If there’s one thing that we can all agree upon, whatever our religious point of view, it’s that there’s nothing worse than people knocking on your door and trying to talk to you about Jesus, right? Whether you’re religious or not, chances are that you have your own viewpoint and don’t want people bursting into your life and trying to convince you to change your mind. Religion is a personal thing for most people and an uninvited home visit can feel intrusive. It’s not surprising that most people seem to have their own technique for getting rid of such unwelcome visitors.

But I’m always kind to religious door knockers. That’s in spite of being very comfortably non-religious. I generally explain my position, but if at all possible say that they’re welcome to come in for a chat. If you don’t want to talk to religious door knockers, I would urge you to be polite, even to thank them for offering to share their religion with you. Perhaps take a copy of the Watchtower (or any alternative literature that is offered). Why? Because theirs is the right way to proselytise. Many people want to share their philosophical point of view and with many religions there is something of a duty to do it. If you genuinely believe that you are giving someone a chance at eternal life, or of avoiding eternal damnation, it’s a pretty decent thing to do. But the right way to do it is to approach adults and to offer them a chance to hear what you have to say. They can always say no.

This is in contrast to the wrong way to do it: take over the local school and force your beliefs onto other people’s children. Perhaps work your way into the legal system or become a part of the government in order to bind your beliefs into everyone else’s lives. That would be a cynical and unreasonable way to share your beliefs.

If you believe, as I do, in secularism – the freedom to hold whatever religious viewpoint you choose – then it follows that you should support the freedom of others to share their religion. Of course, you are free to reject what they are offering, but if you take out your distaste for proselytising primarily on those who do it in the right way, you are favouring those who do it in the wrong way. Will talking to Witnesses or Latter Day Saints make your local school any more secular? Hardly. But by supporting an effort to make this outlet for the need to share a pleasant option, you will in some small way be contributing to a truly secular society. As long as the established church knows that the general public is less bothered by vicars and priests descending directly upon their children in school than by the occasional inconvenience of a couple of old ladies at the door, it has every incentive to resist the secular education system that most people favour.

A couple of months ago I was interested to read a Guardian Comment is Free piece by the marvellous Tauriq Moosa, which proposed that marriage no longer makes sense. Although I have a lot of time for his point of view on most things, I think he’s wrong in this case – and it’s fairly easy to explain why if we reframe the argument somewhat: myths aside, what IS good about marriage?

As a gut instinct, I have little time for tradition – at least as a justification for doing anything that you wouldn’t want to do without it. But for a lot of things in life, it is very useful; it can provide a generally recognisable framework or a default mode of behaviour, which can be helpful socially. Starting with something with which people are familiar and moulding it for your own purposes will usually give you a head start when you want to make some kind of statement. While I would never suggest getting married purely to appease some societal or family pressure, it is very useful to ride the wave of tradition if it suits you. For those of us who have found someone that we really love who we intend to spend the rest of our life with, a handy prefabricated arrangement into which that relationship can be categorised can be really rather nice; that warm and pleasant feeling of being a part of a tradition, practising a part of your culture and repeating something that has been done for so long before is a fulfilling thing. It’s not surprising that so many completely irreligious couples choose to marry in religious settings such as churches: the pleasant building alone is a part of it, but the feeling of being a part of something ancient brings a feeling of gravitas to the occasion. People have been gathering together their communities and celebrating their pairing off for a life together for millennia – it’s still a nice thing to do, so why stop now?

For those people who are religious, there are typically various god-related elements that make marriage special for them. If they choose to marry for these reasons and it makes them happy, where’s the problem? The various versions of marriage can coexist.

Of course, marriage changes very little in reality; unless you are a member of that tiny, possibly slightly crazy group of people who reserve certain intimacies for married life, you will typically return from your honeymoon somewhat (or quite considerably) poorer and with a lot of mismatched plates that you don’t need – but you will still be the same couple with the same family and friends. And yet… something does change. There is a difference. Perhaps it’s all motivated by tradition, prejudice one might even say, but having a wife/husband is different from having a girlfriend/boyfriend. Whether legitimately or otherwise, you feel in some small way more a part of society. Your partner’s family treat you a little differently. I suppose you feel a bit more grown up. Of course, this undoubtedly doesn’t apply to everyone, but it seems common. Is all of this a bit silly? Well, no; however little it may mean in the scheme of things, you have made a declaration to people around you, a statement of your intentions as a couple. That’s not something that tends to happen, otherwise.

And sometimes that display to those around you is important. If there are simmering misgivings about your partner from your family or friends, marriage can be a useful line in the sand. It can be a radical statement when you marry into a different religion or class, but it’s only because of that weight of history, tradition and the associated legal bindings that it means more than a couple of signatures on a piece of paper.

And on top of all of this, it’s an excellent excuse to buy all of your friends and family a pint!

What should change are the bad things about marriage; obviously the really nasty things like child marriages and forced marriages should be cracked down upon hard. Those are very serious human rights problems, but we don’t need to blame marriage itself for them. Any kind of coercion in relationships is clearly horrible and I can only feel for people who live in any situation where such a thing is considered normal and acceptable. Society should not force people to marry or assume that they will. Those who choose to marry should not have to get themselves into colossal amounts of debt, buy overpriced blood diamonds or misrepresent their beliefs or intentions to satisfy anyone else. Undeserved legal rights should be repealed. And the so-called “traditional” marriage, alluded to above, should be expanded to include as many different variations of the wholesome, Disney fairytale version as can be reasonably included in the definition; it should go beyond gay marriage into truly genderless marriage where two – or, why not, more than two – people can marry without their biological history being a factor. And we should be able to do it where we like and with whatever religious or pseudo-religious elements we want included within it. Other elements such as sexual fidelity should be a matter for those in the relationship. And perhaps a better system of alternatives to marriage needs to made more readily available to cover people with entirely different arrangements, too.

Let’s open it up to everyone, but demand it of no one. Then it can be the happy thing, for anyone who wants it, that it is for me and (she assures me), my lovely wife.