Don't most Christian wedding rituals use the terms "until death do us part" in the vows? I've always taken that to be understood that marriages terminate when one party dies, whether there's an afterlife or not.
As someone already pointed out, not the Mormons. If you get married in a Mormon temple by their designated authority, it's "for time and all eternity." Which then gives rise to all sorts of special cases for divorce, death of the spouse, and remarriage. And in contrast to some other religions, marriage is a
huge deal for Mormons, to the point where they really want to get involved in public policy debates over marriage. For a religion that fled to the West over their own peculiar ideas about marriage, they seem to want to impose a lot of restrictions on everyone else.
And how do they get around that part in the Bible that says that in heaven they neither marry nor are given in marriage? They retcon it to say that if you're not already married when you get to heaven, you can't get married when you're there. You have to meet the person (or people, since this is Mormonism) that you're going to marry here on Earth, marry them appropriately on Earth, and then it persists in the hereafter. Married before Joseph Smith saved the world? No, problem; Mormons have you covered. Two already-married people on Earth get married again as proxies for you, then you're good to go in the afterlife.
And yes, you get to keep having "spirit babies" in heaven with your spouse. I believe it really is canon doctrine that the way this happens is the way impregnation occurs among organisms. I have no idea how that's supposed to happen without a carnal body. And yes, the "family unit" is preserved in heaven, meaning your children on Earth are your children in heaven -- except that somehow they and
their children are also a "family unit" and have some sort of autonomy, and so forth and so on until it's turtles all the way down. Plus the Mormon concept of the hereafter could out-Dante Dante anyway for its convolutions. Some ex-Mormon told me that they solve the remarriage problem by allowing polygamy (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) in heaven, but I don't know if that's canon. It obviously doesn't work for a woman who remarries after her first husband dies. More corner cases.
I agree few people who model the afterlife as basically a continuation of this life have really thought things through. That was always the easy way to get Scorpion tied up in knots. And rightly so, because I'd say the problem has some gnarly -- if not inherent -- contradictions. Another ex-Mormon, one of my software guys, compared it to hacky software solutions. You start out with a reasonably simple, reasonably well directed code base. Then ten years later it's a hopeless buggy mess of add-ons,
ad hoc fixes, repurposed components, and special corner cases. Then it acquires the dreaded epithet, "Unmantainable." That's where I think a lot of theology ends up.
