#SHE DESTROYED THE WORLD SO SHE WOULDN'T HAVE TO KILL HIM #she only agreed to setting things back if he married her
At first, she broke apart time and space to look for another way so she wouldn't have to kill him. Yes...at first.
But she did not agree to set things back if he married her.
River did not force the Doctor's hand in marriage. I cannot impress upon that (unfortunately popular) notion enough.
"River, there's no other way!"
"I didn't say there was, Sweetie."
As implied by the beard the Doctor has grown, enough time has passed by in that timeline. Enough time for young (!!) River to have realized that there was indeed no other way to proceed except for her to kill the Doctor.
So mind made up, she has the Doctor brought to Pyramid HQ. All that was left for her to do before she had to kill him was to impress upon him that he is loved "by so many and so much, and by no one more than her" because he was so ready to die believing that no one really cares and that he can just disappear quietly into the shadows.
River broke apart time and space to dispel that notion.
There was absolutely no need for them to get married. AT. ALL.
It was the Doctor's choice. He chose to marry her.
That moment when the Doctor found the answers to the how's and the why's and the what's he'd been asking since he found out he married this time-travelling archeologist sometime in his future.
He could have just simply touched her wrist. That was all it took. A simple touch to restore the broken timelines.
But no, that was the penultimate part of the path he'd started from the moment he first remembered meeting her. The moment he knew was coming since that fateful day in the Library.
A path he used to run hard and fast away from because he knew how it would end. He saw how it would end.
But with the 200+ years spent running across time and space with River, he began running to her instead.
That moment on the top of a pyramid with the timey-wimey beacon River built (I'm the Child of the TARDIS. I understand the physics.) surrounded by billions of lights in the sky that weren't actually solar flares but everyone who came to heed River's distress call to help save the Doctor.
You can see the moment he makes the decision to marry River. The name-giving moment may not have happened then but it definitely happened. My favorite headcanon is that the name wasn't actually a word but more of like a higher dimension thing? I read a fic about it and loved the idea. It would explain the Doctor's flabbergasted look when River supposedly whispered his name in the Library. "She's a human (right?) who's an archeologist who somehow was able to 'relay' my name. Only Time Lords could do that. Or not. Maybe? Dunno."
That's also the first time the Doctor shows River to trust that he always has a plan â whether it's a bit foolhardy, spur of the moment, he still always manages to drum up a plan. We see that firm trust in action in previous episodes â where River jumps out of tall buildings and spaceships, when she introduces him to Father Octavian as someone equivalent (-ish) to an army (or even better). All that trust has to start somewhere and it starts there on top of that pyramid in a universe that is breaking apart.
While the Tesselecta Doctor is stoic and serious, the actual Doctor stowed away inside it is still his same carefree, child-like self.
He now asks for her help and her trust and with that wonderful, wonderful kiss, the universe is back to what it once was with River ending up in prison hardly unable to recall the event that led her there and the Doctor coming for her on her first night to take her out on her first post-wedding date.
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