Unmarried bliss

Living happily ever after doesn't necessarily require a marriage license

by Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller

Duncan Smith remembers when, not so long ago, hotel check-in clerks requested evidence that he was married to his wife. Back then, he says, "If you wanted to be with someone, you had to be married."

Times have changed. Today, Smith, now divorced, lives with Lydia Breckon in the Edgewood neighborhood of Cranston with their three dogs and a cat. For 11 years, they've shared their lives, their cooking and cleaning, and their vacations. People sometimes assume they are married. But they have never taken a trip down the aisle together.

They describe themselves as pragmatists, not radicals. "I don't have a banner or a flag. I don't march around saying [being unmarried] is the right way to live. But on the other hand, I feel totally comfortable," Breckon says.

Living together without marriage, once unheard of, has become commonplace in America today. Parents often advise children to delay marriage and live with a partner to test the relationship, and growing numbers are forgoing marriage altogether. Unlike gay and lesbian couples, whose fight to legalize same-sex marriage has dominated recent headlines, those who choose not to marry receive little attention for their unique situation.

According to the US Census, 12,000 partners like Smith and Breckon live together in Rhode Island without being married. Nationally, there are 5.6 million, a fivefold increase since 1970. "Today, the `Ozzie and Harriet' family only constitutes about 10 percent of all families. Family diversity is now the norm," says Los Angeles attorney Thomas Coleman, an expert on family diversity and marital status discrimination.

Coleman attributes the change to a list of factors, including women in the workforce, changing religious attitudes, no-fault divorce laws, and greater visibility of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people. Yet many unmarried people say that government and private industry have been slow to keep up with the times by implementing laws and workplace policies that recognize the new structures of families.

Most cohabiting couples will marry eventually. For many, living together is a logical way to experience a relationship without making a lifelong commitment. Ken Heskestad of Providence says, "[Living together without marriage] makes me more conscious of what I have and makes me devote more of my energies to the relationship." Living together saves money as well, another common reason people decide to move in with a sweetheart.

Significant numbers of people, however, decide to stay together long-term without a formal exchange of "I do's." Their reasons vary. Some, like Jane Fronek, Heskestad's partner, say the choice not to marry allows her a freedom from assumed roles. "Once you are considered someone's wife, people treat you in a certain way, and that is something that really scares me," says Fronek.

Television talk shows label unmarried couples "commitment phobic," but many say that their level of commitment to a relationship has nothing to do with its legal status. In California, Amy Lesen's parents divorced when she was a child, and her father went on to have a successful 20-years-and-counting relationship without being married.

Today, Amy says she does not want to marry her partner. "I saw one marriage break up, and I saw two people who did not get married stay together for the rest of my life. I think that it drove a point home to me that [marriage] does not really matter," she says.

Some people find the institution of marriage too bound to religion. Some have experienced painful or expensive divorces and have sworn never to involve the legal system in their relationships again. Growing numbers of senior citizens find that they would lose a significant amount of the pension they receive from a deceased spouse if they were to wed again. So while college students may have been the first ones to thumb their noses at societal mores by moving in with a lover, today even some grandparents decide it's the way to go.

Close to home
As a couple who long ago decided not to marry, this issue is a personal one for us. As children, neither of us dreamed of getting married when we grew up, possibly the legacy of our "you can do anything" feminist mothers. Our relationship was strong and felt stable and complete. As bisexuals, we also didn't feel comfortable taking advantage of a privilege that wasn't available to many of our friends in same-sex relationships. Not getting married was an easy decision. Or so we thought.

After we'd been living together for a few years, an occasional family member would ask if we were considering marriage. One of our employers refused to give us the type of family health insurance policy for which married couples are eligible.

Then, in 1997 there was a news story about a Rhode Island man who wanted to legally adopt the biological son of his female domestic partner, a child he'd been parenting for years and considered his son. But a Family Court judge told the man that until he married the boy's mother, he would not consider the case.

