One of important reasons why society wants to push age of consent way above puberty age - is because society wants to prevent teenagers from having promiscuous sex and have pregnancies out of wedlock. Marriage helps to reduce both these risks. That is why marriage is allowed at a lower ages than age of consent.

Children are being raped, and then pressured to marry their rapists. This means that the rapists can't always be prosecuted.

Personally, our son was also born out-of-wedlock and we are still not married. For us it was simply a choice of wanting children but not seeing the need to affirm our relationship through the public statement of a wedding. While in our country no one is taking offense with that, it is unfortunate that there are still negative side effects such as higher taxes and a lot of paperwork to ensure my spouse and I have the same rights and obligations with regards to our son

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/why-are...

Who, exactly, would have benefited from that?

Svekax: Yes. Children with only one parent [...]

I don't know how you can say this and then go on to say

> This is a discussion about marriage, not parenthood.

That's the link that people were questioning. Marriage is not a necessary condition for having a two-parent family, even if the US law is lagging behind in recognizing it. Why would you think that any of those bad things would happen if two parents, who were already planning on living together and raising their children, had to postpone the wedding for a few years?

You screwed up. You conflated correlation and causation. You fumbled dictionary definitions, suggesting that having unmarried parents was the same as having only one parent.

Numerous people called you out on this. You doubled-down and then, when you saw the way it was going, tried to change the conversation and tried to suggest that you were talking about general trends; unmarried parents correlates more strongly with single parents than married parents does.

These are ways you screwed up. You can learn from this, and become a better person, more able in the future to have meaningful discussions, or you can ignore it and spit out some more passive aggressive phrases in which you pretend everyone just misunderstands you, posturing for complete strangers who don't even know you. Either way, we're done here.

I'm a bit confused how marriage protects against single person parenting when about half of marriages end in divorce.

I'm not sure about that, I'm open to persuasion. But I'm not persuade by people saying {it's obvious}.

As far as I'm aware what the family relationship counsellors are saying these days (the ones I've spoken to anyway) is that it is conflict that harms children.

It matters less whether the parents are together. What's important is that children aren't exposed conflict.

Because if it's just a correlation, then you're might just be measuring the obvious third-cause: that deadbeat parents are not willing to marry. And that wouldn't be affected by preventing their marriage, since they wouldn't marry anyway.

I was born out of wedlock, and still raised by two parents.

If your two parents aren't married you still have two actual parents.

Perhaps rather than "parent" you meant "active caregiver" or similar.

Then maybe force insurance companies to cover partners too?

>Soldiers won't be able to get married before joining.

Then maybe they shouldn't be sent to kill and get killed before they are like 21 either? This way they have 3 full years to get married and enjoy their marriage, even after joining at 18.