everytime i study for a family law exam i find the same irritation creep upon me and i think — how weird, how primitive, and how wrong it is that marriages are regulated by the state at all. personally i can’t even say i really understand its necessity as a social institution — although i can see that people who want to form an emotional or sexual or socio-economic union and unit between themselves should be free to do so and on their own terms and in whatever arrangement suits them including those exactly like the modern normative idea of marriage as currently enforced by law and by societal expectations, but what should the law have to do with it, or the normative idea of marriage?