Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, End Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History

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Through the Looking Glass: Nonmarital Planning in a Marriage-centric World

The most powerful ideas are those which are taken for granted.

—DORIS LESSING, UNDER MY SKIN: VOLUME ONE OF MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TO 1949

Imagine being a professor who’s just earned tenure. You worked toward this goal for years, subsisting on abysmal wages while completing graduate coursework followed by doctoral examinations. Then came the real labor: researching and writing a 450-page dissertation. It was arduous, but eight years of weekends camped at various New York City libraries paid off. A doctorate in English Literature qualified you for the academic job market. A university in Connecticut made an offer; you accepted, relocated, and started up the next mountain: a six-year climb toward tenure. This meant publishing, serving on university committees, and proving yourself in the classroom. Again, diligence paid off, and you achieved tenure and promotion to the rank of associate professor.

This happened to me. The raise was modest, and the job remained demanding, but my satisfaction was palpable. Finally, I had a professional foothold and could stop thinking in twelvemonth increments, from contract renewal to contract renewal. When the congratulatory phone calls stopped, reality began sinking in. I realized it was time to consider the future in a new way, putting financial plans in place for myself and my loved ones. Toward this end, I assumed there were choices. I was correct. But I learned that in the United States the central, and sometimes sole way to protect oneself and one’s family involves marriage.

Looking down the road, I factored in Social Security. I anticipated one day receiving monies from a system into which I had long paid. Every paycheck I had ever earned withheld for Social Security. Hence, I should select a beneficiary. I decided on my sister. Incessant conversation, medical tests we’d seen each other through, and verbal pacts of commitment made her the right choice. Years of shared news—good, bad, irrelevant—had helped us both face the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

An hour of research derailed my plan. I learned that as a never-married professional, I can’t leave Social Security benefits to a loved one. The support Frances and I give each other goes unrecognized in a culture that distinguishes sharply between marriages and all other partnerships. Because our bond does not fit the connubial model, American law treats us as strangers to one another.

It got worse: I discovered that my payments go back into the system. My situation is true of all never-married American wage earners; when they die, monies paid for their whole working lives are absorbed into Social Security’s budget. So, whether they want to or not, all payers subsidize wedlock. If he married three times, a deceased worker’s widow and both divorced spouses would get 100 percent of the sum he received while alive. None would have to demonstrate need or a history of financial dependence within the marriages. None would have had to pay anything toward Social Security. For a spouse, one year of matrimony is all it takes; ten years are required of an ex-spouse.¹

Frances and I had been together for over ten years: no matter, but Social Security follows a nonmarital relationships don’t count rubric. This, combined with a matrimony is best for everyone, always assumption, encourages Americans to wed, regardless of their beliefs. Since length of marriage determines one’s ability to collect, the program goads each adult—happy or unhappy—to stay married.

Of course, a crux federal program that rewards only one relationship implicitly diminishes other styles of pair bonding that increase—no pun intended—social security. Case in point: Frances and I remain a constant in each other’s lives. If I predecease her, a safety net would increase her peace of mind. It might encourage her to take chances and expand her work as a property manager. (Indeed, a nonmarital Social Security option would foster small entrepreneurship by giving millions of Americans such protection.) Social Security’s lump-sum death imbursement could help her give me a proper funeral. All people in committed relationships deserve the opportunity to bury their loved ones respectfully, but Social Security reserves this benefit for spouses. This exclusion struck me as particularly disgraceful. We may not be married to each other, but neither Frances nor I would feel comfortable hurling the other’s remains into a dumpster.

Social Security is a third-party benefit. Such entitlements don’t come from a person but another entity such as the state or an employer. Since the federal government is Social Security’s third party, I wondered how a national program could be so partial. If Social Security treated a particular ethnic or racial group preferentially, newspapers would publish exposés. Protestors would march; lawsuits would proliferate. But marriage-centric policies evoke little, if any, outrage.

A piece of related news caught my eye: actress Melanie Griffith’s divorce from actor Antonio Banderas after eighteen years together. According to several magazines stacked in Central Connecticut University’s Burritt Library reference area, Griffith and Banderas’s union ended with a court mandate that he pay $65,000 per month in alimony.

