If you trust your partner to keep their word, there is comfort in knowing you are a team, no matter what crazy stuff happens.
If your partner refuses to make that promise (that promise being what makes it a marriage, IMO), well, you might want to re-evaluate how much you trust them and why.
Refusing to commit yourself seems more like perpetuating that problem than addressing it, to me.
Maybe I'm missing something.
One source tells me that 41% of first marriages end in divorce. Divorce today is not generally considered a pleasant process, yet they go through with it, which is evidence that there was something seriously wrong with the relationship. Put differently, 59% of marriages were sufficiently correct choices.
Suppose couples spent an additional year on scrutiny before getting married. How much would that improve the success ratio? To 70%? 80%? What about the remaining 20%? Once they discover their choice was sufficiently wrong to want to go through with one of today's divorces, what should they do? Stick it out no matter how bad it gets? Really? Or if they do divorce, then what have you achieved? If they delayed by three years and got to 90%, would that be worth it?
Also if you've been together for 5 years and then marry, why would that change the chance to be divorced after another 5 years versus marrying after 2 and then divorcing after 8?
I do not think all marriage-ending issues are foreseeable. There are often red flags that are flagrantly ignored, but things like substance abuse and spousal abuse are not always predictable. They can begin unexpectedly well into a marriage.
I do not think you should always "stick it out". Keeping promises does not have the same moral weight as many bigger issues.
The obvious example is abuse - the victim should get out, then get a divorce (my understanding is that abusers rarely change their stripes, but are very prone to appear to do so long enough to lure their victims back).
I don't advocate for huge delays before marrying. I don't think that really helps a lot. Going really fast is not wise, but waiting for years does not magically solve problems.
Instead, I advocate for a totally different approach to dating than most US inhabitants take.
Dating should be about figuring out if you should get married, not about having fun or impressing the other person. The last two goals form a tiny, tiny subset of the first one, and I can't tell that most people I have seen dating are aware of that.
There's a phrase I love from the recent Picard show - "the way of absolute candor". When we first met, we engaged in something not unlike it (we called it "brutal honesty"), and it was a lot of what drew us to each other.
While our marriage has been full of hardships and difficulties (and, yes, plenty of surprises), we both had a decent idea what we were signing up for before we said our vows. That was largely due to the way we approached dating, and our extreme honesty with each other.
So far, we have stuck with it. At this point I have a hard time seeing what could break us apart, apart from major personality and behavioral shifts due to neurological failures (injury, mental illness, etc).
That's in large part due to how much work we did before getting married, both on the relationship and on solving difficult, ugly problems together. Marriage, especially parenting, is mostly about doing hard, unpleasant work together.
God / the universe helped us on that front, by dropping multiple hard things on us while dating. One example would be the time her apartment got destroyed in a flash flood weeks after she moved so we could live in the same area and see each other regularly.
That sucked, but boy did we get to understand each other better. Taught us a lot more about how married life might go than playing video games or going out for French cuisine.
Not saying you should destroy your girlfriend's apartment to see how she copes, but you can seek out hard, frustrating, meaningful things to do together regularly while dating, instead of a steady diet of all fun, all the time.
You can also be rigorously honest up front - my wife had as good an understanding of my failings as I could give her within weeks of meeting each other (many of the unpleasant surprises we've had in our marriage have come down to things we didn't realize about ourselves, so both parties were surprised by the discovery).
Take those approaches and add a reasonable amount of time before marriage (we dated for a year then were engaged for six months), and I think you could significantly lower the divorce rate.
Granted, you'd probably lower the marriage rate a lot too. That might not be such a bad outcome, though.
Marriage is not girlfriend/boyfriend.
It's far more serious, and making it a commitment to be contemplated deeply before entering - and not easily breakable - is the whole point of highlighting the problem of trivialising it.
Marriage is rooted in religion, for better or worse, and these thoughts about making marriage some unbreakable for-life bond are based on religious beliefs hundreds of years old. Catholics couldn't divorce, ever! We live in a more enlightened age, one where religious thoughts have less to do with forging our societal beliefs. Can't we progress with our thoughts on marriage as well? Marriage for life would mean for many an unhappy and unfulfilling life. Perhaps a life of violence or depression. Is that we want to force people into? A life without choice, a life without happiness?
So it’s not wrong to say marriage has its roots in religion, but the cause to create marriage hasn’t gone away even if religion isn’t a factor: Can you imagine how difficult it was for a single parent (especially women) to raise a child alone, a few millenia ago? I think it’s fair to say that it caused major problems.
Even today raising children is still extremely difficult. Raising a productive citizen is another order of magnitude of difficulty.
Around a billion people, give or take, in China would disagree with you.
Heck Japan isn't exactly a religious country.
With a few exceptions, the concept of marriage coincides with agricultural societies.
Also, parents invest a lot in their child's marriage, e.g. downpayment for a house, car, etc, for their child (singular!), so that adds even more pressure to "make things work".
Ecclesiastical annulments are grossly misunderstood by most Catholics and non-Catholics alike[1]. They are not "Catholic divorce." And yes, the tribunal system can be gamed, but if you actually believe you should realize that God isn't going to be fooled. And if you don't believe then why do you even care what the Church thinks?
[1] See below reply
Because your friends/neighbours/relatives may be Catholics, and you may care about your appearances.
In my experience with religious folks, keeping God happy is not the sole driving force behind most of their lives to the exclusion of all else. It's a framework around their lives, but not always priority #1.
Given that, annulments are essentially a catholic divorce, with a little bit of magic added.
Think about how many people within your own extended family do this? Take a guess, deliver this talk to them and track through life how many follow the path.
We chimps display a wide spectrum of Personality traits and an even wider spectrum of Needs, which are constantly changing through life and the events that effect it. Dangerous to assume whatever system you have accepted will be accepted by all.
Its easy to come up with all kinds of theories about "what works" and "how things should be" but that is usually based on our limited awareness of the spectrum.
How come you suddenly need 50% less emergency cash per person just because you're married?
Most peasants were married through arranged marriages that benefitted their families.
The problem is that the legal one size fits all rule of marriage doesn't fit most. And, that size differs from country to country and even within countries (eg US states).
It’s working quite well for us for now. We’ve been together longer than any of my old, married (and since divorced) friends have.
Maybe we've taken marriage too seriously for hundreds/thousands of years, and we're finally progressing as a global society to realize that till-death-do-us-part might be too big of a commitment for some 20-somethings. After all, what's really the difference between being married and living with your significant other besides some laws that are based on the old views of marriage.
(Granted, with kids things get tricky, but making sure parents stick around and help raise kids to me seems rather independent on whether a couple was married or not - seems more to do with someone's inner beliefs)