Marriage in this Secular Age

I got married last year! Here’s a couple of thoughts about what marriage means to the capitalist and state institutions which govern my life.

When I got married, I built a strange picture of how the state perceived marriage based off of the requirements. A county issued a license, and a marriage document was to be returned to the state signed by an officiant and two witnesses. The officiant was to be a minister, or maybe a judge, but the state was perfectly happy to call anyone a minister who filled out some paperwork online with one of the many not-for-profit organizations who do that sort of thing. I, being me, read all of the statutes in detail. The statutes mostly were concerned with banning people from marrying twice. So, in summary, the state wants three people to agree that they saw you get married, and the state only wants you married to one person at a time. They clearly prefer that the marriage ceremony be of religious significance to you, but they really don’t want to take responsibility for regulating what counts as religious or equivalent. Interesting.

So now I’m married, and my wife and I are the heirs to an institution with origins in a culture much different than ours. It was once socially acceptable for a man and woman to live together only if they were married, but society has mostly accepted unwed cohabitation. That said, there are all sorts of little barriers against doing things for or with another person which dissolve in the face of matrimony. State laws in the US say that if you rent a car to a spouse, both members of a married couple get to drive it with the same protections under law. You have to pay extra for that if you aren’t married. (Although a fun fact is that many rental companies will automatically give that privilege to any two people who have the same address on their license.) By law, a car insurance policy in my state automatically applies to a person’s spouse if they have one. For some reason, states really seem to want private companies to make sure your spouse can drive any car you can drive. Moving to more pure government interactions, filing taxes jointly means that you can divide two people’s income between them so that if one makes a lot of money relative to the other, the income is treated as two people with moderate income instead of one person with small income and another with large income. Because the percentage of money taken gets higher as income goes up, the net percentage of a married couple’s income taken for taxes is often less than the sum of what they would have paid separately. In the realm of healthcare, I’ve heard people complain about the fact that they can’t have someone pick up prescriptions for them at a pharmacy, but the second you say you’re picking up medicine for your spouse, all questions disappear. It is well known that marriage will grant you essentially unlimited access to your spouse should they end up in a hospital.

To try to summarize that paragraph, private companies and government entities will often treat your spouse as you when deciding whether your spouse is allowed to do something. Private companies and government entities will let your spouse make decisions for you that they usually wouldn’t let another person make for you.