What could explain this jaw-dropping amount? As I had heard it explained, alimony is compensatory. Spouses—so the rationale goes—deserve recompense for years when they put careers on hold to do matrimonial things. Griffith worked throughout her marriage to Banderas, appearing in films like Adrian Lynne’s 1997 Lolita, Larry Clark’s 1998 Another Day in Paradise, Woody Allen’s Celebrity (made that same year), and Rob Minkoff’s 2002 Stuart Little 2. The scion of actors, Griffith grew up in Acton, California on a 200-acre ranch. After enjoying a lifestyle undreamt of by most Americans, she launched her career in the late 1960s. Ironically, it peaked with Mike Nichols’s 1988 film, Working Girl, the story of scrappy secretary Tess McGill, a Wall Street outsider who breaks into investment banking. Griffith, by contrast, is a Hollywood insider with an acting income buttressed by valuable assets. She split with Banderas proceeds from their Hancock Park, California estate ($15.9 million) and retains sole ownership of an Aspen, Colorado home. Her art collection includes an original Pablo Picasso work, The Painter and His Model.² Clearly, no one needs to organize a bake sale for her.

Heading home, I thought of various gay celebrities fêting themselves with weddings: musician Elton John and filmmaker David Furnish, who married at Guildhall, Windsor, England in 2005; comedienne Ellen and actress Portia DeGeneres, who took 2008 vows in Los Angeles. I imagined these new matrimonial standard-bearers, years down the road, scanning divorce papers as they stammered, But . . . no one told us about this part!

Judith Plaskow, professor emeritus of religious studies at Manhattan College, might have warned them. In 2004, she and Smith College government professor Martha Ackelsberg, issued a public statement that they would not wed: Were we to marry, we would be contributing to the perpetuation of a norm of coupledness . . . At this moment, when there is so much focus on celebrating the right to marry, we want to hold up a vision of a society in which basic rights are not tied to marriage, and in which there are many ways to organize one’s intimate life.³

I had thanked Plaskow via email for taking such a morally coherent stance. Questioning wedlock—straight or gay—takes courage in a nation largely devoted to the marriage principle. Her reply caught me off guard; while their views hadn’t changed, she and Ackelsberg were considering matrimony: Unfortunately, there’s only one way around the estate tax, she wrote ruefully.⁴

Estate tax? Recalling Plaskow’s note, I decided to investigate.

My accountant, Mario, shared more disturbing information. Wedlock, he explained, is American inheritance’s litmus test. In cases of intestacy, a spouse automatically receives all assets. Relationship length is irrelevant. At that point I had been with my boyfriend for four years. A man who married someone he barely knew in Las Vegas would have enjoyed stronger protections than Jim did if I had no will. This remains true. In most states—Georgia is an exception—disinheriting spouses who have not waived their rights with prenuptial agreements is illegal. Community property states consider everything accumulated during a marriage as belonging to both parties.

These laws aim to keep married people’s focus exclusive. They can prevent a divorcing Californian from gifting cherished possessions to loved ones. Connecticut exempts husbands and wives from tariffs otherwise due when assets transfer from one person to another. Bequeathing one’s residence to an unmarried partner is a taxable event, so selling can be the only option for those in high-income brackets. In estate tax the first two million dollars are tax-free, Mario explained. After that, it changes. The next 1.6 million garners a 7.2 percent tax: that’s just over $115,000. It goes up from there.

Hanging up the phone, I scrutinized my 1,600-square-foot house, which had been advertised with the phrase, Needs TLC After spending years in tiny apartments, refurbishing this Colonial had been a wonderful adventure. Jim insulated the attic, upgraded a flagging electrical system, and set up our Internet. Beneficiary of the house, he lives with me part-time—a setup common among academics, who require ample privacy to read and write.

I knew that the place would never appreciate to anything near two million dollars. So, my untimely demise would not produce a bill so steep that after losing me, Jim would also part with our home. But pricey estates are common in Connecticut. Many properties are worth at least two million dollars. If their occupants cannot write a $115,000 check, they will lose their homes when a co-owner dies. It can take less than a death for the state’s approximately 5,500 farmers. Farming has become a growth field in Connecticut, especially among young people aware of the premium on organic food and eager to own land despite high real estate prices.⁵ They qualify for family farm loans if applicants are linked by blood or marriage. Nonmarital farmers working cooperatively, who need money to sustain operations or handle emergencies, don’t meet governmental criteria. They can lose property because of bad weather, broken equipment, or any shock that soil is heir to. Again, the law capriciously protects certain people—what does marriage have to do with farming?—and encourages everyone to follow a single model.⁶

