McGrath of Harlow said:

People always talk as if weddings were carried out by the person officiating - the priest or the registar or the Captain of the ship or whatever. In fact that person is really just a special kind of witness to a ceremony which is actually carried out by the people getting married.

Well, there are two ways to look at marriage, from the inside out and the outside in.

The two people involved can (and should) decide and ordain their mutual commmitment, and can publish it to the world. This is the personal-relations view of marriage. However, that decision is private and subjective, and society needs something objective to look to.

The society has a role here, in how it views and treats the people involved. This is, was, always has been true. This is the social- institution view or function of marriage. This involves such things as tax status, social status as it will be recognized by others, Social Security status, and lots of other things.

Under the common law, anyone (understood at that time as any man and woman not already married and not within the proscribed degree of consanguinity, etc.,)could decide that they were married, declare it to the society around them, and they were in fact married under that legal regime. As society grew more complex, this function of the common law was abolished (in most or I think all states), and a legal set of objective requirements was set up in order to qualify a relationship as marriage, including licenses and officiation (or at least official witnessing) by certain kinds of persons, who would certify for the public record that John X and Jane Y, pursuant to license, were publicly joined. This record served the public's interest in regularity of inheritance, prevention (or at least discouragement) of bigamy, prevention of incestuous unions, assurance of legitimacy of offspring, affecting tax status, and lots more.

While the officiating person doesn't do something that magically "creates" a marriage, from society's point of view a marriage doesn't exist unless it is properly spread of record according to society's rules.

I remember teasing my bride, 43 years ago, by saying, "Aha! I done you in, gal! You think we got married, but I'll tell you, now that I've had my way of you, that preacher didn't have a permit to perform marriage ceremonies!" Which was true enough, but then neither does any other preacher or judge or whatever. Their mere status (as preacher, registrar, judge, ship captain at sea) is sufficient to establish their ability to certify to the fact that the couple presented themselves publicly as man and wife. The ceremony gets dressed up in ritual, sometimes, which makes it appear that the officiating person waved a wand, so to speak, and brought about the married state, but it ain't so.

You know, when I started to write this post I thought I was disagreeing with McGrath, but I see that all I've done was extend his comments. I think.

Dave Oesterreich