That's great you can marry people. I didn't know that. That gives a nice Rune Factory/Harvest Moon touch to the game.
Don't get too excited. It's pretty badly implemented. You have to learn from a cleric in Riften that marriage is
possible and is performed there. You buy a charm that you wear, and certain NPCs in the game will ask you if you want to hook up (sometimes you have to do a quest for them first. Mine did). Then all of a sudden, they love your character and you're (happily?) married. From that moment onwards, their only role in your character's life (assuming you didn't pick a battle character, which you can bring along with you into combat) is to sit around at home; be a shopkeeper in their spare time; and supply you with a 15% skill learn boost for 8 hours after you sleep in your bed at home.
Harvest Moon's romance system is goofy and almost insultingly stereotypical with how you just dump gifts on characters until they like you, but it comes off a
lot better than this.
As for the crashes, I think it should be expected by now that Bethesda games are going to crash. Its just a fact of life, and you have to learn to deal with it. But that doesn't mean these games don't deserve high marks despite that. You seem to be played it a lot which means you must be enjoying it... if you hated the game these crashes would make you break the disc in half and throw it in the trash. But you keep on playing and rebooting because you are having a good time with it... and that's why people rate it highly in spite of the problems.
When it
works, I do really like the game. I've put well over 70 hours into the game, and I'll probably put at least 70 hours
more into it before I'm done with it. But I can tell you this: if Bethesda doesn't fix these massive instability problems in the very near future, when I've done all I can stand to do in that game I'm trading it in. I won't be buying any DLC, and they can deal with a used copy out in the marketplace someone can pay Gamestop for instead of them.
What's really irritating about these PS3 issues is that it's obvious Bethesda
and Sony never did any deep-layer testing with this game. And if they did, they just threw up their hands and said "well, it's a Bethesda game and we don't want Microsoft to basically have exclusivity, so we'll just let the consumer deal with it." All these crashes and other such glitches occur the further you get into the game and the larger your save file gets. I can laugh at some of the goofy things I've seen like levitating mammoths and NPCs that fly magnetically through the air to where they're supposed to go.
But I draw the line at crashes. If a quest breaks, you can reload an old save. If a goofy physics or graphical glitch happens, you can just look past it. But a crash is a total unrecoverable systems failure, and they're just getting
more frequent the longer I play the game. They're not even triggering only at Loading Screens anymore, as they also occur now if I spend too much time (i.e. more than 15 seconds) scrolling through the Perk trees, or if I pull up the menu sometimes. I'm
really getting concerned now that these crashes (especially because they're creating corrupted files) are going to have lasting damage on my PS3's hard drive. And I just
know this game will find a way to screw me over and corrupt
all my files just as I'm on the verge of a well-deserved Platinum.
That said, maybe you should have played it on PC (or 360) instead. The PS3 is probably the least stable platform for this particular game.
I don't have a PC that can run it, and the only games I like playing on PC are P&C Adventures and RTS games. As for my 360, that's reserved for Microsoft exclusives and pretty much nothing else.