505 - Do We Need to Get Married Really?
The pros and cons of marriage
Marriage is often disparaged in the non-monogamous community, but it does have its perks. On the other hand, how necessary is marriage really? We’ll be exploring some of the pros and cons of marriage in this episode.
The case for marriage
Financial reasons:
Possibility of a lower tax rate with combined incomes, higher standard deductions.
Combined incomes = more spending power and more opportunities.
A married couple can give away twice as much money as single taxpayers without triggering federal gift and estate taxes.
Married couples have high standard deductions on their taxes.
Higher spousal IRA contributions - spouses can contribute to each other’s IRAs if one of them is not earning a paycheck.
If you own a home with your spouse, you may be able to pocket more of the proceeds from the sale of your property — up to twice as much. Personal residence exemption from the gain of the sale.
You can qualify for your spouse’s social security benefits if you don’t have a job when you turn 62.
Relational reasons:
Among married and cohabiting adults, love is cited more than any other reason for why they decided to get married or to move in with their partner: 90% of those who are married and 73% of those living with a partner say love was a major factor in their decision. Majorities in both groups also cite companionship as a major reason why they decided to get married (66%) or to move in with their partner (61%), and 63% of those who are married say they wanted to make a formal commitment.
Married people are seen as more “adult” by their peers and family members.
Often a spouse is seen as another family member rather than someone who the person is just dating. Plus ones and invitations to family gatherings are more likely to be extended to a spouse.
Things like religion and other value systems may be a reason why many people choose to get married.
Practical reasons:
Raising children with a partner is simply easier than raising a child alone (of course if there are more than two adults, this is even better).
Marriage generally allows for more financial stability than being single.
Generally there are many more benefits for spouses when it comes to things like health insurance. Some people genuinely need access to good health insurance and wouldn’t have it unless they were married. Leave benefits are also awarded if your spouse is ill or if someone in their family passes away.
Spouses get legal decision making benefits as next of kin, power of attorney, etc. If you or your spouse is ill, it is much easier to be able to see them in a hospital than if you were just a friend or not married.
Finally there are many many research studies out there that say there are health benefits to being married. We don’t always take those at 100% face value, but there is something to be said for the data that being in a committed, long-term relationship contributes to some people living longer and being happier than their single counterparts.
The case against marriage
You can do most of the things married people get to do without ever needing to get married like have kids, live together, and even entangle finances and health insurance.
Divorce rates continue to stay around 40-50% and getting divorced is difficult and costly, no matter how amicable it is.
Marriage still isn’t legal for queer people in many, many countries so it may not even be an option where you live. Additionally, there is even an ever increasing threat to gay marriage in the United States.
Marriage is rooted in patriarchal and heteronormative institutions, making it unappealing for many people.
People get into marriage without looking at divorce laws - entering into a legal contract that they haven’t fully understood.
If you are non-monogamous, marriage may not be something you want to partake in. We know of many non-monogamous individuals who are married and have chosen to divorce to make their relationship less intrinsically hierarchical. Marriage and benefits still only are available to one person at a time in the United States.
The vast majority of Americans think it’s acceptable for an unmarried couple to live together. Most Americans (69%) say cohabitation is acceptable even if the couple doesn’t plan to get married, while another 16% say it’s acceptable, but only if the couple plans to marry; 14% say this is never acceptable.
While many Americans see societal benefits in marriage generally, when asked specifically about raising children, a majority (59%) says that couples who are living together but not married can raise children just as well as married couples. Four-in-ten say married couples do a better job of raising children than couples living together but not married.
More practical reasons come into play to a greater degree for cohabiting adults than for those who are married. About four-in-ten cohabiting adults say moving in with their partner made sense financially (38% say this was a major reason why they decided to move in together) or that it was convenient (37%). Far smaller shares of married adults.
Transcript
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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about marriage, why you might want to do it, why you might not want to do it, as well as some special considerations for people who are non-monogamous and already married or who are thinking about getting married or who are thinking about opening up their marriage, any variation of that.
We're going to be talking about marriage in general, unpacking what this is all about. Why do we feel the way we do about marriage? We've all got a lot of stuff we bring to this personally. We'll go through some of that as well.
If marriage is something you've ever thought about, maybe considering in your life, then this is an episode for you. Also, if you're interested in learning about some of our communication tools that we reference on this show, you can check out our book, Multiamory Essential Tools for Modern Relationships, to help you have the healthiest relationship, whether you're married or not. You can get information about that at multiamory.com/book or wherever you buy books.
Emily: Wow, marriage, it is all over the place. That's one of the reasons why I really wanted to discuss this today. Also, just the fact that in the last few months, I've been bombarded with marriage and normative, I guess, ideals and people saying things like, that's what you should do. Assuming that maybe I would want to get married someday. I went to a wedding, for instance, with one of my partners where people were asking, oh, well, because you're a person of a certain age, are you going to accelerate this relationship more quickly? Maybe progress up the relationship escalator more quickly because you're in your late 30s now, and that's just something that you should be doing.
Jase: I would bet none of them used the term relationship escalator or person of a certain age.
Emily: Well, they didn't imply that, though.
Dedeker: Hold on, hold on. If you go to a wedding, and if that wedding is populated by people of a certain older age. I feel like they are legally obligated to say to people of a certain younger age, "When's your turn? Who's next?" There's a legal obligation. Not a lot of people know about this, but that is why they will say it every single time without fail.
Emily: You're probably right, Dedeker, that that is a legal obligation. Recently, I was working a big event for a number of weeks. Maybe you saw it on my Instagram. I was working for a credit card company with a bunch of very high-powered executives. It's amazing that if you were a person of a certain age with a certain type of job, where you're making quite a bit of money, that also seems like the thing that you're going to be doing, getting married and also having kids.
