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You can become so focused on one purpose for something that you fail to see all the myriad other purposes.

Marriage, regardless of children, is the great stabilizing influence on men. Without it we would sink into anarchy in a short span of time. While it is true that if every marriage produced no children our society would cease to exist it is not true that children are the only reason for marriage.

Face it, we could produce children just through rape or hired surrogates if we so desired. But these things do not stabilize man. Only a family and the desire to provide for his own wife (and perhaps children) lends the stability required for society to exist. This I believe is the real primary purpose for marriage

Genesis 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

The first biblical mention of marriage doesn't say anything about children. We need to be married because we are incomplete without each other.

Looking at marriage as being solely for the production of children greatly cheapens it.

You are making up and projecting nonsense uncharitably. The primary purpose of marriage is children. If it civilizes men - and women - it is because it dedicates both to something more important than themselves. And no, men left alone do not become beasts. Hermit saints are not beasts, monks are not beasts. It is quite completely up to the individual involved. I don't recognize the "we" of your digusting hypothetical. There are people in the modern world, right now, who will do anything and say anything rather than recognize children as the primary purpose of marriage. That's because they hate marriage and are seeking to destroy it. Sliding its normal meaning away from its core to a romantically idealized periphery, is just a preliminary to supplanting that core with a decidedly unromantic and non-ideal periphery. Which is a mere mockery of marriage.

Some good points, but as a father of a mere four year old, you're missing something: Children don't stay children for long. Most couples will spend a lot more time in their empty nest than they did with children. With two grown, and the youngest two now in those teen and tween years where they need parents less and less, I'm accutely aware of the transition. Even the grandchild that's so prominant in my profile will be grown and out of her parents house before I'm even of retirement age.

So, you are absolutely right, and JasonC is absolutely wrong. You're going to need a whole lot more than a desire to have children to have a sucessful marriage, because children are just one facet of a marriage, and in truth, not even a necessary facet. There have been plenty of good, but infertile marriages.