Marriage, now and then

Last updated on: June 30, 2015 at 3:10 pm by Jane the Actuary

Marriage, now and then 2015-06-30T15:10:08-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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ADDED: Bonus hypothetical question below!

This is that sort of post in which I think about things a little, and invite you to think with me.

What is marriage, in our legal system, now, in the year 2015? Discarding issues of children:

1) It provides a means of becoming mutual next-of-kin to someone not biologically related to you. This has all manner of implications, most notably medical decision-making and visitation rights, as well as an inheritance presumption. (Could this be adapted to non-marital and/or polygamous relationships? Probably not in the newfangled polyamorous “everyone loves everyone else” form, but you could have a “next of kin declaration” that’s not mutual — e.g., wife A and wife B both declare that their next-of-kin is husband C; but husband C would have to select a single spouse as his next-of-kin.)

2) It provides a commitment by each person in the pair to provide support for the other — and a trade-off by the government: certain benefits such as joint filing status (that is, where it is a benefit), government involvement at dissolution to ensure a fair split of assets, etc., while at the same time, the household income is assessed as a whole to determine whether the family is eligible for welfare-type benefits.

But the “then”? Once upon a time, it was taken as a given that the wife was a stay-at-home mother, with little or no earnings. That’s the reason for Social Security spousal and death benefits –the assumption that they’re going to a needy wife. In other parts of the world, stay-at-home parents earn benefits in their own right, for those years that they’re out of the labor force, rather than getting a percentage of their spouse’s benefit, and there’s no reason Social Security in the U.S. couldn’t be updated to reflect this, and eliminate any unfairness about married couples receiving greater benefits than singles. For that matter, it used to be a given that household finances and assets were always jointly held, and I have the impression that the presumption of mutual support implicit in #2 isn’t always the case any longer, at least based on periodic Ask Amy articles in which the letter-writer complains that they don’t have joint finances and higher-earning hubby spends his cash on golf outings and new clothes while she’s scrimping to pay her half of the mortgage.

And the other “then”? The presumption that any child born in the marriage was the offspring of the two spouses. Does this continue to make sense, as opposed to simply listing as father whoever claims fatherhood and/or is proven as father?

So your turn:

what “benefits of marriage” are there that don’t fit into categories #1 or #2, and does it make sense to continue these in the year 2015? And, with respect to #2, expectations of mutual support, how should that look in 2015?

And here’s the hypothetical question:

Imagine that the government, wanting to get out of the whole business entirely, sets up a replacement system:

Any couple that wishes can file a Mutual Next of Kin Declaration. Poly folk can file generic Next of Kin Declarations, no mutuality required. Call it a NOK in keeping with the American love of acronyms.

Any couple (or other group) can file a Declaration of Mutual Support, which binds them financially — with all debts, all earnings, all assets shared, and dissolution requiring a court order dividing it all. And even without such a declaration, a NOK pair living in the same household would be treated as a couple for any government benefit requiring an income test.

To make these commitments even further committed, either declaration can be dissolved, but then neither party can enter into a new declaration for a specified length of time — 2 or 3 or 5 years or the like.

How do you think people would respond? A traditional set of wedding vows paired with a trip to the county clerk to file these declarations? A NOK first, and a DMS (yeah, you’d need a more acronymable phrase) only if you work out the math and it makes sense? Or just a NOK, because mutual support is too demanding and risky?

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