It kind of screwed with me a little bit. It made me wonder and question my own life choices, because I feel like so non-normative at times. It made me definitely question and wonder, am I doing the right thing here by not wanting those things necessarily in the capacity that some people do? This is what everybody does. You are a person who should be wanting those things as well. Somebody even went so far as to say people who are young these days only care about themselves. They're not growing up--
Dedeker: Wait, somebody said that to you?
Emily: They were saying it to someone else, and I was in the vicinity-
Dedeker: In your vicinity.
Emily: -because I always had to be nearby. That was that kind of job .
Jase: So you were eavesdropping for two weeks?
Emily: Well, I could not because the room that we were in was teeny weeny. The person was basically saying that kids these days aren't getting married, and they're not having children, and they need to just grow up and do those things. They're acting selfish because they're not getting married and having kids. That really rubbed me the wrong way because I don't agree with that. It also made me stop and be like, "Am I selfish?"
Dedeker: Were you like, "Well, if you lower the interest rate of my credit card, maybe I'll have more disposable income to have, say, a wedding or have children." If that's what I want.
Emily: Yes. Not wrong. I didn't say that, but I should have. There you go. What do you two think about this subject? Just getting married in general, being normative in general in this way that seems to be prescribed for everyone. We're all just taught at a young age that this is the thing that we should be doing. If you go against that grain, it could be really challenging.
Jase: I do think it's really interesting because I've definitely had conversations with people over the last several years about marriage and about commitment because those things often come up if you talk about non-monogamy or polyamory, kind of these like, well, but what about commitment? What about marriage? Is it just being selfish? Is it just wanting to have your cake and eat it, too? Some of these things we've talked about before. I always like to say, "What's the point of having cake if you're not going to eat it?" Aside from that, I do think that is an interesting and maybe a bit surprising perspective that to equate not getting married or not having kids with being selfish.
In one way, if we were to say that if we all agreed that your obligation to society is to have kids and keep the population increasing, and then if you decided not to do that, because that sounds like a lot of work, yes, I guess if you're assuming those things, sure, that's selfish. To say like, sure, everyone in this group project is working, but I'm not going to work. I'll just have fun instead. I could see that. That sounds like selfishness, but it's based on this assumption that that's what we all should be doing and that the world is better if we're all doing that. That's the part that I think is harder for people to question, or at least is less common for people to question. Why is that normal? Why is that what you should do?
That's, I think, a little bit of what we're going to get into in this episode, but it's a hard one because if you ask people, they'll get very defensive about that question if they haven't already thought about it. They'll be like, "What do you mean? Why?" They'll try to come up with stuff. One of the ones I've heard recently about marriage is this idea that, well, if you're not married, then as soon as anything goes wrong, you can just break up and leave this person. There's sort of no commitment there. You're not really seriously committing to trying to make this relationship work.
I think it's a little bit of a weak argument, and it's based in some assumptions about what keeps people in relationships. It's interesting, though, that that is something that comes up when people try to think of, why is marriage important to me when they've maybe never thought about that before, or at least not critically. That's like one of the reasons I see people reach for is this like, oh, well, it's, you're committing to someone else, even when things are hard. Assuming that when people date without being married, they're not doing that.
Emily: How about you, Dedeker?
Dedeker: Yes, for me, this very much relates to how normative or non-normative you are seems to often change depending on the room that you're in.
Emily: It's very true.
Dedeker: The example that I often cite for people is that when I am around kinky people, I am by far usually the most vanilla, like boring-est person in the room. Then when I'm around my more normie friends, I am the weirdo because I'm non-monogamous. Also, a very knowledgeable about kink and this whole culture. By default, I'm the weirdest person. I think the same thing happens with the normativeness of marriage to a certain extent, where I do have a lot of married couple friends who got married young and they've been having kids and just doing the whole very normie thing for a long time. Then I feel like a weirdo, but then in other spaces, I feel like less of a weirdo when I'm around all my friends who are not married or haven't been married for years or don't intend to get married and things like that.
Emily: For sure. I think that's a very good point and something that would be good for me to realize because I also was in this situation with a very specific group of people that pretty much all worked for these like high-powered companies and that is probably going to attract a certain amount of normalcy more than potentially like a tech job might, maybe.
Dedeker: I don't know though. We'll get into this more later, but it's like marriage is this social marker. I think especially for men of, oh, yes, you're normal and you're dependable and you're trustable and we can trust you with responsibility more so than like a single man in the workplace might get.
Emily: That's true, but it's amazing how many of those men were also talking about like, oh, yes, I can't wait to get away from my wife for the weekend. I heard that a lot too.
Jase: Sure. Yes.
Dedeker: Oh, yes, the classic.
Jase: Absolutely. The old ball and chain.
Emily: Indeed. Yes.
Jase: There's a real contradiction that can happen there for sure.
Emily: Oh, yes. Let's dive in a little bit and talk first about why somebody might want to get married because there's a lot of research out there, a lot of different statistics and polls and things that are done on married people and I think the government, not to get too anti-establishment or whatever here but I do think that the government really wants us to get married or somebody like out there, society at large is saying, let's get married people, let's do it. The Pew Research Center found that 53% of US adults aged 18 and older are married and that's down from 58% in 1995. That woman who said it was selfish, she is right that it is down now in terms of younger people not maybe getting married as people used to.
Dedeker: Okay, but that doesn't mean that it's selfish. false equivalency.
Emily: I agree.
