Unless you're planning on being a breeding unit I don't think it's necessary.

Spoil a beautiful relationship..get married..well it did for me ..

I can't say I've noticed that nonbelievers are opposed to marriage....if they are it's probably more to do with their own personal experience than with their belief.

I am neither opposed nor unopposed to marriage. The success of a relationship depends on the terms agreed upon by the people in it.

I just got divorced after 32 years and five kids. Why? Of course there are many reasons, but the main one was because my (ex) wife "found jesus". She got in with a very evangelical baptist church and did a complete 180%. I did my best to support and respect her decision; however she asked if I couldn't just "fake it" and go to church with her. I said that I couldn't - I felt that was extremely disrespectful for both me AND the church, their beliefs, etc. I offered to go, but I would not participate in the trappings and ceremony. I even supported her taking a mission trip to Nepal to hand out water filters and "preach the gospel of salvation".

But it wasn't enough.

She wound up asking me for a divorce. We lived in rural Georgia, so most assumed that I, the "godless, intolerant atheist" asked her for the divorce. I don't bother to correct them, it's not worth it, and those people will never be a part of my life anymore anyway. But no, it was the intolerant xian that divorced the tolerant atheist.

We have five adult children - 3 are atheists, 2 are xian. She has disconnected from all of them - something that, as a parent, I cannot fathom to this day.

So, back to the topic: I have always believed that for a greater chance of success, both partners in a relationship should be "in the same ballpark" on religion & politics. My ex and I were, when we got married - I even remember sitting her down in her kitchen before we started getting serious to make sure she knew that I was an out of the closet atheist, I always would be one, and I need to know that a) she's OK with that and b) where she stands on religion (she was raised a strict Catholic). We discussed it, and it was great. For 30 years.

Never marry unless you find a true feminine women. If you marry the typical western women then you're screwed.

i was against marriage before i was an atheist, and i've been an atheist since i was 15. i wasn't opposed on religious grounds; i just equated it, as i saw it, as it was practiced on tv and in other popular culture, with prostitution. a woman exchanged her sexual, housekeeping and child-rearing favors in exchange for financial security. i always had in mind that some day i might meet a guy and want to have an equal partnership (domestic and romantic) with him, and that eventually happened. we're engaged but we can't afford to marry; we are disabled and we'd lose the slim benefits on which we barely survive. on the other hand we'd have standing with regard to each other. we don't care whether or not we have that piece of paper; i wouldn't be changing my name (i'm 66 and a half already -- i should change my NAME?) at any rate. it wouldn't be an ozzie and harriet marriage, no june and ward cleaver, no donna reed and whoever she was supposed to be married to, so i no longer object on political grounds. it's probably not going to happen, though. we'll probably die first.

g

I've been married twice. I'll unofficially marry my next wife but getting married legally is very unlikely. Other than crappy tax benefits it's not worth the trouble. It's a piece of paper and paper has nothing to do with love

I personally find it rather outdated.

I've been with my partner for 23 years happily unmarried. We've got 3 kids together, a house etc.

I think the only benefit to getting married in Australia are some next of kin laws in medical emergencies and default inheritance laws, so I have recently been thinking about signing the paperwork just for that, but wouldn't bother with an event.

I couldn't resist looking up the data on this question. I was curious to see what the divorce rate might among atheists. Pew's data shows that if you want to stay married, find an atheist. ^_^ [pewforum.org]

Even Barna Research was in agreement. (George Barna is a conservative evangelical Christian, who founded Barna Research, but credit where it's due. He's standing by his data even if it makes others in his movement upset.)

Atheists and agnostics divorce less often than other religious groups. Fact.

I crosschecked by profession. Pew statistics say find an Ag Engineer. They have the lowest rate of divorce by profession.

No drama from this happily married atheist. But I'm not an Ag Engineer. Nobody's perfect. Ha ha.

I used to think I wanted to get married again, but the thought of going through another divorce is not optional for me.

It's not hard being faithful and loyal to a man.

I've passed the most rigorous test of time having once been married to a military service member for eight years. He was deployed six times during our marriage.

Even through his betrayal, I remained steadfast until he was out of harm's way before filing for divorce.

I don't want to lose like that again.

I feel that the whole wedding thing is a little outdated, but marriage itself (i.e. private court marriage) is still applicable in a lot of ways. If I feel like I want to spend the rest of my life with someone and share everything we accumulate in possessions and finance, then I would want to get married. Dating and having sex,I feel, are now separate from marriage because of the whole religious aspect of it and the lack of religious importance in the world today.