Although the story was followed closely in the Rhode Island media, there was no public outrage -- no letters to the editor or courthouse protests -- as there had been in similar cases affecting transracial, gay, and single-parent adoptions. It was becoming clear to us that, in spite of our large and growing numbers, unmarried people didn't see themselves as a constituency, a group that could speak out and demand equal rights.

In case we weren't convinced yet, a few months later a potential landlord suggested he would not rent to us as an unmarried couple (breaking Massachusetts state law). A month later, a tenants' insurance company informed us we would have to buy separate policies, paying double what a married couple would. Finally, we got angry enough to do what we'd been talking about for years.

We decided to found a national organization to provide resources, advocacy and support for people who choose not to marry, are unable to marry, or are in the process of deciding whether marriage is right for them. The Alternatives to Marriage Project was born, and with it the beginning of a national community where none had existed before.

The conversations about what it's like to live without a ring, the challenges and the joys, are just beginning. Unmarried couples may not be harassed by hotel clerks now, but many say they still experience pressure to marry. Breckon remembers the day a newly-married friend of hers told her, "You've got to do this! Why are you holding out this back door in your relationship?"

But without marriage, Breckon says, there is a constant need to confirm her commitment to Smith. She told her friend, "There isn't a back door. The back door isn't open. Just because we're not married doesn't mean there's an escape path."

Things often get stickiest when unmarried couples decide to have children. Relatives turn up the heat, and for many, there is internal pressure to formalize the relationship. Marie Davis, who lives in Vermont and has participated in our Alternatives to Marriage Project, hasn't decided yet whether she wants to marry her partner of three years. But she says it's hard to know whether she could resist the pressure to marry if they decided to have children.

"A friend of mine recently got pregnant," Davis says. "She was married within three or four days of telling her parents. They flew out and did this clandestine little marriage ceremony, and now they're having a big wedding. And it kind of blew me away, like whoooah, those forces are strong!"

But even this last bastion of societal expectation is slowly shifting. Studies find that about one in 10 cohabitors give birth to a child while they live together, and an additional quarter bring children from a previous relationship to the current cohabiting relationship. The newest generation of children of unmarried parents, like Arthur Prokosch, a Brown University student, say it doesn't much matter.

"It never seemed to me to be that big of a deal that my parents weren't married," he says. "I was just a kid. My parents were there. And so I never really thought about it that much."

At a time when it is common for an elementary-school classroom to include children with single, divorced, foster or adoptive, and gay and lesbian parents, children raised with two unmarried parents usually don't see fitting in as a problem. Most say the issue would come up only occasionally, in insignificant ways.

Searching his mind for a way in which his parents' lack of a marriage license affected his life, Prokosch remembers, "Every so often, [a friend] would come over and say, `Can I have another glass of milk, Mrs. Prokosch?' " And his mother would then have to decide whether to explain that she had a different last name than Arthur and his dad and that they weren't married.

Hillary Gross, a 19-year-old from New Jersey, says she and her college friends sometimes joke about families today. "We would tease somebody 'cause their parents are still married -- `Oh, their parents are married! To each other? How weird! ' "

Not just for heterosexuals
When one thinks of gays and lesbians and marriage, images of the recent and ongoing high-profile cases to win the right to marry often come to mind. But while many same-sex couples eagerly await their chance to buy a plane ticket to whatever state first allows them to marry, others see themselves on the forefront of a movement pushing for a new definition of what constitutes a family.

"In my conception, what the gay and lesbian movement has been about has been tolerance of diversity," says Duncan A. Smith of Providence. Although he thinks same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, he says, "It just doesn't seem like marriage really works effectively for the majority of those who decide to marry."

Paula Ettelbrick, a New York attorney, law professor, and activist in the field of "family recognition," points out that since gay and lesbian couples haven't historically had the option of marrying, they have been forced to re-think the very notion of what a family is. "Through our success in creating different kinds of families, we have shown that groups of people can constitute a family without being heterosexual, biologically related, married, or functioning under a male head-of-household," she says. Ettelbrick says LGBT people would be better off continuing to expand how family is defined "rather than confin[ing] ourselves to marriage."

