes away. And all kinds of hell can break loose when you let that happen. It can happen very easily and by accident, but then it is something to watch out for. I suppose one of the things a lot of couples I know, including my own couple, do in lieu of other forms of intimacy very often when we’re so tired is we just we watch box sets together. And that’s my favorite bit of every day.

In a moment where divorce rates are common and rising, what does divorce reveal about the entanglement or interconnections of marriage?

DB: Divorce, in its fullest sense is very rarely seriously entertained in our imaginative life. Can one ever really be outside wedlock? Can one ever really be unmarried because the world we’re in is so wed locked in all of its interlinked interlinking institutions, in so many different ways. I wind up in this book, I make a quite radical statement or provocation in relationship to divorce. I’m partly reading this through other thinkers, including the Great American philosopher Stanley Cavell. I wind up, I think, more or less saying that you should divorce if you can. . . .we should look at divorce in the way that Milton saw it as a really fundamental story about human freedom, and a really important part of our imaginative life.

Devorah Baum is a writer, a film director, and an associate professor in English literature at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Feeling Jewish (a Book for Just About Anyone) and The Jewish Joke: An Essay with Examples (Less Essay, More Examples). With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both codirector and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband. She lives in London, UK.

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  • How to conclude an essay | Interactive example

How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example

Published on January 24, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

The conclusion is the final paragraph of your essay . A strong conclusion aims to:

  • Tie together the essay’s main points
  • Show why your argument matters
  • Leave the reader with a strong impression

Your conclusion should give a sense of closure and completion to your argument, but also show what new questions or possibilities it has opened up.

This conclusion is taken from our annotated essay example , which discusses the history of the Braille system. Hover over each part to see why it’s effective.

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

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Table of contents

Step 1: return to your thesis, step 2: review your main points, step 3: show why it matters, what shouldn’t go in the conclusion, more examples of essay conclusions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay conclusion.

To begin your conclusion, signal that the essay is coming to an end by returning to your overall argument.

Don’t just repeat your thesis statement —instead, try to rephrase your argument in a way that shows how it has been developed since the introduction.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Next, remind the reader of the main points that you used to support your argument.

Avoid simply summarizing each paragraph or repeating each point in order; try to bring your points together in a way that makes the connections between them clear. The conclusion is your final chance to show how all the paragraphs of your essay add up to a coherent whole.

To wrap up your conclusion, zoom out to a broader view of the topic and consider the implications of your argument. For example:

  • Does it contribute a new understanding of your topic?
  • Does it raise new questions for future study?
  • Does it lead to practical suggestions or predictions?
  • Can it be applied to different contexts?
  • Can it be connected to a broader debate or theme?

Whatever your essay is about, the conclusion should aim to emphasize the significance of your argument, whether that’s within your academic subject or in the wider world.

Try to end with a strong, decisive sentence, leaving the reader with a lingering sense of interest in your topic.

The easiest way to improve your conclusion is to eliminate these common mistakes.

Don’t include new evidence

Any evidence or analysis that is essential to supporting your thesis statement should appear in the main body of the essay.

The conclusion might include minor pieces of new information—for example, a sentence or two discussing broader implications, or a quotation that nicely summarizes your central point. But it shouldn’t introduce any major new sources or ideas that need further explanation to understand.

Don’t use “concluding phrases”

Avoid using obvious stock phrases to tell the reader what you’re doing:

  • “In conclusion…”
  • “To sum up…”

These phrases aren’t forbidden, but they can make your writing sound weak. By returning to your main argument, it will quickly become clear that you are concluding the essay—you shouldn’t have to spell it out.

Don’t undermine your argument

Avoid using apologetic phrases that sound uncertain or confused:

  • “This is just one approach among many.”
  • “There are good arguments on both sides of this issue.”
  • “There is no clear answer to this problem.”

Even if your essay has explored different points of view, your own position should be clear. There may be many possible approaches to the topic, but you want to leave the reader convinced that yours is the best one!

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This conclusion is taken from an argumentative essay about the internet’s impact on education. It acknowledges the opposing arguments while taking a clear, decisive position.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

This conclusion is taken from a short expository essay that explains the invention of the printing press and its effects on European society. It focuses on giving a clear, concise overview of what was covered in the essay.

The invention of the printing press was important not only in terms of its immediate cultural and economic effects, but also in terms of its major impact on politics and religion across Europe. In the century following the invention of the printing press, the relatively stationary intellectual atmosphere of the Middle Ages gave way to the social upheavals of the Reformation and the Renaissance. A single technological innovation had contributed to the total reshaping of the continent.

