For all of my adult life, I have been of the philosophy that If a commitment is strong enough between two people, marriage only serves to announce and formalize that commitment, as well as formalize legal right and responsibilities of the individuals to each other. I am not against marriage, I just have never thought it was a complete necessity.
Twice in my life, I have been in a relationship where the next step would be marriage. The first time, the other person and I were in a committed relationship for several months. The idea of marriage had been discussed, but we had made no decision as yet, and placed ourselves under no pressure to do so. We felt that a long-term committed relationship would work just fine for us. An unexpected pregnancy gave us a reason consider marriage seriously, and we decided to go through with a marriage. At about 10 weeks, there was a miscarriage. In retrospect, I’m not sure whether that was the event that caused the downward spiral of the relationship. We eventually decided that although the idea of marriage would seem appropriate to us with a child involved, the lack of that incentive actually left us both with little desire to marry. We cancelled the wedding, and eventually split up.
The second instance, my current wife and I had been serious about each other for several months, and then started talking about if there should be a next step. She said she wanted to be married, and I had no problem with that, since we felt we could maintain that commitment with marriage or not.
If she had wanted to get married, I feel sure that we would be celebrating our committed relationship every year anyway.