If a couple is going to raise kids I believe marriage is critical on several different levels. If people want to live together without getting married that's fine with me. For their sake, however, I suggest no kids, and treat it like a business partnership with an "escape plan" in writing for the division of all shared large purchases if there is a split (a full legal contract for a house). I respond to a number of legal questions on the legal and ethical section of yahoo answers. There is a huge number of horror stories of people exiting relationships with shared households and no agreement how to split things up. That is made much, much worse, of course, because, at that point, both people totally hate each others guts and combative as hell. Hint: never move in with an attorney.

My views towards marriage are that I’ll consider it with the right woman. But it hasn’t happened so far.

If you want to put on a costume, put on a show and get some applause, become an actor!

I also have not noticed a correlation of atheist/agnostics opposed to marriage. Maybe they're opposed to the whole religious ceremony of marriage. I am married but got married at the county court house.

I didn't noticed a correlation like that. Marriage has a lot of legal benefits. Unfortunately some turn to nightmare if you were to divorce.

I think unbelievers just tend to have a more relaxed, less dogmatic view of it. We know what the institution is good for, and what it's not; what it is, and isn't. So we can be pragmatic about it.

After my deconversion, my wife and I met, and she'll be the first to tell you she'd not an easy person to get close to. She's withheld and slow to trust. I'm not. One of the ways she helps herself not feel trapped, is to not get married. We've been together going on 10 years now and I consider myself to have been married for that whole period, even though we're just coming up on our 2nd anniversary of making it "official" (civil ceremony). In fact by the time she got around to talking about actual marriage, it was anticlimactic. However given that we weren't starting a family together or even raising children, one of the major benefits of marriage -- social legitimacy and security for children -- was a moot point.

At the end of the day getting married ended up costing us a ton of money, too. My wife was slated to get about $2800/mo in social security when she turned 66.5 and now it's down to $1200 because the benefits were based on the greater of her work history, or that of her late prior husband. Once she remarried, his earnings no longer entered into it. Now she's going to have to bump me off to get back into that scenario!

On the plus side we no longer need a health care power of attorney to make decisions for each other should one of us end up in a coma or something -- or to insure we even have the right to visit each other. Pragmatically, though, I would have rather put up with that and had the extra retirement income.

When it comes down to it, we got married because psychologically it "seems" more permanent and committed and real, and it's symbolic, yadda-yadda, but pragmatically we kind of cut off our nose to spite our face. And guess what, the love or lack thereof and the emotional cost of breaking up is the same with or without the contract, so it's not like there's any reality to the contract making a breakup less likely. I'm sure some people feel more secure with marriage but there's no reality to it in today's world of no-fault divorce. In fact, ironically, being married makes divorce easier rather than harder, because there's no ambiguity about how to go about it and who gets what or how committed you at least meant to be to each other because the contract makes all that more explicit.

So maybe the short answer to your question is, for unbelievers, there's no psychological magic fairy dust surrounding marriage, as well as much less and possibly no sense of social pressure or taboo against just living together, and so ... it's really a very pragmatic and unromantic decision, plus some variable level of residual social conditioning that might influence us, as to whether or not we enter into that contract.

I just think I don't have to follow other's traditions on it. Can get married here for legal benefits though.

My wife and I are married and are non believers. For me that has been lifelong (I think for her, too, but maybe not in childhood years). I've read that non believers divorce less often than believers, and I can believe that it true. I've read comments about how marriage is unnecessary. Truly and fully committed couples don't "need" the extra legal trappings of marriage, and in many respects that is true. And, of course, marriage is extremely disruptive to dissolve (I've seen plenty of that). After we'd been together for two years I put it to my then girlfriend "Do you want to make this permanent? I mean getting married". [Yeah, I'm such a romantic!]. Now, half a century later, I'm glad we did. I think there are some subtle aspects of marriage that go a bit beyond being in a thoroughly committed relationship, and I think the differences are beneficial overall. This is my two ¢ and I'm sticking to it.

I think of marriage as a religious thing, so far it’s not been something I’ve wanted in my life.
Sometimes I think it’s a nice idea and sometimes I think I’d feel trapped. Also having no kids the surname issue hasn’t occurred.
Each to their own