This conclusion is taken from a literary analysis essay about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . It summarizes what the essay’s analysis achieved and emphasizes its originality.

By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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Your essay’s conclusion should contain:

  • A rephrased version of your overall thesis
  • A brief review of the key points you made in the main body
  • An indication of why your argument matters

The conclusion may also reflect on the broader implications of your argument, showing how your ideas could applied to other contexts or debates.

For a stronger conclusion paragraph, avoid including:

  • Important evidence or analysis that wasn’t mentioned in the main body
  • Generic concluding phrases (e.g. “In conclusion…”)
  • Weak statements that undermine your argument (e.g. “There are good points on both sides of this issue.”)

Your conclusion should leave the reader with a strong, decisive impression of your work.

The conclusion paragraph of an essay is usually shorter than the introduction . As a rule, it shouldn’t take up more than 10–15% of the text.

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McCombes, S. (2023, July 23). How to Conclude an Essay | Interactive Example. Scribbr. Retrieved February 15, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/conclusion/

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Marriage and Divorce Essay Introduction, Tips, and Samples

Table of Contents

Divorce is a common topic for law and social science students to research and write about. The effects of divorce are varied and can be brought on by various factors.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of how to write a marriage and divorce essay. It provides tips, guidelines, topics, and sample introductions to make the writing process as easy as possible.

Let’s dive in!

silhouette of man and woman under yellow sky

How to Write an Essay on Marriage and Divorce

Sometimes divorce results from a mutual decision and a clean break with the family. But, more often, it is the culmination of years of tension. For this reason, the law includes numerous safeguards for parents and their offspring in the event of a divorce.

Family circumstances leading up to the divorce are also essential to consider. This is because socioeconomic status can significantly impact a couple’s ability to keep their marriage together. In conclusion, there is a wide range of potential topics for an effective essay on divorce.

Prove that you’ve thought about the bigger picture by discussing the factors contributing to divorce.

Find the root causes of the issue and explain them in a way that will convince the leader of their veracity. Use relevant statistics to support your claims and give your research more weight.

Once you’ve spotted a worrying pattern, you can try to elaborate on it and explain why this particular family issue is so pervasive.

Such concepts can be developed into full-fledged essays with the potential to leave a deep impression on the reader.

Legal Proceedings

It’s important to talk about the various legal proceedings involved in a divorce, regardless of the reason for the split. One of the worst parts of divorce is having to go to court to resolve issues like property division and child custody.

Prenuptial agreements are one example of precautions that can be taken to avoid such problems. However, you should also mention the drawbacks of these agreements.

Finally, you can talk about the societal factors contributing to divorce, such as teen pregnancy leading to early or forced marriages.

Sociological research can help pinpoint the root causes of divorce, which must be addressed to end this social problem.

If you want your essay to have more of an impact, remember to follow these general guidelines:

Points to Note for Marriage and Divorce Essay Introduction

Use interesting and engaging ways to start your divorce essay to keep the reader interested. If the reader loses interest and skims, you’ve failed.

Write an introductory paragraph that presents a high-level summary of the issue without diving into subtopics or specialist language.

Conclude with a clear thesis statement that states the question you will address and the position you will take, if applicable.

Don’t stray too far from the central argument you laid out in your thesis. To better engage your reader, keep your work narrowly focused.

Like how you should begin the paper, your divorce essay should end with a conclusion that summarizes the entire paper. Restate your thesis and add a few fitting closing remarks to your essay.

Separate article sections with titles that identify the themes should be explored in different paragraphs. This method makes the essay easier to read and more organized overall.

15 Topics and Sample Introduction on Marriage and Divorce Essay

What Happens to a Person After a Prolonged Divorce? When one spouse, typically the man, abandons the spouse and their children during a divorce, the surviving spouse may have trouble providing for them.

Young children are especially vulnerable to the adverse outcomes of divorce. Children’s reactions to their parent’s separation and eventual divorce vary depending on their age, gender, and personality.

Based on these issues, here are some topics and introductions to start your essay.

1. Psychological Counseling for Dealing with Divorce

One thing that happens after a divorce is that a person’s emotional and mental state changes. Counseling began in the country in the 1950s, when it was realized how important it was to… Why and how people get divorced.

Many marriages end because one partner cheats on the other. The person who was cheated on feels like all the work and sacrifices made to keep the marriage together was for nothing.

2. What Divorce Does to Children

When a married couple with children gets divorced, the law says that the children’s best interests must be protected. Difficulties that children face and ways to solve the new problems that arise after a divorce.