Jase: Right, false equivalency.
Emily: I'm not saying that she's right about that, but I am saying that she's correct that people are getting married less now. Over the same amount of time, Americans who are cohabiting, that is risen from 3% to 7% and today 18% of adults younger than 30 are married compared with 31% in 1995. That's a big decrease. Among adults ages 30 to 49 and those 50 and older, 62% are married down somewhat from 1995 when marriage rates in these age groups were 68% and 65%.
Jase: Okay. A few percentage points down in those but that primarily in this youngest age group, there's significantly fewer people being married but a significant-ish increase in the amount of people who are cohabiting without being married.
Emily: That's true.
Jase: What's interesting is when you look at those numbers, so we went from 58% of adults, 18 and older, being married in '95 down to 53%, that's, what, a 5% difference?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Then we have cohabiting going from 3% up to 7% which is a 4% increase. It seems to imply that we've almost corrected by the same amount, like maybe these people who would've gotten married before are now just cohabiting instead without getting remarried.
Emily: There you go.
Jase: Because we had a 5% decrease in one and a 4% increase in the other, it's almost like those might be balancing each other out.
Emily: Maybe. Among adults ages 18 to 44, the share who have ever cohabited, which is 59% is now larger than the share who have ever been married and that's 50%. That makes sense to me. People are choosing to cohabit before getting married and they may wait to get married probably a lot longer than they used to.
Dedeker: You know what's so interesting in my Christian upbringing? Living together before you were married was so demonized.
Emily: Yes, not okay.
Dedeker: Well, so they would trot out this research and I don't remember where this research comes from, so I'm just completely pulling this out of the air but they would always cite this research that shows that when people live together before they get married, they're less likely to get married. They're more likely to break up and I do think it's legitimate research because I'm like, yes, you live with someone and then you realize what their cleaning habits are like and what it's like to be around them all the time and so that's probably a good thing that then you decided to not get married to them.
Emily: That's really funny and interesting to me that they're like, so don't live together because then you won't get married.
Dedeker: Exactly.
Jase: Yes. Growing up, I heard a similar study but different, and again, don't know where this is coming from. I'm pulling this straight out of my butt and that is that people who lived together before getting married were more likely to break up, meaning more likely to get divorced. Again, have no idea what the source was on that or if that was true, but that's the one I remember hearing as a kid.
Maybe it was actually breakup but my parents interpreted that to me, oh, that must mean they got divorced rather than they broke up before they got married. I'm not sure, but it is another interesting example of if the assumption is that the good outcome is getting married and staying married, then yes, you could look at that and go, "This is a bad thing." People are living together sooner and they're more likely to break up before they get married. Therefore, that's bad. If we've pre-agreed-
Emily: That marriage is good.
Jase: -the good outcome is getting married and staying married. I think that's what's so core to a lot of this is based around these assumptions of what is good, what is the right thing to do and that's the hardest part to unpack. I think that's just something to keep in mind as we look at all of this of like what might be those assumptions going on in the researchers or the respondents or anyone involved in these studies.
Emily: Well, those two statistics are very different than a decade ago when 54% of adults in this age group had ever cohabited and then 60% had ever married, so it switched a little bit. Now many more people are just cohabiting, like you said, as opposed to getting married, and a decade ago that wasn't the case.
Jase: To be honest, the fact that in the '90s it was still 54% seems a lot higher than my Christian upbringing would've led me to believe was normal. That's still a majority of people.
Emily: Again, it's the circles in which you run, as opposed to maybe what society at large was doing at that time in these more conservative Christian circles doing that living together before marriage wouldn't be seen as okay or maybe they were seeing that it was on an upward trend and they're like, "No, no, no, don't do that thing."
Although cohabitation is widely viewed as acceptable, the public still sees the societal benefits of marriage. A slight majority of Americans, 53% say that society is better off if couples who want to stay together long term eventually get married, while 46% say that society is just as well off if they decide not to marry. That's interesting, like society is better off whatever that means.
Jase: Right. That's what we're getting at here is there is this interesting-- just society says this is what you should do.
Dedeker: Was it a society of wedding planners?
Emily: That's a good point.
Dedeker: Was it a good society of event venues?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Again I would agree that society would be better off.
Emily: For sure.
Jase: I do want it to be clear though that this episode is not about saying, "Oh, well, society says you should get married, so you shouldn't." There are things that society says you should do that, at least for myself, I think are great and it's nice that we do them and I would say it's better when we do them.
Dedeker: Yes. Don't poop on the street.
Jase: Don't poop on the street is a good one. Not eating with your hands at a restaurant. It's like, yes, that doesn't really actually affect anyone. There's no objective way I could say that that is inherently worse than eating with silverware, but we've all agreed that's how we do it, and I do think it's nice to go along with that unless you have a good reason not to. Even just like saying, excuse me, or please and thank you, there's all sorts of things that we just have agreed upon as a society somehow, these are good things and not doing them is bad. There is a case for that.
I am not so convinced that marriage is that because of a lot of what we're going to get into later about all of the legal and financial ramifications of it and things that people will talk your ear off about, like it upholding patriarchy or that it being about ownership and capitalism or about colonialism or all sorts of things like that. Yes, it's got some bad history to it as well, but I just want to be clear that we're not saying just because everyone says you should do it means you shouldn't. This isn't that type of episode, although I love to have that discussion sometime too.
Emily: I think one of the big things that people cite about marriage is that it will make you happy overall, and I don't know if that's actually the case but there are a lot of different polls and stuff done on that very "fact," quote-unquote. For instance, the Institute for Family Studies now, okay, take that with a grain of salt please, but they did a fairly longitudinal study from 2008 to 2020. They collected data from basically 2.5 million US adults, mostly via phone surveys and then they collected an additional 56,000 surveys between March, 2020 and November, 2023.