Curiouser and curiouser, Lewis Carroll’s Alice says after tasting cake that elongates her neck. Like the naïf from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I felt as though I’d gone down a rabbit hole into someplace bizarre yet familiar. Like the world of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, this realm was laid out as a chess board, but promotion rested on betrothal rather than movement to the eighth row. A morning of Googling revealed data on nearby states. Massachusetts has a lower tax threshold than Connecticut: one million dollars. Danvers-based attorney David E. Peterson recommended splitting estates with assets of $1.5 million and opening two revocable trusts to keep each potential survivor under the million-dollar mark. This would prevent a $64,000 penalty: Voila, no estate tax!⁷ No estate tax for married people, that is.

I had known that America incentivizes marriage. Just how powerfully it does so was coming into focus. This issue had not spurred my planning-for-the-future initiative. I set out to overcome a longstanding fear of money. Like many academics, I spent years without enough for essentials. This leaves vestigial anxiety. The mere prospect of getting organized and setting financial goals generates queasiness. In my effort to stop functioning like a nervous graduate student, I was discovering just how powerful the American marriage system was.

An investment advisor from my bank suggested opening a traditional IRA as an income shelter, explaining that I would get a deduction on my contributions, and taxes on the account’s income would be deferred. I asked about opening an IRA for myself and one for Jim and learned that I couldn’t. In spousal IRAs, one partner contributes to a tax-deferred retirement account. But, as its name suggests, this option is tailored to marrieds. Surely there were exceptions, I prodded. What if an unwed person is sick, unemployed . . . taking time from work to care for a dependent child or senior? No; spousal IRAs made no exceptions.

I could name Jim as a beneficiary, but even here, marital exceptionalism prevailed. Spouses who tap into an IRA early don’t pay the 10 percent tax imposed on unwed people (if the expenses exceed the account-holder’s adjusted gross income by 7.5 percent). Even a financially unsophisticated academic could grasp the ramifications; while it’s generally unwise to draw on an IRA prematurely, never-married Americans who have no choice lose 10 percent of their withdrawals.⁸

I had entered the orbit of professionals paid to evaluate life’s practical angles. They tend to operate in the here and now, withholding judgement and navigating a realm that simply does its business. Part of that business is legally gaming the tax system. Toward this end, financial advisors dispense advice that normalizes marital privilege. Matrimonial superiority is treated as an incontrovertible fact. Clients get the message. The message is passed on.

Way leads onto way, Robert Frost wrote in his lyric, The Road Not Taken.⁹ I could see how one marriage-based benefit led to the next . . . and to the subsidy after that. All flowed from the belief that once married, spouses lose their separate identities. Each newlywed couple becomes a monad; accordingly, what belongs to one belongs to the other. A husband’s health insurance must include his wife. Her employment at a college extends to her husband.

I’d knocked around universities long enough to observe the practice of spousal hiring, which gives married job candidates preferential treatment. Spouses are routinely interviewed for preexisting positions and job lines opened for people married to important scholars. In 1977 Harvard offered the titanic cognitive scientist, Amos Tversky, a tenured professorship. His biographer explains that it took them a few weeks to throw in an assistant professorship for Barbara [Tversky].¹⁰ The phrase to throw in makes one of the world’s most coveted academic jobs sound like a complimentary dessert given by a restaurant manager. In 1978 the Tverskys landed at Stanford University, whose psychology department accommodated them both. In 2014 Dartmouth appointed Carolyn Dever to a dual position: Professor of English and University Provost. Dever will be joined in Hanover by her husband, Paul Young, who will be a professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth, the press release reads.¹¹

The late Tversky built a career debunking assumptions: showing how people oblivious to their biases follow instinct with unwarranted optimism. Carolyn Dever studies Victorian fiction, focusing on representations of motherhood. Such policers of ideology become oddly complacent when receiving matrimonial benefits. I had yet to hear a professor whose wife found work at his home institution ask why their marriage positively influenced hiring, when a candidate’s maleness or heterosexuality could not. I’d never heard a married academic question her husband’s free access to university gyms, while nonmarital partners paid fees.