For some in the LGBT community, marriage is even more complicated. Julie Waters of Providence, a pre-operative male-to-female transsexual, is in a relationship with a woman. And right now, she can't afford the expensive surgery involved in the medical transition process.

Since she is still considered a man legally, she points out, "If I could get married to someone whose health insurance happened to cover conditions related to transsexualism, I could get the insurance through them, go through the [sex change] process, and then, in most places, the marriage would be considered null and void after the process." Situations like this demonstrate how the notion of debating whether marriage should be limited to "one man and one woman" may be missing the point.

Employment inclusion
In many ways, American society is warming to the idea that families come in many shapes and sizes. A concrete example of this is the trend toward domestic-partner benefits, an option many employers have implemented to update human-resource definitions of "family" for employees of all sexual orientations.

The most common type of discrimination unmarried people face relates to equal pay for equal work. While most employers offer health insurance to the spouse and children of an employee, it's less common for policies to be available to unmarried partners. Still, the number of companies, colleges, nonprofit organizations, and municipalities offering domestic-partner benefits to their employees is on the rise.

According to a recent poll, 6 percent of large employers now offer domestic-partner benefits, and another 29 percent say they are considering offering them. Although details vary, the plans usually require that couples have lived together for a certain amount of time and that they are jointly responsible for living expenses and are in a caring, committed relationship.

In Rhode Island, two of the top 20 largest employers offer domestic-partner benefits: Brown University and BankBoston. Brown implemented the benefits first, in 1994, and in addition to getting a positive response from staff, the benefits have improved the university's ability to recruit and retain employees, says Brown spokesman Mark Nickel.

As of today, Brown's definition of domestic partners is limited to same-sex partners, because the policy was developed in response to staff requests, says Nickel. "Same-sex domestic partners have almost no avenue open to them, since same-sex marriage is not legal in Rhode Island or any other state," he explains. "At least opposite-sex domestic partners have some options open to them."

But as a result of this same-sex-only policy, Breckon and Smith, a Brown employee, had to weigh their options. At one point, Breckon was in danger of being without health insurance, and Smith says they were frustrated by the fact that, if Breckon had been a same-sex partner, she could have been added to his benefits plan.

Instead, Breckon says, "Briefly, on one Thursday, we considered getting married in a hurry." Breckon, however, was able to get a job quickly, so they ultimately avoided this newest kind of shotgun wedding.

Other employers are moving in the direction of offering domestic-partner benefits that are more inclusive, defining partners without regard for gender or sexual orientation. BankBoston's plan, which took effect just this summer, is an example. Employees now have the option of adding a spouse, dependent children, a domestic partner of any sex, or another adult dependent who meets certain criteria. "We wanted to expand eligibility with the goal to include as much of the diverse workforce as we could," says Martha Muldoon, a senior worklife consultant at BankBoston.

Los Angeles attorney Thomas Coleman is an advocate of broad-based benefits plans like BankBoston's. "I don't see why it is a legitimate business concern to an employer as to whether an opposite-sex couple chooses to be registered domestic partners rather than become legally married," he says. "If the opposite-sex couple is willing to sign the same affidavit and assume the same obligations as the employer has same-sex couples sign, then why should they not be able to do so and get the same employment benefits?"

Despite the "family values" rallying cry of politicos, the trend away from marriage and toward less traditional families is unlikely to change anytime soon. Coleman says, "Theoretically, the Constitution protects freedom of choice in certain highly personal decisions, such as those involving marriage, family, procreation, and child-rearing." And he hopes people's freedom to choose how they will structure their families will be increasingly respected by lawmakers, courts, and businesses.

Sometimes the freedom to choose results in some unusual benefits. Prokosch, son of unmarried parents, says that when telemarketers called and asked for "Mrs. Prokosch," he could tell them honestly, "There's no one here by that name.

"That was quite convenient," he laughs.