Marriage and the Institution
Written by the AUREA Team
Word count: 2137
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
If you were born and raised in the United States you’ve heard this story before. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, he buys her a big, shiny, diamond ring and they have a beautiful, expensive wedding. They end up with 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and live happily ever after.
If you were raised in another country those stories might have been a little different. Maybe they didn’t involve a diamond ring and maybe there was never a white picket fence, but one thing probably stayed the same: marriage as the end goal.
Many single and nonpartnering people in the aromantic community have already rejected these stories. We’ve decided they’re not for us, or at the very least not especially realistic. But whether we believe them or not, these stories are pervasive, and the more they get told, the more they shape our daily lives.
So what does it mean when happily ever after gets signed into law? Who loses when that wedding ring becomes a business asset?
Using the United States as a case study, let’s take a look at what happens when romance, and more importantly marriage, become normative, and start to take root in our social, government, and financial institutions.
The economic disadvantage of being single
The institutional inequalities between married and single people in America are felt most readily when reaching for your wallet. More than 1000 U.S laws give legal and financial benefits to married couples, resulting in disparities that can be seen at home, at work, and everywhere in between.
Probably the first of these benefits that comes to mind is tax cuts. Married couples, and in particular middle and upper class married couples, often end up filing income taxes jointly, typically resulting in lower tax rates. While working class couples rarely end up receiving the same tax benefits from marriage, the idea of “marrying for tax purposes” is not an antiquated one. A wedding ring really can benefit you financially come tax season.
A more overarching legal benefit given to married couples comes in the form of Social Security. U.S citizens who are married or have been married often receive far more money from Social Security as a result of funding being allocated not just for individual workers, but for their spouses as well. While this policy isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the same benefits don’t apply to singles who are financially tied to close friends or other platonic partners. As a result, single people get far less benefit from Social Security than their married counterparts, and that disparity shows when you look at the numbers. Federal surveys show that in Americans over the age of 65, those who never married make up 12% of the poor, despite only accounting for 5% of the general elderly population.
For singles who are still working, marital status may also end up affecting the size of their paycheck. Married cis men make an estimated 26% more than single cis men with the same skill set and company position. While cis women who get married don’t reap the same financial benefits, and there isn’t currently any data available on whether or not marriage results in a pay raise for transgender and nonbinary individuals, it’s clear that, at least among cis men, it pays to be married.
Being single can also make it more difficult to access housing. While many states have added clauses to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that prohibit discrimination based on marital status, federal law still allows landlords to deny leases to people based on the fact that they’re single. As a result, unmarried renters in states like Virginia may have an especially difficult time finding an apartment, and prospective homeowners aren’t much better off. Because banks look for either high or dual incomes when giving out mortgages, singles are also far less likely to receive a mortgage than a married couple.
For the aromantic community, this has some troubling implications. While some aros do end up getting married, the reality of it is that many aromantics prefer to stay single, or if they do have a partner, they may not want that relationship to result in marriage. If marital status can have such a strong impact on individual finances, many aromantics are being given an automatic setback.
Despite the severity of these issues, there is a lot of hope to be had when it comes to getting rid of these disparities. Activists like Bella De Paulo, who coined the term singlism, have spent the last several years spreading awareness about the stigmas and financial setbacks singles face. Their work has resulted in the creation of resources like unmarried.org, a website that single people can refer to when navigating government and financial institutions. Hopefully, as more people begin to recognize the organizations and fight for the equal treatment of singles, the financial burden placed on unmarried people will lessen.
Marriage and Medicine
The setbacks people face due to being unmarried don’t end with economics. Most private and government institutions have rules and guidelines that benefit married couples, and one of the institutions most notorious for this is the medical industry.
One of the most obvious examples of this comes up when deciding who gets to make your healthcare decisions. While some states do allow you to choose an orally designated surrogate decision maker in the case that you’re unable to make healthcare decisions for yourself, many others don’t. What this means in many cases is that while married people typically end up with a spouse (who they presumably chose to be with) as a decision maker, singles and other unmarried people most often end up with a close blood relative as their decision maker, whether they’re okay with said relative making decisions for them or not.
Creating a Living Will or Advance Directive form can help alleviate this problem to a certain extent, by allowing you to state your medical wishes on paper and appoint an attorney-in-fact to make decisions for you. However, while Advanced Directives can make this process somewhat more equitable for single people, the laws around these documents vary by state. As a result, any patient who needs to be moved across state lines for medical care may still end up with someone other than their attorney-in-fact making medical decisions for them. Government policy changes like creating a federally recognized Advance Directive could be a potential solution to this problem, but as of now there has been very little action taken towards fixing this situation.