College orientations make strenuous efforts at sensitivity. I am regularly invited to events that encourage academics to unearth buried prejudice. Facilitators deploy now familiar terms: otherness, shaming, and what English professor Robert Boyers considers an overused noun: privilege.¹² (Boyers notes that while no one could deny various forms of social advantage, to occasionally berate oneself for being privileged while making demonstrations of camaraderie with less privileged groups requires minimal emotional engagement.)¹³ In my experience, academic professional development has expanded to include the words diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. Yet it does not include diverse beliefs about family, relationship equity, or the inclusion of nonmarital people in benefit-conferring programs. Marriage as a privileging category and relationship-status discrimination are largely ignored. One must wonder why seminars designed to highlight power imbalances don’t question an institution that unequally distributes hundreds of benefits. Perhaps the subject of relationship-status discrimination would disrupt proceedings by pushing academics to discuss how they live and which privileges they embrace, replacing perfunctory self-flagellation with dialogue.

A gift from our dean, Maike Ingrid Philipsen’s book, Challenges of the Faculty Career for Women: Success and Sacrifice, had sat on my shelf for two years. I opened it, hoping to find something on women’s concerns about marriage-centric hiring. Instead, I found a plea to give marrieds special treatment. Discussing an actual school assigned the pseudonym, Flagship University, Philipsen describes a real couple. Flagship hired the wife for a permanent teaching job and generously gave the husband a postdoctoral fellowship. According to a (married) colleague, with whom the (married) author concurs, this was injurious: candidates married to people tracked for tenure should be foisted on departments: In Dr. Ingerson-Noll’s opinion, the university should . . . offer the spouse a teaching appointment . . . His research may not be completely what the department wants to do but ‘it is more important to keep people happy than try to be very precise about what kind of science you want to have.’¹⁴ More important for a university to keep people happy than set research standards? I reread the sentence twice before grasping its claim: in academia, cheerfulness should trump intellectual rigor, but only where spouses are concerned. Philipsen advocates bending rules for married faculty—not unwed or never-married professors. She ignores academics who wish to put forth friends, lovers, or other long-term partners for consideration in package hiring deals. One must conclude that in her view, married scholars’ feelings matter, and nonmarital professors’ emotions don’t.

Unfortunately, Philipsen’s blind spot is common. Universities’ overall message to students is, repudiate bigotry and denounce nepotism—except for bigotry against the unwed and matrimonial nepotism. They’re okay. Graduate and undergraduate students witness yet another example of special efforts on behalf of the married household made by those content to let other families fend for themselves. These reinforce larger cultural messages about marital exceptionalism.

Like Frost’s narrator, I found myself wandering extemporaneously. Having entered marital privilege’s deep undergrowth, I was stumbling on inequity after inequity, accumulating information faster than I could absorb its outrageousness. Researching real estate taxes in New York, where I grew up, I learned that the first $2,062,500 of an estate are nontaxable. After that, unwed residents pay. New York City swells with denizens who arrange their lives nonmaritally. In 2012 the New York Times featured three men and two women who shared an apartment in the slowly gentrifying section of Bushwick, Brooklyn. This was no hodgepodge of tenants splitting bills until they found spouses. It was a friendship-based household consisting of two architectural designers, two fashion designers, and one advertising executive—all in their twenties, who spruced up a 2,700-square-foot loft and agreed to live together for ten years.¹⁵ Marriage fundamentalists denounce such setups as newfangled. Actually, friendcentered homes have a long history and support from thinkers like Aristotle (384–322 BCE), one of western philosophy’s two most influential figures: Those who welcome each other but do not live together would seem to have goodwill rather than friendship. For nothing is as proper to friends as living together.¹⁶

My homeowner’s real estate appetite whetted, I checked announcements of Bushwick open houses. A four-story townhouse on Bleecker Street, in the heart of trendy and upcoming Bushwick, had an asking price of $1,300,000. A similar Wilson Avenue property was listed at $2 million and a four-story Greene Street townhome at $3 million. Given the pace at which New York City real estate appreciates, a $2,062,500 exemption did not seem monumental. The discrepancy in treatment between married and unmarried New Yorkers looked punitive. Throughout neighborhoods like Bushwick, adults committing to each other in ways that flout marital norms were being penalized.

