Welcome to the Matthiaship Barker podcast. My name is Matthias. I'm a psychotherapist from

Spokane, Washington, and this podcast is about mental health and moving towards what's meaningful,

even despite hardship. Today we're talking about marriage. And you know, I remember a couple

weeks ago, I talked about how I get the most flack when I talk about babies and having children,

why having children is a good thing. And I get a lot of negative messages when I talk about that.

Marriage is another one of those things. I get so much negative feedback. What I talk about marriage

because, well, it's not really a mystery. I just think our deepest wounds in life come from

the most intertwined and personal relationships we have. And so whether that's parents that got

divorced, whether that's a marriage that you were in or a relationship that you want to be in,

there's just so much writing on marriage in our culture. And there's a few different answers

about how to address that. One would be to devalue marriage and just kind of be like, hey, it's

we can just kind of be in these long-term, you know, monogamous polyamorous relationships. And

as long as everything's consensual, meeting everyone's needs, like everything's just fine, you know,

like people can have just as positive outcomes. If they just are committed to each other for as

long as it's beneficial, you know, why do we have to get all legal with it and sign up, you know,

for lifelong commitments when I don't even know who you're going to be in 10 years. And so I just

think our culture is suspicious of that proposition. And so what I want to do is just give a little

bit of, I don't know, my opinion, my view on why I think marriage is still beneficial and a pretty

great idea. And so I hope you enjoy.

Why get married?

You know, I think a lot of people grow up with parents who didn't make marriage look very

desirable, right? Like there's a lot of contention, there's a lot of arguing, there's a lot of

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