They found that adults who were married are by far the happiest as measured by how they evaluate their current and future life. In 2023, married adults ages 25 to 50 are 17 percentage points more likely to be thriving than adults who never married up from 12 percentage points in 2009. I don't know what thriving is. That's going to be probably different for--
Jase: Is it just self-reporting is thriving?
Emily: I guess, yes, like I'm thriving because I'm married.
Dedeker: I guess I'd have to see how are they measuring that or how are they reporting that.
Jase: Also, what's the order of the questions?
Emily: That's true. All of the above.
Jase: This is always something I think is so important. If you imagine being asked the questions of how are you feeling about your life? How happy are you? How fulfilled do you feel? Then later saying, are you married? How long have you been married? Asking you those sorts of questions. Or if it's the other way around, if it went, are you married? Yes, and then immediately after, how happy are you? Would you say you're thriving? That I think there can be more of a like, "Oh, yes, I'm happy I'm married. I'm doing great." The ordering of how you ask questions does affect the outcome.
Emily: Absolutely. From a psychological standpoint, they found that people who are persistently happy or have attributes that tend to generate and sustain happiness such as character traits like agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness may be more likely to seek out marriage and maybe more likely to receive marriage proposals. They said marital status is not randomly assigned.
Jase: I do think that's really interesting.
Dedeker: That's pretty funny.
Jase: If we try to think about it on the one hand, sure, if you're a nicer person to get along with, I guess more people would want to marry you. Sure. I guess so. It's more likely someone dating you is going to go, "Yes, this person's nice and easy to get along with. Cool. I want to be married to them." I could also see that their traits specifically they mentioned agreeableness and conscientiousness, which depending how you measure those, conscientiousness, could mean I want to be very aware of what society expects of me and I'm going to conscientiously do those things. Maybe it also means you're more likely to score as being more conscientious if you also score as being more normative. Again, it depends how you measure those things. It's all very, very interesting.
Emily: Just to throw out there probably who was answering these questions in the study, the data showed that Republicans are significantly more likely to be thriving in their wellbeing compared to Democrats and independence by 9 to 12 percentage points. Likewise, people with a religious preference are more likely to be thriving than atheist, agnostics, and those with no preference by six percentage points yet controlling for these things does not lower the effect of marriage even though married people are more likely to be both Republican and religious and seen.
Dedeker: That tracks with what we can pick up from just looking at culture.
Emily: Yes, for sure. If you're a thriving Republican religious person who is married, like you've got life on lock is basically what I'm hearing from this poll.
Jase: Fascinating. Okay. A little bit later in this episode, we're going to get into some different studies that have some contradictory information but first, do we want to take a moment and just talk about what are some actual reasons why you might want to get married? If we're being real about it, what are some reasons you might want to get married?
Dedeker: I think the big one that everyone tosses out is like the financial benefits because ultimately this is an economic arrangement. Historically, has always been an economic arrangement, and it still is. I mean, this is true in many places around the globe but of course our focus is specifically on the United States where there's a possibility that you may end up in a lower tax bracket with your combined incomes, you get higher standard deductions, there's the reality that like when you have two incomes, you have more spending power and more opportunities.
Now, of course, people don't have to be married to have multiple incomes that they take advantage of and of course we have the whole joke about how, oh, monogamy in this economy that yes, we know that having multiple incomes means that you have access to more money straight up. When you're married, I think that the culture and the infrastructure expects the multiple incomes more so in the sense of thinking about like trying to get a mortgage for instance. The process is different if you're married with multiple incomes versus if you're a single person with just one income.
There's things like a married couple can donate about twice as much money as a single taxpayer without triggering federal gift taxes or estate taxes. Spouses can contribute to each other's IRA accounts if one of them is not earning a paycheck. If you own a home with a married partner, you can pocket more of the proceeds from the sale of your property and also you can qualify for your spouse's social security benefits if you don't have a job when you turn 62. That's just a tiny smattering of sum of the financial benefits that tend to come along with getting married. Of course, when we also start to get into things like raising children together, that also expands some of the logistical legal benefits that come along with that.
Jase: Aside from those financial reasons, there are also emotional relational reasons and that is, Dedeker mentioned for a long time, since its inception, marriage has been a financial contractual agreement between two people or two families to be honest but in our modern day we've now wrapped this whole love thing into it which it did not start with. No, I'm just saying, we added that later on. We added this love part. That was not part of the marriage contract in the beginning.
Within married and cohabiting adults, love is cited number one. It is the most common reason people cite for getting married or moving in with a partner. 90% of those who are married and 73% of those people living with a partner say love was a major factor in those decisions. That doesn't surprise me at all, but basically there is that part of like, oh, I love this person, so that's what I should do? What I want to do? Which is it? Is it that I think I should or is it that I want to?
Also, people mention that they're seen as more adult by their peers and their family members? This goes to what Emily was saying about the people at the wedding that she went to talking about it like, well, don't you want to do this when it comes to business, like Dedeker mentioned being seen as more stable, more trustworthy, those sorts of things, basically being seen as more adult, that one definitely comes up.
Another one is that your spouse is seen as another family member rather than just someone you're dating, so in the cases where you might not always assume that person you're dating would be your plus one or that you would always expect to get a plus one for them to events if you're married, well, then obviously, I get a plus one for them. It's like you get to take advantage of some of more of those assumptions, I guess, about people getting invited to things with you.