Philosopher Carrie Jenkins notes that the married family receives the fullest and easiest access to social and legal benefits: it remains the model we must choose to minimize the risk of potentially devastating social stigma and rejection.¹⁷ Indeed, the notion that wedlock renders people special yokes to beliefs that spouses cannot lose their entitlements so easily. Singer Madonna’s 2008 divorce from filmmaker Guy Ritchie, for example, entailed a $92 million settlement.¹⁸ This high-profile case raises questions about spousal support. Many people who consider marriage civically beneficial believe that those who stray must pay. Others less enamored of wedlock still tut-tut, arguing that lesser-earning spouses deserve compensation for abridged careers. (Ritchie slaving over a hot stove seems unlikely, but who knows?)

These claims have a wholesome sound. But they assume that marriage represents a singular form of caregiving. If curtailing one’s career to care for a dependent (or dependents) justifies support, many people should qualify. Anyone who sustains a needy, injured, or aging companion over time ought to meet the criteria. When sociologist Ursula Henz asked interviewees, Do you currently or have you ever regularly looked after someone, for at least three months, who is sick, disabled, or elderly? more unmarried than married respondents said yes.¹⁹ They include London-based writer Kate Mulvey. I moved into my parents’ spare room in 2010—to help Dad when my late mother was diagnosed with dementia, she wrote in 2015. Mulvey quickly became the default caregiver for an elderly, grief-struck widower. I just hope that one day my [married] sisters will see that a less-than-conventional life like mine is no less important than theirs, she reflects.²⁰ Everyone who makes such sacrifices should receive compensation, or no one should.

Mulvey’s unwed friends have been her main support. This validates sociologists’ Naomi R. Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian’s research on time allotment. Factoring in sex, resources, and scheduling demands, they found that marriage-free people devote more hours to communal exchanges than their wedded counterparts do. Gerstel and Sarkisian report that spouseless people socialize more. Unmarrieds come out ahead in helping friends and neighbors as well as giving more intergenerational assistance.²¹ Apparently matrimony’s formula for romantic oneness, according to which spouses have unrivaled claims on each other, does not benefit the public weal. Using sociologist Lewis A. Coser’s definition, marriage is a greedy institution. Coser coined this term for social arrangements that make total claims . . . and . . . attempt to encompass within their circle the whole personality.²²

Yet marriage receives massive backing, including lavish communal celebrations that generate income for cadres of professionals. Jewelers, wedding consultants, event planners, gown designers, caterers, cake stylists, florists, photographers, dance instructors, and bridal beauticians benefit from our nation’s addiction to romance with all the trappings. The American nuptial industry generates between $83 billion and $161 billion per year.²³ (The latter figure, from media company Condé Nast’s bridal division, includes honeymoons and gifts heaped on couples through registries.) The Huffington Report appraises the global wedding business at $300 billion per annum.²⁴ Tax advantages are just one kind of bait offered would-be spouses with a promise: conform to the dominant conjugal model, and rewards will follow.

Why not conform? People do it every day. I recalled for myself reasons I had often shared aloud:

Marriage violates the ideal of governmental neutrality. A government that incentivizes one lifestyle with over 1,000 benefits penalizes other ways of living.

Having been blessed with several life partners, it seems wrong to elevate one relationship above all others. This does not mean obliterating every distinction between friendship and amorous relations. It means acknowledging that when genuine, both are powerful and life structuring. They should be placed on more equal footing. This is especially true since wedlock cannot be separated from the practical benefits it confers. Friendship is comparatively disinterested, which made it the relationship nonpareil for classical thinkers.²⁵ Today, philosopher Elizabeth Brake observes that Friendship is perhaps a purer example than marriage of a relationship for its own sake, as it has no institutional form or associated enterprise.²⁶

Matrimony has a blood-soaked history that originates in the state (Mesopotamia) owning each couple and the husband owning each wife’s reproductive and sexual functions. The 1750 BCE Hammurabi Code and the Middle Assyrian Law Codes of the fifteenth through the eleventh centuries BCE sanctioned husbands’ control of marital assets, including women’s bodies. No misogynistic cabal shaped these policies. As they collaborated in developing early agricultural societies, men and women together produced patriarchal law.²⁷ (Female collusion is probably best understood in terms of women’s separation from each other by categories of sexual respectability, with propriety granted wives.) Beginning in the Bronze Age, western law treated various forms of nonmarital sex as criminal. I cannot honor this legacy.

