Want Financial Security In America? Better Get Married.

Vicky Leta for Vox

Couples get hundreds of legal and economic privileges single people don’t. If that feels unfair, it’s because it is.

Maria loves being a single mom. She doesn’t have to share decision-making with anyone, and she treasures her close bond with her teenage daughter, who will never have to worry about her parents getting divorced, because Maria has never married.

But Maria, who is in her 50s, also pays a price for her single status. Somewhat ironically, she pays more in taxes than “if I had a stay-at-home spouse providing free child care and housekeeping,” she told social scientist Bella DePaulo in her recent book, Single at Heart: The Power, Freedom, and Heart-Filling Joy of Single Life. Though she owns her home, people often assume she got it in a divorce. When her daughter went to summer camp, she had to send a certified birth certificate to prove she had permission to go. No two-parent families had to go to such lengths.

In ways large and small, Maria and the millions of other single people in America pay a price for the widely held assumption that everyone is — or should be — part of a couple. As Maria knows when she files her taxes, it’s more than just social pressure. “Our legal system is really built for married couples,” said Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center.

Cohen, drawing on the work of scholar Eleanor Wilkinson, calls this bias “compulsory coupledom,” which she describes as “the notion that a long-term, monogamous relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood.” Compulsory coupledom is not just a social construct — for more than a century, tax, welfare, health policy, and more have enshrined the couple as the fundamental unit of American life. If you’re not part of one, you’ll spend countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your life navigating a system that was never designed for you.

That system grants married people more than 1,000 legal benefits that single people cannot access, according to DePaulo. These include tax breaks on inheritances; the ability to open a spousal IRA and draw on it without tax penalty; immigration rights; and the ability to jointly adopt children.

“No one should have to get married in order to have access to the hundreds of benefits and protections that married people get just because they are married,” DePaulo said in an email.

The push to disentangle American economic and social policy from compulsory coupledom is more urgent than ever as Americans marry later — if they marry at all.

Millennials have long followed their own timetable when it comes to marriage and family, for example. As of 2019, only 44 percent of millennials were married, compared with 53 percent of Gen X-ers and 61 percent of baby boomers at the same age. Many others are experimenting with other ways to live their lives that don’t put romantic relationships at the center. And even if they eventually marry, Americans are spending longer stretches of their adult lives single: Nearly 700,000 couples get divorced every year, and about half of women over 65 are single, often having outlived their partners.

Some have responded to these trends by arguing that American law and culture need to put more emphasis on marriage, not less. University of Virginia sociology professor Brad Wilcox, author of the recent book Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, has said commentators and schools should do more to convince people to marry, especially before they have children.

Melissa S. Kearney, an economics professor and author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, wrote in the New York Times last September of a class divide in American family life, with less-educated people more likely to raise children in single-parent homes, resulting in less economic stability.

Rather than lead Americans back into marriage, however, what if the US could adapt law and policy to fit the way that people, increasingly, structure their lives? That will require legislators to rethink the design of systems like Social Security and health insurance, and to acknowledge the ways “compulsory coupledom” harms people across countless domains of life.

“Single status is the most important policy issue we’re not discussing as a nation,” said Jessica Moorman, a professor of communication at Wayne State University who studies how Black women in Detroit define and navigate singlehood. “It touches on everything.”

Contemporary America was designed for couples

Many of the privileges now associated with marriage emerged in the 20th century. At that time, “marriage was a microcosmic welfare state, a unit where men and women exchanged not only wedding bands but caregiving and financial support,” Cohen writes in The Other Significant Others. “The assumption was that husbands and wives were interdependent, and the state stepped in to encourage their mutual support or replace it once it was gone.”

Treating married couples as a unit was logistically convenient, since most people were married; it was also a moral imperative for lawmakers, who wanted to discourage “fornication” and out-of-wedlock births, Cohen writes.

Offering benefits through the family was also more palatable than creating broad anti-poverty programs, which would have been politically unpopular. Many of the supports tied to marriage emerged as substitutes for more universal policies, said Stephanie Coontz, an emeritus professor of history and family studies at the Evergreen State College and author of the forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage.

One example was the widow’s pension, established by state governments beginning in the 1910s to help mothers provide for their children after the death of their husbands. In the 1930s, state-level widows’ pensions were replaced by federal Social Security, which gave benefits to children and spouses of workers after their deaths.

To this day, Social Security survivor benefits are tied to marriage. Single people have no ability to leave benefits to someone else, and cannot claim anyone else’s.

Contemporary income tax policy, too, was set up in the 20th century with married couples in mind — specifically “male breadwinner families,” according to Coontz. Today, the tax code still disadvantages some high-income dual-earner married couples and all single earners.