I would also extend this to say that your family or their family would then look at your partner as family more than they would otherwise of just, oh, this is someone that my child is dating or my brother is dating or something like that. That now it's, oh, this person is part of our family. Then, of course, religion and other value systems is a big part of why people get married.
Emily: There's a lot of practical reasons to get married, like raising kids. As a child of a single mother, I'm sure that having an additional person there would've been easier for sure. I did have my grandmother living with us for the majority of my life which was awesome and think if you had even more extended family or an additional partner or something like that there to help raise children, I do think that that's a reason why a lot of people choose to get married.
Jase: The family piece there is key too. In your case, it was a grandmother who's still like legally a family relation of yours.
Emily: That's true.
Jase: Whereas if it's a parent's partner that's not married to them, there are certain areas where it can be a little trickier or more difficult for them to support as much when it comes to like school things and hospital and legal stuff, so that's part of it because otherwise you could get that just with any group of people but there are certain things that become easier with marriage.
Emily: For sure. Marriage generally allows for more financial stability than being single. I do think that you are able to maybe benefit from a partner's finances in certain situations, but when you are married, you are legally tied to that person.
Dedeker: You're also legally tied to their money in many cases.
Emily: Exactly. For better or for worse, like--
Jase: Which could also be bad.
Emily: Exactly. I mean if somebody has a lot of debt, for example, then that could be maybe not particularly beneficial for you in a financial sense but for the most part, I would assume that you are marrying together finances and therefore from a practical standpoint, that would be a plus. Also, things like health insurance, a lot of benefits are afforded to spouses that may not be afforded to a person who's just dating or multiple partners who are together, for example. Some people really genuinely need access to good health insurance and you wouldn't have it unless you were married to somebody who had a nice job that can afford them a really good health insurance.
Leave benefits are also awarded to your spouse if they're ill or if someone in their family passes away. The company that I was talking about that I was working for, they were talking about the fact that the parental leave for just having a kid is five months for both people, so not just for like the person who had the kid but also the spouse, so that's incredible. If you're working like a job that doesn't afford that, I mean that sucks. That's really difficult. Both people get that option and that opportunity.
Jase: I will say that having to be married to get insurance benefits is a lot less common of a requirement now than it used to be.
Emily: That is great.
Jase: Often you do have to live together, that can still be a requirement sometimes. Sometimes not, but I do find that this one is less of a thing than it used to be. However, stuff like parental leave, if you are not legally the parent of that child that's just been born which generally would be through marriage, then whether you could actually get those benefits is probably a lot less likely.
Emily: For sure. Spouses also get legal decision-making benefits like next of kin or power of attorney. If you or your spouse are ill, then it's much easier to be able to see them in a hospital setting for instance, than if you were just a friend or if you were not married, or if you weren't a member of the family. Married people tend to get that access immediately and if you are a friend, that becomes much, much more difficult.
Jase: We've probably talked about this on past episodes about planning for death and estate planning and things like that but that's something that came up a lot when I was recently going through getting my will planned out and everything with a polyamory friendly attorney who is fantastic. One of the things she pointed out is if you are married and you die, everything, by default, goes to your spouse. If you're not married though, nothing goes to your partner unless you've specifically tried to put things in to make it so they get stuff. It will go whoop, right past them to your next of kin, which is going to be your parents, first of all, and if not them, then it might be siblings or other nearest relatives. There's a whole system for figuring out who the next of kin is.
Dedeker: Same thing for who determines what your funeral is going to be like-
Jase: Yes. All that stuff.
Dedeker: -or how you want your body to be dealt with, right?
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I think people don't realize that that may fall into the hands of your bigoted parents, for instance, who you're estranged from, right?
Emily: Absolutely.
Jase: Right. Even if you've lived with this person for years and years and years, they are basically non-existent in the eyes of estate law. That's another one there too.
Emily: Finally, in addition to all those research studies about people being really happy and happier if they are married than single, there's also a lot of studies out there about people having health benefits if they are married. Again, I don't necessarily take these at face value.
Dedeker: By health benefits, you mean physical benefits to their health-
Emily: Exactly.
Dedeker: -not like health insurance benefits?
Emily: People live longer and they are mentally happier, so therefore, they're physically better off than their single counterparts. There's just a lot of studies out there that will say that this is the case. Again, I don't know that that's necessarily the case, but one has to look at like, "Okay, are these people happy being single and that's fine with them and they're still getting great benefits from being single and having other important relationships in their lives or are these people very lonely and they're longing for a relationship like a marriage or a long-term committed, something that would potentially help them be happier and therefore physically get some benefits from that as well."
You just don't really know what these studies are implying or who they're speaking to and it's difficult to just have a blanket statement from that standpoint that married people are always going to be healthier and happier.
Jase: Which is a good segue into some other studies that we want to talk about here. As I mentioned, there have also been some studies that have shown contradictory information about marriage and happiness, as well as some that have shown a neutral effect. We're not going to go into detail about as far as the health stuff goes, one of the criticisms of those studies is they tend to look at people who are either married or not married, but who want to be married, and so saying that wanting to be married.
Often they have that as someone who was married and is now divorced, that they had lower health, things like that, that it's often tied to someone who does wish they were married though. It leaves out people who were not married because they did not plan to get married or don't want to get married, that once you calculate for that, all those effects go away. All of those negative effects of being single go away if you're doing it by choice.
