I recently was married, I know that is not a popular choice on this subreddit and I completely understand the reasons why.

I married and things changed for me. I don't mean in terms of anything tangible, but rather in terms of my viewpoint and outlook. I have spent significant time recently trying to understand what changed and why.

Ultimately, I have to say it was simply ceremony. A demarkation of one life and an embarkation on another. My spouse and I had cohabitated for several years, so there was no legal or relational change. The process made little to no difference in our day to day lives.

That leads me back to ceremony. I had noticed that I had always viewed myself as a youth, Even into my 30's. My father passed away when I was 37. That shifted my thinking. Not so much about the mortality issue, I have faced mortality since I was young having lost a parent early in my life and having several risk taking behaviours. Rather, the process, and my siblings reliance on me for leadership as part of that process changed who I was.

When I read about anthropology (I tend to read vociferously, and not simply fiction), there is a great deal about ceremony being important to human development. There are many ceremonies in the life of a youth - preschool, school, high school, dating, driving, graduation, jobs, first independant living - but many things have lost the ceremony surrounding them and thus lost the impact of changing mindset on the individuals involved.

I read so many complaints, many unustified, about "man-children" and I have to think that much of this is due to the lack of ceremony for young men (and young women really but that is not my topic) to separate the stages of their lives.

My concern in life is largely for my son who is soon an adult. Truth be known, I would rather he was gay, he would be spared some pains that are almost inevitable in a heterosexual life. Mostly around the devastation that is family law and children for men. Expecting a man to forgo children is unreasonable. Some will and some can't. I know I couldn't have, regardless of the cost. I am fairly certain that he will be similar. That being said, he has a natural wisdom that I lacked. I learned my lessons from running full-tilt into the pointy end of the spear and extracting the blade and collecting my entrails after the fact. I expect he will have better judgement but I have no illusions that he will likely avoid all the problems.

I also see issues with his development from one stage to another. This brings us back to ceremony. If we are advising young men not to marry, what are we replacing it with? Ceremony will be important. How does one convey the dividing line between parents being responsible for us and we being responsible for ourselves? That historically has been "parenthood", "marriage" or "moving out on our own". Without ceremony and completeness though, these steps lack the mental impact that is needed to push the change in mindset.

Really, with ongoing changes in what Masculinity means in todays world, some formulation on ceremony is, I think, really necessary to develop "complete persons". Is "marriage" necessary or a parent dying necessary? Of course not. Is some structure to passing from one stage to another important to human growth? Yeah, I think it is.

What does everyone else think?