Employer-provided health insurance (also a substitute for the more universal benefits available in other wealthy countries) is another area in which couples have an advantage — people can extend their health insurance to a spouse and, in some cases, to a domestic partner, as Cohen points out, but not to “the closest of friends.” That allows married people to “drop in and out of the workforce as needed or seek out jobs that don’t provide full-time insurance,” Anne Helen Petersen wrote for Vox in 2021. “Single people, particularly single people with chronic health conditions, have fewer options, even after the rollout of Obamacare.”

Marriage proponents have pointed out policies that penalize married couples, especially at the lower end of the economic spectrum; Wilcox writes that programs such as food stamps and Medicaid can sometimes disincentivize marriage. But pro-marriage commentators often advocate for the institution in part because it confers economic benefits.

It’s not just that two people make more money — the structure of American society actively costs money for singles. According to one 2013 estimate, an unmarried woman making $40,000 per year could pay nearly $500,000 more in taxes, housing costs, and other expenses over her lifetime than a married woman, Petersen wrote. An unmarried woman making $80,000 could pay more than $1 million. Given rising housing and consumer goods prices over the past decade, these disparities would likely be even bigger today.

Single people pay a heavy price

Couples, meanwhile, enjoy the social and cultural benefits of being considered the norm. “Coupled people, especially married people, are typically regarded as superior to single people, who are believed to live lesser lives,” DePaulo told Vox. “People who marry are celebrated (often lavishly), respected, and admired. Single people are more likely to be pitied.”

Indeed, people who are single are often assumed to be desperate, dysfunctional, and unhappy, Moorman said. For Black women, these stereotypes intersect with racism. Single Black mothers, in particular, are stigmatized as hypersexual, irresponsible, or “taking advantage of the system,” Moorman said. As a result of such discrimination, single Black moms “don’t receive the same kind of care or treatment that married women will” in medical or other institutional settings.

Moreover, single people are not specifically protected under federal housing or employment discrimination law. Though some states do ban discrimination based on marital status, in others, a landlord, for example, can refuse to rent to people because they are not married.

For decades, same-sex couples were denied the many protections associated with marriage in America. With the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, however, these couples gained the right to marry and, with it, the ability to access Social Security survivor payments and a host of other benefits. Single people and couples who do not wish to marry, however, are still locked out of many of the privileges couples enjoy, especially since, as Cohen notes in her book, many states eliminated domestic partnerships and civil unions once same-sex marriage became legal.

“Marriage is still the only legal partnership available in most US states, leaving many committed relationships without adequate protection under the law,” Cohen writes.

The norm of couplehood also limits the kinds of lives people can imagine for themselves, experts say. For example, people might forego having children because they haven’t met a partner, without considering possibilities such as raising kids with a friend, Cohen said. They might spend energy dating when they’re actually quite happy being single, like one divorced woman who told Cohen that she thought she “had a hole in her life that she needed to fill” — until she realized that one of her close friendships already filled it.

Getting rid of “compulsory couplehood” is good for everyone

Progress starts with an examination of the many policies that make social and economic benefits contingent on marriage. Congress should broaden the Family and Medical Leave Act to allow people to take time to care for those beyond their immediate family, DePaulo said. Similarly, housing policy could incentivize the construction of more types of homes to accommodate more types of relationships — many of Moorman’s research participants “want to start a commune” and “live in this Golden Girls house” as they age, she said. Medical care, too, needs to be more accessible to single people, who may have more trouble finding someone to pick them up from a procedure like a colonoscopy or surgery, or to care for them afterward.

A variety of legal reforms could protect people in non-marital relationships, Cohen said. Some legal scholars recommend a kind of registry where people could designate someone to handle legal and medical decisions if they become incapacitated — essentially “the legal equivalent of an emergency contact,” Cohen explained.

Another option would be a legal alternative to marriage, similar to domestic partnership laws but with the flexibility for people to choose the rights and obligations they want to share — like medical decision-making — and even to spread those rights out among multiple people. A 2009 Colorado law, for example, allows any two adults to enter into a designated beneficiary agreement that includes rights in 16 categories, most around health or finance, Cohen writes in her book.

Reforms to paid leave and other policies help everyone, including couples, Coontz said. Twentieth-century work and family policies were built on the idea that workers were men with stay-at-home wives to handle chores and child care. Changing those policies now helps single people, but also anyone without a stay-at-home spouse (which is most Americans). “The more that you support people in their increasingly independent work lives and large parts of their lives that they do live single, the more you are actually supporting them once they marry,” Coontz said.

On a broader, cultural level, Americans need “more pluralism in what a good life looks like,” Cohen told Vox — a reduction in stigma, but also a shared sense that multiple paths, single or partnered, are valid.

Update, March 11, 7 am: This story, originally published on Apple News on February 12, has been updated to reflect recent developments.