The one we want to talk about here is this 2011 study by a group of authors led by Bella DePaulo who looked at 18 different long-term studies of happiness and marriage to see whether getting married actually makes you happier. I guess spoiler alert the answer is no. In all 18 studies, what they did was they looked at asking people about their well-being. That's happiness, life satisfaction, satisfaction with their relationship before they got married and then continuing to ask them those same questions for some time after they got married. Doing a longitudinal study over time, they found no evidence that getting married results in lasting increases in happiness or life satisfaction over time. Probably, it spiked up a little bit. After the marriage, we're all excited about it, but then it levels back out to where it was before, essentially.
They also found that a lot of these studies only include people who got married and stayed married. When they look at people who got married and then ended up getting divorced, they actually show that their happiness decreases over the course of being married and that their happiness doesn't go back up until quite a while after that divorce has happened. Actually, that person ends up with a net negative, much more significant than if they had just stayed single that entire time.
Then they also mentioned things like the group of people who choose to get married versus the people who stay single by choice and that those people are just different people so you can't always correlate one piece of data with the other because the people who get married chose to get married obviously so they've already self-selected for this. Kind of like the Pew research study said that marriage is not randomly assigned.
Emily: They were onto something, actually.
Jase: I think they were saying in a little more of a snarky way of only good people get married.
Emily: Yes
Jase: I think that there is this yes, it's not randomly assigned and so any data you're pulling from it, you're not really able to say marriage is what caused this because we can't randomly assign people to the married group or the not married group.
Dedeker: The same way that we can spend all this time making arguments in favor of marriage or even if you're nonmonogamous, of course, there's a big case be made against legal marriage. One of the big things is that these days you can do most of the things that married people do without actually needing to get married. You can raise a child together with someone or multiple someones. You can live together with someone or multiple someones. You can choose to entangle finances. It's become less common that legal marriage is a requirement in order to take advantage of a partner's health insurance.
We can't deny that our culture has been shifting, and that's a good thing because not everybody wants to get married necessarily. It's better for us to be affording the same rights that we give to married people, to people who are single or people who are partnered but just don't want to get married necessarily.
Jase: We've still got a long way to go, but it's at least getting a little better.
Dedeker: Yes, we do have a long way to go. Of course, we can all look at the divorce rate. I think a lot of us millennials, we're children of divorce and I do think that that's probably helped to plant a seed for many of us of being maybe more cautious. We could argue. Choosing to wait longer to get married. Choosing to not get married at all. Choosing to do entirely different things with our relationships, but the divorce rate is still around 40% to 50%, and getting divorced is still difficult. It's still costly, no matter how amicable it is.
Of course, we also have to take the angle that marriage still isn't legal for a lot of queer people in many, many countries and it may not even be an option where you live. Of course, marriage is still not legal for non-monogamous people. There's anti-bigamy laws that have been on the books for hundreds of years. Then, on top of that, the progress that we have made with things like same-sex marriage, there's still a threat to that. It is not necessarily rooted in the bedrock of our particular country. It's like marriage rights for anyone who is not heterosexual is still a little bit dicey. It's not something we can just relax into.
Of course, I think the one that comes up for me the most is just looking at the sorted history of marriage that there's no arguing against the fact that it is a patriarchal and hetero-normative institution. I do think people can and should be empowered to interface with that institution in a way that makes it feel like this is on their own terms. At the same time, it's still unappealing because of just the history that's baked into it.
I think a big one is that people get married and I think especially nowadays where we do have marriage wrapped up a lot in love and commitment, people choose to get married without looking at what divorce laws are in their state. This makes sense because I'm assuming if you're getting married you're feeling very optimistic, we're not going to get divorced.
Jase: Right.
Dedeker: I can understand the thinking behind that, but what you're literally doing is entering into a legal, financial contract that you have not read the fine print on.
Jase: Which in any other context would be absurd. No one would say, "Oh, yes, just sign it. It's fine."
Dedeker: Yes. That doesn't mean once you read the fine print, you're going to choose to not get married. It's just good to read the fine print and just know exactly what you're getting into, even if you're feeling optimistic.
Jase: Now I will say the fine print for this is actually hard to find-
Emily: I was wondering-
Jase: -and varies by state.
Emily: -do they hand you a contract when you're married?
Jase: No.
Emily: I bet they don't.
Jase: That's part of what's so messed up about this thing. You sign a piece of paper saying you're getting married and no one ever checks to say-
Emily: What does that mean?
Jase: -do you actually know what this means for you financially, legally, and then what happens if you get divorced? No one makes you do that which is ridiculous. It's honestly shocking when I really step back and think about it.
Emily: Now, if you're looking at marriage through the non-monogamous lens, marriage might just not be something that you want to partake in. We definitely know of a lot of non-monogamous individuals who are married and who have then chosen to divorce because they want to make their relationship seem less intrinsically hierarchical. I think that makes a lot of sense because there is this hierarchy that happens with a person if they are a spouse, and getting away from that is really difficult. Even if you say we are non-hierarchical, everyone is equal, all of those things, there's still going to be that inherent idea of hierarchy if you are married to another person. In this country, at least in America, marriage and benefits are still really only available to one person at a time.
Now, the Pew Research survey that we've been talking about a number of times throughout this episode, they found that the vast majority of Americans still think that it's acceptable for an unmarried coupled to live with another person, for unmarried people to live together. Most Americans say cohabitation is acceptable even if the couple doesn't plan to get married. Well, another 16% say that it's acceptable but only if the couple plans to marry and then 14% say that it's never acceptable. That's probably the people, Jase, Dedeker, who you were interfacing with as young people who were like, "It's never acceptable."
Dedeker: Possibly.
Jase: Definitely.
Emily: I think that all of those things tie into this idea, we got to go against that. We got to go against the grain. We've got to be able to be in the relationships that we want to be in and not necessarily do the normative thing of getting married. We can still have meaningful relationships.
