What is the importance of marriage?

God's creative work was not complete until He made woman. And then marriage and family became the basis of society, the central organizing unit. God could have made woman from the dust of the ground as He had made man. God chose, however, to make her from the man's flesh and bone. In doing so, God illustrated that in marriage man and woman symbolically become one flesh.

Answer

Marriage is a foundation of any civilized society from which springs property rights, inheritance rights and legal responsibility which are all civil legal rights. In ancient times, marriage created a unit and that unit was the man. Within that scheme women had no legal existence. Modern societies no longer adhere to that mode of thinking. Wives and husbands each have equal legal rights in the modern Western World.