Unwedded bliss

One of the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project talks about the deep-seated American fear that shacking up will lead to the fall of Western civilization.

By Sheerly Avni

Jan 10, 2003 | When the American Law Institute (ALI) released a 1,200-page report last month that effectively called for revolution in the legal consideration of marriage and family, Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot had a good laugh and a lusty cheer at their kitchen table in Boston.

As founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which provides resources and information to unmarried couples, and themselves a happily unmarried couple, Miller and Solot had a very big win on their hands. The ALI, an influential group of lawyers and judges, had devoted 10 years to its report, and the document was widely expected to be a new guide for family lawyers and courts across the country. Not only did the report acknowledge that families and the people who head them have changed, it made specific recommendations for how to accommodate those changes in the practice of family law. If followed, the report's recommendations would radically alter the legal status of cohabiting couples, extending to them many of the same rights as married couples.

All of which made Miller and Solot, who co-wrote the book "Unmarried to Each Other," very happy. Presumably, the report also delighted the rest of America's 11 million cohabitating couples. Not so thrilled were conservatives and proponents of traditional "family values," who denounced the report as an assault on marriage, an institution currently being promoted by the government at great expense.

Marshall Miller, who, with Solot, has championed "unmarriage" for five years, spoke with Salon from his home office about the potential impact of the ALI report, the history of marriage in the United States, and the joys of planning your own commitment ceremony.

What was your initial response to the ALI report?

I sat down at our kitchen table to read the summary files of the report from Lexis-Nexis, and my partner Dorian was laughing, because I was cheering at each page. It's an impressive document, a decade in the making, written by people who have spent a lot of time studying family law and seeing firsthand what goes on in family court. These are people who really understand what's going on there. Like it or not, unmarried partners are in family court -- the divorce court judges who advised the report said that 20 percent of their caseloads are unmarried couples.

There's nothing new about informal unions -- relationships that aren't on file at City Hall. They've existed alongside formal marriage throughout history. What's new in only this last century (and I didn't realize this until I started reading the history) is the idea that what matters is the license -- whether or not people are legally married. Basically, before the Victorians in the 19th century, if you acted married, people treated you like other married couples. The focus often tended to be on the reality of day-to-day life. Who's putting the kids to bed, paying the bills, caring for the elderly?

The American Law Institute report is recommending a return to the kind of system that has existed in most of the world for most of history, a system where the focus is on treating people fairly based on the relationship and partnership they have, not based on formal marital status.

What do you think of the response to the report so far? Will it bring changes?

I'm excited by it -- front-page coverage in the New York Times, a big article in USA Today. I hope it sparks a serious national discussion about these issues not just in the news, but in the halls of justice and on the floor of Congress. There is every indication that unmarriage will only continue to increase, so it's about time we started talking about how the legal system can catch up.

After all, people who care about the well-being of families have had to consider the evidence: Nowadays most couples who are walking down the aisle are already sharing a home. There are 11 million people living together unmarried in the United States. And 40 percent of births to so-called single mothers are actually babies born to two-parent cohabiting families -- the mothers are single only in the legal sense.

One response to the evidence of tremendous growth in cohabitation would be to recognize unmarried partners as a constituency, listen to their needs thoughtfully, and give them the tools to help make their relationships successful, married or unmarried. That's at the heart of our work, and that approach is evident in the proposals of the American Law Institute.

The other possible response is to shut your eyes tight and wish that cohabitation would just go away, or direct all your energy into telling people how important marriage is. It's one thing to hear that from Jerry Falwell -- Dorian has had the pleasure of debating him on TV -- but it's quite another when that thinking is popular among those who have the president's ear as Ron Haskins does. He's a senior advisor for welfare policy in the Bush administration who recently told the Washington Times, "Cohabiting is a plague and we should do what we can do discourage it."

Next Page: Friends and family were asking, nudging, hinting: "When are you going to get married?"

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