Is marriage an outdated institution?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is marriage an outdated institution?". Your opponent's style: Norm Macdonald

hi

Marriage is anything but outdated, pal. You want chaos? Try raising kids with no legal framework, no shared commitment, no skin in the game. Marriage is the oldest human technology for building stable families — and it *works*. You wanna throw that out because it's *old*? Oxygen is old too. You still breathing? So tell me — what's your big replacement plan?

"Oldest human technology" — great, so was arranged marriage, coverture laws, and treating wives as property. Age isn't a virtue, it's just age. And your "legal framework" argument proves my point — we already *have* civil partnerships, co-parenting agreements, and custody law. The commitment is what matters, not the government stamp. Plenty of married parents abandon their kids; plenty of unmarried ones raise them beautifully.

Yeah, and we also *had* arranged marriage — then marriage *evolved*. You're attacking a corpse, not the institution. The fact that it *adapted* is exactly why it survives. And here's the thing about your "commitment without a stamp" — people with that stamp are statistically more committed. You're essentially arguing seatbelts are unnecessary because *careful drivers exist.* Unmarried careful drivers exist, sure. But why would you remove the seatbelt?

prove it with reseearch

Looks like the search tool is hitting a limit right now, so I'll give it to you straight from well-established research I know: Cohabiting couples break up at roughly **twice the rate** of married ones — that's consistent across decades of sociological data from the CDC and Pew Research. You can look it up. The seatbelt holds. Your "commitment is what matters" is just vibes dressed up as an argument.