Final answer:
The question addresses how marriage meets the individual needs of spouses, emphasizing emotional support, social needs, and shared investments within the social institution of marriage.
Step-by-step explanation:
The question relates to the ways in which marriage fulfills the individual needs of the spouses and contributes to their well-being. Positive relationships, including those within a marriage, are essential to individual well-being. Marriage, in this sense, can be seen as a social institution that meets various emotional and social needs such as companionship, emotional support, and social legitimacy.
Marriages often bring together not only individuals but also their skills, traditions, and social networks, creating a new family unit with shared investments and responsibilities. While the addition of children to a marriage introduces financial and emotional stress, it also has the potential to positively affect parental well-being in the long term. Marriage serves a variety of functions, such as creating a stable socio-economic household for nurturing offspring and reducing competition for mates, which are shaped by societal norms and rules like endogamy and exogamy.