Immediate respect
At 21 when I said, "my wife", most people that I met responded with a lot more respect for the relationship than they would if I had said "my girlfriend", "my live-in girlfriend", etc. Despite my age, people recognized and reacted to the label.
I admit that some of the respect is that people would see the ring and not hit on us. (Random note: gays seem less deterred by a ring than heterosexuals. I've been told that that is because a lot of gays get married so to avoid discrimination, but intend all along to continue acting gay.) As someone who didn't want to deal with being hit on, it was nice to reduce that stress. Nothing there about feeling that she was chaste or not chaste. It just reduced the amount of stress, and is nice to have constant recognition that the world knows that I am in a committed relationship.
Similarly the label had an emotional impact on me. The level of commitment with marriage is much higher, and I felt myself react to that. One change was that this allowed me to engage on more difficult levels because I worried less about the other person leaving and more about the relationship.
A note that I should make. I come from a family that regards marriage less seriously than most do. First of all I wasn't raised to be particularly religious. Second, many close relatives have gone through multiple marriages, and cynically view them as temporary. Third, more than a couple of relatives viewed my marriage as temporary.
But even with a background that I would have thought would make me not react to being married, I had a surprisingly strong reaction.
Cheers,
Ben