Jase: Yes, I think a lot of it comes to this question of if we're getting married who is it for and why because I think Emily brings up a good point here with the majority of people saying it's acceptable for people to live together. That I think there was a time where it was this, if we want to live together, if we want to form a long-term life together, we can only do that by getting married. Whereas nowadays, people tend to also agree that having children together, even if you're not married, is acceptable and is just as good. 4 in 10 say married couples do a better job of raising children than couples who are not married but 59% say that they can raise children just as well, so that one's I think less of a sure thing than people generally being okay with people living together without being married but also having children as possible and most people support that as well.
Another reason to consider not getting married or at least putting it off is that a lot of the benefits that get mentioned about why you would want to get married, like financial stability, you can't actually get without being married. For example, about 4 in 10 people who were surveyed in that Pew Research Study said that moving in with their partner was for financial reasons. They said that was a major part of their decision was a financial reason, but when it came to why someone got married, finances was a much smaller percentage. More like 13% or 10% of people said that getting married was for financial reasons whereas moving in together it was more significantly for that.
Just pointing out that there are a lot of these things we can get now without being married, which then gets to this question of why. Who is it for? Why do we want to get married? Is it just because we think we should? Do we have a good legal, financial reason to do it? Do we have a good legal, financial reason not to do it? Are there actually a lot of reasons why we shouldn't, but then we think we should because we want to be taken more seriously at work or by our family?
Getting to the bottom of those questions, I think is the important piece of this and that's the work that a lot of people don't want to do because they just want to wave their hand and go do it or marriage is evil and terrible you should never do it. I feel like people often fall into these two extremes but there are a lot of considerations here and thinking about those can help you make the decision of what's right for you in your life at this point in time too because it can also change over time.
Emily: I wanted to check in with our community about marriage and why or why not. Some of them chose to get married, and it was amazing because so, so many people contributed to this section. I really, really got a lot of people just wanting to discuss why they like the idea of marriage or why they don't and why that might be a social stigma for them especially if they are non-monogamous because I do think that there's a lot of interesting implications and ideas that come up when you're non-monogamous about should I get married or should I not? Am I going to be seen as other in this community if I choose to get married? And what the implications of that are, so I just really appreciate all the insights that this specific group of people who are non-monogamous gave to me and gave to this episode.
Dedeker: Of course a lot of the responses that we got covered stuff that we've already talked about in this episode, but there were some that were really unique. We're going to talk about people who are making the cases for getting married and the people who made the cases against getting married. In the four column, one person shared just love. I want to show a certain level of commitment to friends and family. Very similarly, someone else shared that there is a certain magic in public commitment and this idea of bringing people together to celebrate and honor your union, so that seems like that's specifically about having a wedding, in particular having a very visible marriage.
Jase: I think this goes to that question that I was trying to ask of who's it for? In this case, it sounds like some of the answer is for these other people, for friends and family. I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad thing but I do think it's good to acknowledge how much of this is because I want those people to see it and then to ask the questions of, well, why do I want that? Is that really what I want? I think it's good to acknowledge that and to really be honest with yourself about who it's for. Not to say that's necessarily right or wrong one way or the other.
Emily: Along those lines, somebody said that they saw a big difference between when they were married and when they were not married and there was this sense of being a second-class citizen when they weren't married and now like the way in which their friends and family view them is very different, so I mean that sucks. That's really unfortunate, but I do think again that so many people see a person as more adult once they get married and therefore like the infantilizing ideas or things that they place upon that non-married person, they go away when they are married.
Jase: Yes. This is one I've really grappled with my work and thinking about how in my work being a responsible adult is generally valued but then there is this interesting dynamic too of when you are around the executives you were Emily where everyone's talking about being heterosexually married with their kids, that there is also this silent group of people I'm sure who are actually feeling more alienated by that.
Emily: You may be right.
Jase: It's like you might have this vocal majority who now respect you more and treats you more adult but there also might be this other group that you're now pushing away that you're distanced from and depending on your industry and who you work with and who your friends are, you might have more or less of that and you might be more or less aware of it.
Anyway, this is something I've thought about a lot when it comes to marriage because this is something Dedeker and I have talked about for years of what would be the legal financial reasons to do it or not and like that's one I've wrestled with a lot of, am I making the problem worse by putting this persona out into the world and buying into this very normative view that people probably project on me anyway or are there situations where it's good to just take advantage of that and that's a tough question and one I still wrestle with.
Dedeker: Yes. People mentioned one that we haven't covered yet which is that sometimes it's just very practical for immigration or for getting a visa that again whether you like it or not, the state makes particular assumptions about who deserves to come into our country, who deserves to immigrate or not, and what type of relationship deserves to be recognized or not and sometimes that just makes things a lot faster and a lot smoother. Here's one that I also really like that's a little bit less practical. This person shared, "If our marriage is a structural support beam in this analogy, then our house is big enough for all the people that we love." I just thought that was sweet.
Emily: That is sweet.
Jase: I do think it's interesting to think about that from that point of view of, okay, am I being bad by just taking advantage of all of this normative privilege you get by being married but then there could be an argument to be made to say yes, but that's stability helps me provide for all of the people in my actually non-normative life, so that is a good-- I like that analogy of the tent pole or the structural support beam.
Emily: A lot of people out there discuss the fact that gay marriage or non-monogamous marriage can be seen as a political statement and electing to use the Somerville Domestic Partnership Union as a statement about the legality of domestic partnership and seeing non-monogamous unions as okay. That's an interesting take on why one might want to get married because you're using it as like this radical political act because again, those things really haven't been legal in this country for very long. I think 2015 is when gay marriage became legal in this country.