Marital status can also affect the quality of care that you receive in a medical setting. Studies show that when cancer patients are unmarried they are less likely to be offered more aggressive radiotherapy treatments, and, as a result, are less likely to make a healthy recovery. While doctors often attribute this discrepancy to the fact that single people don’t have someone who can support them during recovery, this assertion doesn’t take into account the fact that many single people have strong social networks, religious communities, or nearby family members who can support them during treatment. Researchers like Dr. Joan Del Fattore believe that the solution to this problem is education and self-advocacy, suggesting that patients talk with their doctors about the medical biases against single people in order to increase awareness and improve the care they receive.
While singles are certainly not the only group that has to contend with a biased and unfair medical industry, from an aromantic perspective these discrepancies are a point of concern. Single aromantics, of which there are many, and aromantics in non-traditional relationships, are both heavily affected by these policies and biases within the medical industry. As the aromantic community grows, it’s important that we focus on sharing and promoting the information single people need to effectively navigate medical institutions.
Romance in war and diplomacy
Marriage also plays an important role in our foreign affairs, and for diplomats and soldiers, marital status can affect both their salary and their ability to rise in ranks.
In her book Bananas, Beaches and Bases, Cynthia Enloe discusses the extent to which international diplomacy depends on the institution of marriage. She points out that diplomats frequently rely not just on negotiations in a conference room but also on dinner parties in a more domestic environment when making deals with other nations. Creating the kind of welcoming home environment that’s conducive to improving global political relations takes a significant amount of work and this work typically falls not on the diplomats themselves but on their spouses, most of whom are women.
This creates an atmosphere where not just individual diplomats, but governments as a whole, are deeply reliant on diplomatic spouses when trying to accomplish political tasks. As a result, married diplomats rise in rank more quickly, and with more frequency than those who are unmarried, with straight cis married men, in particular, being given a strong advantage within it comes to improving their standing within the government.
On another side of American foreign policy, you may find similar benefits being given to married soldiers. Because of military programs like the BAH, married servicemen in the U.S make more and get better benefits than their single counterparts. While this disparity is often attributed to the fact that married soldiers and their families have higher living expenses than their single counterparts, this kind of marriage-based pay is apparently beneficial enough that it’s led to the surprisingly common practice of temporary contract marriages among enlisted military members. When marriage becomes such a benefit that people start getting hitched just for the money, it’s worth wondering how equitable that difference in pay really is.
While some aromantics probably won’t end up joining the military or becoming high-level diplomats, the few who do will have programs and biases like these to contend with. Many positions within both the U.S government and governments around the world are set up in a way that disproportionately benefit married service members and, as a result, disadvantage many aromantics who may wish to enter into diplomacy or the military.
The challenge of single parent adoption
While single parent adoption isn’t as difficult as it used to be, married couples still have an advantage when it comes to navigating the adoption system.
While single parent adoption is now legal in all 50 states, private and religious adoption agencies are still allowed to give preference to married couples. Singles who wish to adopt abroad must contend with the fact that many countries have yet to legalize single parent adoption. As a result, singles looking to adopt are often limited when it comes to things like picking an adoption agency and which children they are eligible to adopt.
Single parents are also less likely to meet the financial requirements for adoption, and this is especially true when trying to adopt a child with special medical needs. While financial adoption assistance benefits are given on both the federal and state level to allow low-income people to adopt, single people still get turned away from adoption agencies due to finances with more frequency than married couples.
Single parent adoption is also a notably gendered issue. While about 26% of adoptive parents are single women, only about 3% are men. This is attributed to a bias within the child welfare system, where adoption agencies and social workers believe that children need mothers more than fathers and view men as less safe for children to be around.
For single aromantics who want children, these are some distinct disadvantages. As a larger community, it then becomes worth asking why these disparities continue even as single parent households become more socially acceptable, and what can be done to change them. While biases within the child welfare system certainly don’t affect everyone in the aromantic community, it hurts enough aros that it should still be considered a community issue.
Looking at the global context
This in-depth look at marital bias within the U.S is just one small example of a much larger, global problem. The story of marriage as a necessary goal exists in almost every nation on earth, and in all of those countries, it finds its way into laws and institutional guidelines. As an international organization, AUREA encourages members of the aromantic community to try to understand this problem on a larger scale.
Below you can find a set of resource lists for learning about and understanding the issues of institutional marital bias in other parts of the world:
Information on couples’ rights and obligations in the EU
Statistics regarding adoption in the EU
List of South African marriage amendment acts
A study on advanced directives (living wills) in Japanese nursing homes
Adoption rules for single women in India
Information about adoption in Australia