[x]

Could be. But your friend is bucking generations of Western thinking. If you build a society on individualism, people are going to look for individual ways of fulfillment, rather than to family or tradition.

But shouldn't an individualistic free market society accept that? I'm not saying yes to gay marriage, just asking can you really toss romance and the individual pursuit of happiness overboard when our whole civilization has embraced it for at least two or three generations, if not longer?

Of course, you could look at this in a glass half-full way. It took how many millennia before we reached this point? Marriage had a pretty long run. Maybe the surprise is that it lasted as long as it did.

[Olog-hai]

Hmm? Traditional marriage is collectivist versus some differing notion of “individualism”? I don’t want to be confused on this point.