Marriott will allow any two persons to "combine" their points for an award.

As for options for the OP:

1. If you live in a country that has a Marriott branded CC, you should be able to get some nice bonus points for signing up (up to 50K points plus a free night cert.) In the US, there are a couple of different "brands" of CCs and you should be able to get the sign-up bonus on all of them. In the past I was able to get the sign up bonus for the base personal Marriott Visa, the Premier personal Marriott Visa and the business Marriott Visa.

2. If you buy items online, you might look at using Marriott's portal to buy items through. I do believe you can some decent points for items you were going to buy anyway.

3. If you are traveling, try to move a night or two to a Marriott. It won't take long to build up your needed points doing that. And if you are going to be paying to stay somewhere anyway, you aren't out any extra money.