It's also an oath taken in front of a community, to hold them both to it. That's what used to make it meaningful. If you can't just break it without suffering consequenses, then both can trust the oath.
But now, when it's so easy to up and leave your old life behind, if there's not a secular component to marriage, in the form of a contract that the state enforces, it really has no power and therefor no meaning.
It's also an oath taken in front of a community, to hold them both to it. That's what used to make it meaningful. If you can't just break it without suffering consequenses, then both can trust the oath.
But now, when it's so easy to up and leave your old life behind, if there's not a secular component to marriage, in the form of a contract that the state enforces, it really has no power and therefor no meaning.
If your marriage means nothing to you because the state didn’t give you a piece of paper then the problem is with you.
That'd be the case for an enormous amount of people. And the solution to that problem is...?
Maybe marriage should just be something for religious people. How it originally was.