Epimanes said:
Intimate conversation - creates romantic love
Recreational companionship - creates romantic love
Physical attractivness - initially creates attraction
Affection (non sexual) - creates romantic love
Sexual fulfillment - creates romantic love
Financial support
Family commitment
Openness and honesty
Admiration
Domestic support
Above are all desires, not needs. It may seem that I'm nitpicking on this but the distinction is important in cultural and historical context.
50 years ago, when my grandparents and almost all their peers were happily married, there was not all this talk of "needs" and "feelings." Had someone sat down with my utterly happy grandparents and started quizzing them about whether their "needs" were being met in their marriages, they would go look in the refrigerator, in the closet and for holes in the roof and answer, "yep, I guess they are."
Hyperconsumption gynoculture has semantically hobbled gender relations with all the "needs and feelings" talk over the last several decades. But note that all those "needs and feelings" only go one way for the most part, in favor of the female. Why? Because females are the consumption focus of almost all Western marketing, they have made 80% or more of the spending decisions since just after WW2, and gov/corp learned long ago that the best way to maintain incumbency/profits from an artificially healthy economy is to convince women that they "need" something that they don't have or that their lives are lacking in some way that attention to their "needs" can fix. Feminism is actually as much a creature of capitalism as socialism in this respect, which is why it arose to power almost unopposed, with many powerful backers behind the scenes, both corporate and Marxist.
Convince her she needs a 3000 square foot house instead of 1500, then 5000 after that, then mountains of garbage to fill it all up. Insure loans to get the sh-tball rolling so he can't claim inability to finance in the face of her irrational "needs." And so it goes for 50 years until the speedball addict economy collapses and just gives out, then the true perps try to misdirect the blame away from gynobureauculture, feminism and runaway govt towards the usual suspect "evil faceless Wall Street bankers" and hard to understand derivative pools and investments. I have over 25 years of industry experience and can describe -exactly- where the blame lies with clarity.
So it's no wonder that media, academia, gov choke reason out with all the needs/feelings BS. What's indisputable is that for all the attention to faux needs and self-indulgent feelings, we were demonstrably happier before. Irony.
Marriage as an institution has become a crucial linchpin in the whole scam, because people who can walk away from transparent cultural/political manipulation often do. Slaves to it via contracts for life can't. There's no debtor's prison any more, but the marriage contract does the job de facto in chaining men.
Sorry OP, my posts are topical within your thread. If you wanted to write your thoughts on marriage down without comment, start a journal, don't post on the net. And as far as me personally, thank god I've avoided the trap on several occasions before obtaining the wisdom to avoid it permanently. Most of my friends weren't so lucky. I also hear horror stories every week from my colleagues who are members of the domestic bar, so there's that too. Sure, I know some happily married people. I also know people who have drunk a 12 pack a day for more than 20 years with no ill effects.
Every young man today reading this forum needs to fully understand exactly what marriage is today, that it shares little with what it used to be, and is the equivalent of a piece of flypaper for men now.
Don't step on it.
