The bond of family is unlike any other bond.

You don't need a marriage to have a family; if you disagree with this, I worry you are getting concepts and titles knotted to tightly with one another.

Family as a concept has a clear, practical value; this much I will totally agree with. I don't think it is as important the shape that family makes, though, and thus far marriage has only lent legitimacy to certain forms of family -- one man, one woman, largely responsible for the welfare of the offspring they produce. I can think of a lot of ways in which this is suboptimal.

But marriage having clear, practical value? It seems the practical value you call out in marriage is that it acts as a sort of moralistic glue to hold a marriage together when other means of adhesion -- trust of one another, emotional support, physical attraction, etc -- have fallen by the wayside. If this need to not fail against some societal title bestowed upon a couple is all that is left holding them together, why is this good? How does "'till death do us part" help when it is more of a constraint and/or threat than a promise? And if the couple already has a sufficient number of these things gluing them together, why do we need this additional social glue?

So I'd like to see what marriage is meant to represent separated from the actual institution, and considered separately. If a couple has what a marriage represents, but lacks the title, I don't see how this is worth distinguishing -- or a union in general for that matter; I think single man/woman couples are more of a historical accident than anything. If a couple has the title of marriage, but has a substantive lack of what a marriage represents, I don't see how the title is going to make either of their lives better. It only makes them feel guilty for not living up to what they labeled themselves as, and I've never seen the benefit in that.

I am married, and there are few things that mean less to my and my wife's relationship than that title. It isn't the glue that bonds us, and it would not be the glue that would keep us together if everything else fell apart. But enough other people think it is that we found not being married a huge inconvenience; society in general, and the government in particular, are heavily tilted toward engineering couples into marriage. We'd have been happy remaining unmarried the rest of our lives if everything weren't so constructed to engineer us into wedlock, but we also didn't want to be so financially penalized for not behaving.

So we're married, but there are few things that mean less to us; we were married in all practical purposes before we had the title. Getting the title was strictly pragmatic. If this is part of what is tearing marriage apart, so be it; perhaps it would be better if the institutions that stood so much on ceremony faded into insignificance, and we started focusing more on the things those ceremonies are meant to cement.