MARRIAGE

a legally and socially sanctioned union between one or more husbands and one or more wives that accords status to their offspring and is regulated by laws, rules, customs, beliefs, and attitudes that prescribe the rights and duties of the partners. The universality of marriage within different societies and cultures is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions for which it provides structure, such as procreation, sexual gratification and regulation, care of children and their education and socialization, regulation of lines of descent, division of labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal needs for affection, status, and companionship. In the biological evolutionary scale, the more complex the species, the longer the offspring is dependent on its mother for survival from the time of birth to maturity. Human beings, at the top of the evolutionary scale, require the most time of all species to reach maturity. This imposes increased duties on human parents for the care of their children. The best chance for the successful development of the child into adulthood occurs when both parents are deeply involved throughout the period of child rearing. Hence, marriage lays the foundation for the traditional nuclear family, whose basic constituents are a mother, a father, and a child and which is the primary unit for ensuring the procreation of human beings and the preservation of their societies.