3. An Overview of the Children of Divorce’s Living Situation

Recent studies show that the number of divorces worldwide has increased a lot. This is primarily due to the shift […]

4. Exegetical Study of Divorce in the Bible

The divine plan for marriage and the right to divorce can be used to understand the passage of marriage and divorce.

5. How divorce affects the children

Scholars pay attention to how the child’s age affects their feelings about their parents’ split. Psychologists say that when parents split up, it’s a big change in how children are raised.

8. Marriage and Divorce in the Bible – Religious Studies

The most important thing is that the Bible says not to do it. Both society and the Church suffer when people get divorced. Infidelity is often a cause of divorce and stress disorder.

Divorces and stress disorders can have different causes. But the idea of cheating is still a bit shocking because people have the right to choose whether or not to do it. […]

9. Rates of Divorce in the United Arab Emirates

Even more worrisome is the fact that Emirates are involved in 30% of divorce cases in the UAE.

10. “How Divorce Affects Children” by Meera Chowdhry

For example, it is said that after the end of the Second World War, there was an increase in divorces.

11. How women are affected by divorce

Both people who believe in religion and those who don’t agree that it has helped bring peace and civilization to the world. On the other hand, divorce…

12. Why and how people get divorced in the UAE

In this case, the rate is the number of divorces compared to the total number of marriages in a year.

13. Deontology and Utilitarianism: The Ethics of Divorce

Before discussing the ethics of divorce, the paper first talks about ethics and then discusses divorce in modern society.

14. Settlement talks for a divorce

The goal of the meeting is to work out Rex’s divorce without going to court. All the people involved in the negotiations should be prepared for the negotiations. The results of divorce are poverty and instability.

Divorce isn’t the answer to problems in a marriage because it leads to poverty, instability, and a bad environment for the kids. Due to this situation, personal analysis shows that some children are usually left to the […]

15. How is coaching different from therapy when it comes to divorce?

Divorce is one situation where parents and children need help from a professional life coach to deal with the changes.

Wrapping Up

An introduction sets up the background, setting, and the immediate questions that need to be answered to determine how the essay will be structured.

We write about problems from the standpoint of the emotional, social, and practical effects that these issues have on people’s lives.

Marriage and Divorce Essay Introduction, Tips, and Samples

Abir Ghenaiet

Abir is a data analyst and researcher. Among her interests are artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. As a humanitarian and educator, she actively supports women in tech and promotes diversity.

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Marriage and Family Essay Examples

Reasons for getting divorce - essay.

Divorce means the separation of the married couple from each other. It is a standard and a legal process of divorce, where the spouse can register for permanent separation from another if he or she is uncomfortable. In divorce essay this topic will be briefly...

The Right to Marriage and Family for Same-sex Couples

Marriage was once viewed as something much different from what it is now. It is a commitment between two individuals and the definition according to Google states, “in some jurisdictions specifically a union between a man and a woman”. This commitment varies between cultures; however,...

The Needs of a Man and the Needs of a Woman in Marriage

According to dictionary.com marriage is defined as the legal union of partners (man and women) in a personal relationship. The leading cause of most divorces today results in the needs of both partners being overlooked. The needs of a man are completely different from the...

Women Role in Writing Women’s Worlds by Lila Abu-lughod

Writing Women’s Worlds by Lila Abu-Lughod contains the past anecdotes, poems, and conversations of many women and young girls who live in a small village community in Egypt during and post World War 2. The critical ethnography talks about their troubles with the men in...

How Wilde Challenges the Traditional Ideals of Marriage and Relationships in an Ideal Husband

In An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde presents two men Lord Goring and Sir Robert as two men who are ready to do everything it takes to save their love and satisfy the demands of their lovers. However, their separate lives meet at different points in the play....

The Concept of Marriage and Family in the Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

Marriage is usually being defined as a socially or ritually recognized union between spouses that also establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and any children brought into the family. It takes many forms, varying all around the world as it...

The Reasons Why I Do not Want to Get Married

Everyone has a different way of life and love, you do not have to be like someone and imitate the same thing when you do not feel like it. Marriage is considered one of the great things of life. But not everyone is interested in...

Reasons and Effects of Divorce

The topic i have chosen to write this essay on is The Truth about Divorce. Most people think that people get divorced because they don't 'love' each other anymore but its alot more than that, it can be money issues, abuse, lack of communication, addiction...

Divorce Vs Toxic Relationship 

Divorce has become a debatable topic because of the loss of family structure and foundation. Living in a toxic relationship effects the two partners and their child, if any involved in negative ways. The reason why I chose this topic is because it has been...

Love, Family, and Marriages in the Elizabethan Times

The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603), often referred to as the Golden Age in English History which represented the apogee of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering...

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