When bad times come, some people stay and others don’t, regardless of what has been promised. Marriage entails especially problematic oaths. Conventionally, spouses pledge to love, honor, and cherish each other. These vows are unenforceable. How can a judge decide whether one person has been adequately honored? I could not keep a straight face if someone complained that I wasn’t cherishing him enough.

Institutionalizing eroticism appears dubious at best. I believe that sex is a private activity, which should not be licensed. And I am not clairvoyant. I hope I will always love my boyfriend but cannot know that I will. The commitment lauded by marriage advocates comes into play if attraction ceases and affection evaporates; only a promise remains. This approach turns lovers into insurance policies.

Finally, wedlock touts lifelong monogamy, though primatologists tell us that no nonhuman primate group is monogamous.²⁸ Pre- and extramarital sex occur in every human society on record, including cultures that stone so-called fornicators to death. Both genders face stonings . . . across fourteen Muslim countries, but women are more frequently the targets, explains journalist Terrence McCoy.²⁹ Perpetrators of honor killings murder their victims for having nonmarital sex (including being raped) and refusing arranged marriages. Nations that execute perceived miscreants include Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia.³⁰ If monogamy was intrinsic, would such measures exist?

Doctors David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton claim that erotic exclusivity is unnatural for every species, including human beings.³¹ Perhaps they overstate their case; surely not everyone experiences monogamy as a straitjacket. However, these researchers reveal a flaw in the marriage principle. Monogamy might work for some and not others, for people at one stage of life but not another. Making it a static norm is wrong. This happened in the 1940s, when American schools forced left-handed children to convert to right-handedness and the 1950s, when women were told they belonged at home. It occurred in the postwar years, when medical authorities instructed men, regardless of inclination, to sleep only with women. The insistence on monogamous coupling for all is equally extreme.

At one time mandatory right-handedness looked sensible. For numerous Americans, bundling Social Security and tax benefits with marriage feels similarly reasonable. That federal law protects only husbands and wives from testifying against each other when either is the defendant in a trial, seems fine to many people. But such policies pressure our entire population toward a style of relationship suitable only for some. They defy the egalitarian principle of accommodating differences between human beings.

As Plaskow and Ackelsberg wrote, nuptial ceremonies are prescriptive. They tell viewers, Someday you may star in your own romantic show. Jim and I could do this, waving self-congratulatory We’re Together! pom-poms. A sense of proportion tells me not to. Amorous compatibility is largely a matter of luck; luck should not entail triumphalism. I am a book-obsessed recluse who thrives on high-intensity friendships. Not every boyfriend would find these qualities charming. Jim seems to. When people ask if he’ll propose, Jim says that he respects me too much. When I’m asked why we haven’t set a date, I say that we’re not sex-and-everything-else partners (SEEPs).

Dissenting beliefs usually incur penalties; anti marriage views are no exception. Some deprivations are small; while a marriage certificate would enable me to get a duplicate driver’s license, Connecticut’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles won’t accept the medical proxy form I have with Frances. Some are not small. If Frances got sick I could not invoke the 1993 Medical Family Leave Act to take time from work and care for her. We are not blood relatives, and marriage is the only adult adoption this law recognizes.

I pay roughly $3,000 more in annual taxes than I would if filing jointly as part of a married couple, and every paycheck labels me as single. It’s bad enough to be categorized maritally when one doesn’t perceive oneself in those terms; it’s worse to be characterized negatively. Single denotes not being conventionally married; would African American professors like being called not white on their checks? But when I’d called our university bursar’s department the previous fall, I learned there were no other options. I requested my preferred designation, spinster, and was turned down. I suggested interdependent, a term used in Canadian law.³² This didn’t fly, so I asked the woman fielding my query to leave a blank space. Again, no. Again, I encountered someone who presented romantic status as the determinant of human identity, sexual love as real love, and marriage as real love’s culmination. If she didn’t believe in matrimony as a centering norm, the concept didn’t seem to bother her.

The American tax code situates adults within a hierarchy of relationships. Accordingly, its administrators deal with individuals in terms of imposed social personae. However, among my students I notice increasing skepticism about wedlock’s categories. During the Spring 2016 semester, my best undergraduate, Annalise, commuted from Durham, Connecticut to our campus in New Britain, a town that draws large numbers of Polish immigrants. In my writing class she submitted essay after outstanding essay