Jase: I think a couple more interesting financial reasons against getting married. One is that someone brought up, "As a widow, I can collect my late husband's social security income when I retire, but if I remarry, I forfeit that." I remember this also came up with my mom whose retirement age about if she remarried, she would get a social security benefit based off of the new husbands rather than the old husbands and depending on their financial states, that might be different as well. There's all these little factors.
Then another one is that in the US if you have disability insurance for yourself as a single person, if you become married, you can lose that benefit because it might be seen that your household now can support itself because you have someone to support you. Some interesting cases about not getting married for financial reasons which usually don't get made.
Dedeker: Now, of course, we've got a lot of people who are sharing really good arguments against, and first of all, I don't know which column this quite goes into but I just wanted to put a pin in the fact that people pointed out that there can be a lot of shame in the polyamorous community about marriage or about wanting to be married. Which I think the reasoning for that is people equate marriage with a very traditional relationship with traditional values. People may equate marriage with monogamy, and therefore, if you want that, you must want monogamy and why are you here? Essentially, I guess is maybe the thinking.
I do think that's part of why we wanted to pull this episode together at all is to reduce that shame and just talk about the fact that yes, there's a lot of reasons for and against this. I like that someone brought up that historically wedding vows have included asking women to obey their husbands specifically. It's funny, I'm actually I'm reading a book right now. I'm reading a biography of some rich artist lady in the mid 1800s but they shared that one of her, like finishing school teachers refused to get married because she didn't ever want to have to say obey in her vows and so she just never got married and everyone just like dealt with it.
Emily: Wow. Love that.
Dedeker: Of course, if this all links to what I was talking about earlier about how there's this history of the patriarchal institution, the history of it being an institution of oppression and control and men's superior status over women, women being property, and some people just don't even want to get close to that which I totally understand.
Emily: Somebody who had been married before but then has chosen to not get married again said that "I don't want to date to marry anymore. I want to date to find people who fill my life with joy and laughter," so they're keeping the focus on what matters to them and so many people out there really do date in order to find somebody to get married to. I love that idea that like, no, I'm dating because I want to find really special people to fill my life with, and that is what matters to me and what is more important to me than just this idea of getting married.
Jase: Certainly, yes, I think that for a lot of people, the goal-orientedness of getting married, and I'd say also of having children can often get us so focused on the goal that we don't take the time to really focus on just the relationship as it is and what we get from it as it is and so often people get to that state where they've accomplished all those goals, and then suddenly there's that, oh, shit, now what?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: I haven't really invested in this thing, giving me happiness for its own sake. I've been goal oriented and maybe we're a good team and we've really fought for those goals together, but like, that's not really what a good relationship is based on. So I like that idea of choosing not to even be looking for marriage so that you can stay focused on what really matters more in those relationships.
That said, I do think it's worth acknowledging that for a lot of people, I'm sure some of you have already turned off this episode because of this but there are a lot of people who take this harder line of like, "No, until marriage doesn't have this monogamous focused legal privilege that's only for these people who choose to get monogamously married, I will never support it and I will not support anyone's choice to do it." I think it's just inherently wrong because you're upholding this terrible system.
I get it. I don't take that hard line myself. I think that we have the tools that we have and we got to make our choices within those, but I do want to acknowledge that. That is fair to say, yes, by doing this upholding this system that sucks, that has a shitty history and has a shitty present, that's still a problem. I think that if you are going to go into that, at least being aware of those things and trying to think about what you are doing, like are you just taking this as an advantage and just not worrying about the fact that you're upholding this or are you looking at why am I really choosing to do this? Do I have a good reason and am I also doing other things to try to support the change that I want to see in society and legally, financially, all of those things?
Emily: I want to leave you all with something that Dr. Keanna, nurse who has done some research help on some of her prior episodes said about marriage because she is married and yet she doesn't live with the partner that she's married to and she said, "I primarily enjoy the economic benefits of marriage even as my husband lives with another partner, and I live alone. Thank you. Tax and healthcare advantages. Even if I were to get divorced, which my husband and I discuss every year on our anniversary, I love that by the way, like a check-in on the marriage explicitly, which is different than our relationship check-ins. I would be open to remarrying to enjoy those similar tax and healthcare benefits.
I don't think being married presents negative challenges, but it does invite me to never stop questioning how power and privilege function within my polycule and to do my best at creating and maintaining equity driven and empowering relationships for everyone I'm involved with. Concretely, that has involved some very explicit conversations around resource distribution. For example, if my husband and I are paying lower taxes because we're married, how do we redistribute those funds so that other relationships and partners can benefit too? It also animated conversations around social visibility and privilege.
I'm happy to be married to someone who is willing to imagine and live marriage on her own terms, to challenge assumptions around who is to be included and made visible to friends and family and work. Even to question assumptions around the entitlement and access, folks presume we have to each other because we're married. As far as I'm concerned, our marriage doesn't really look like the cultural models I see of it, whether I'm in monogamous or non-monogamous circles and I'm very glad that's the case." Amen. That's awesome. I love that.
You can do marriage, go for it, absolutely, but let's do it with integrity and questioning and looking at the structure as a whole and how it may benefit you versus another partner and what can I do to help make all relationships more equitable and do the things that are serving everyone as opposed to just the couple that are married. We want to hear from all of you about this episode, what you thought about us talking about marriage prose and the cons and we have a question of the week which is going to be on our Instagram stories, and that is, if you are non-monogamous and married, why did you choose to get married?