A World Without Marriage: Embracing New Horizons in Relationships

There has been a huge change in the relationship landscape in recent years. Marriage is losing some of the traditions it’s held for decades. People are getting divorced with alarming frequency. Others are spurning marriage and creating other forms of families instead. It’s already hard to see how people will have to practise marriage in the years and decades to come. So how will things change when we no longer need to? What will the end of marriage look like? In this blog post, I’ll explore how a marriage-free world might feel. I will explore the future of human relationships, societal evolution, and what it means to be free.

The way the norms of our society have changed in recent years has made the prospect of a world without marriage a genuinely hot topic and the near future seems to be one in which divorce rates continue to climb and the idea of a single, legal, lifelong commitment doesn’t seem to work for everyone and not everyone thinks that they need to be two people living together for the rest of their lives.

in this blog post, we’ll be discussing new ways of living the relationship, in which the demise of the marital imperative transforms the very ways that people relate to one another. We will see, in particular, how new kinds of intimacy might come into play once cohabitation and long-term dating become the norm; how the taboo against non-monogamous relationships is breaking down; and how, as the marital bond weakens, people will be freer to adapt their partnerships into unique forms, matching their own values, emotional states, and purposes in being together.

Equally, we will consider wider social transformations that would accompany an end to marriage – how legal arrangements and social institutions would change to reflect new forms of relationship. We shall examine what would happen to the family and its members; how property laws might change and how the state might address inheritance without relying on marriage; and how more people might adopt different forms of chosen family as a safety net without the structure of marriage.

While a post-marital world no doubt promises many delights, there are also potential pitfalls I want to explore just what that means for people and society. I want to look at the financial and legal implications of being unmarried, without enjoying the legal rights and protections of marriage, and how children might be affected if a world sans marriage had consequences for the way they are raised.

Our hope is that our exploration of this question will help to deepen the conversation over the kind of world we can have without marriage, how relationships would change in such a world, what it would mean for our society, and the personal freedoms people would want to exercise in such a world.

Redefining Relationships

There would no longer exist anything as homogenous as ‘the family’ or ‘a relationship’, freed from the institutional obligations of marriage. Instead, they’d be the sum total of what the people involved wanted and could sustain in (one hopes) harmony with their personal value systems and emotional and physical needs. Cohabitation, long-term dating, and polyamorous relationships would all be more welcome, providing no template with which to work.

The Rise of Individual Autonomy

There would, perhaps, be greater freedom for individuals to think of, and live out, their lives according to their own terms. The pressure of marriage as a rite of passage into adulthood – to embark on the same sort of relationship, with the same label, for the same reasons – would lift. In turn, people would be better placed to pursue the ups and downs of adulthood as they choose: investing in their own lifelong development, fulfilling work-related ambitions or creative passions, and growing as individuals.

Evolving Social Norms

The shape of our societal norms and expectations would change considerably in a post-marriage world. Without marriage, communities and institutions would only begin modifying to support and make room for a much wider variety of relationship structures.

In another shift, non-marital partnerships would be granted legal and emotional legitimacy. Right now, marriage has a legal status, one that comes with benefits such as tax advantages, spousal inheritance rights, and healthcare decision-making. In an amae-free world, there would be a need to create alternative legal structures that could grant non-married partners the rights and responsibilities enjoyed by married couples. This could take the form of various legal agreements between partners, such as a cohabitation contract or partnership agreement, which would allow for a particular set of rights and obligations to accompany a committed relationship.

Beside this, societal norms around relationships would alter too. Notions of chosen family would proliferate as established communities of individuals form, and sustain, bonds with others, outside of matrimonial and legal bounds. This expansive approach to kinship would foster a sense of belonging, towards non-traditional but deeply connected ‘relatives’. Communities would be more accommodating to significant others, making space for diverse forms of relationship.

By normalising the break-up of nuclear families, this shift would help not just those people who would, in the future, not be married but in some other lived relationship course. As a society, we will have moved toward a freer, more open-minded and accepting system in which different forms of love and companionship are not regarded as inferior to or worse than marriage, but are celebrated for being different. This attitudinal shift would permit the free exercise of choices that are not ‘marriage equivalent’, and create a more flexible model of society.

Thirdly, the biology of family would also be transformed. Widespread access to birth control, surrogacy, IVF, gay marriage and adoption would mean that the ‘nuclear family’ as we now know it, centred around a married couple with their children, wouldn’t be the only model of family life. Chosen families – created when once-strangers formed deep emotional bonds and stood by one another through thick and thin – would become even more important. People would ‘come out’ about their chosen families to show support for something that went beyond traditional ideas of blood or legal relations and reimagined the meaning of family life.

To sum up, a world without marriage would necessitate a reformation of our social institutions and expectations of one another’s romantic relationships. Communities and institutions alike would uphold the legal and emotional validation of non-married romantic unions; families would recognise and support new modes of kinship, and embrace what have come to be known as our chosen families; and society as a whole would grow more welcoming of diverse relationship choices, one in which people could exist and coexist in redefined worlds without the social construct of marriage. Marriage, or at least the practice of it, would gradually be replaced – much to its benefit – with wider and deeper realms of freedom, respect and understanding, where individuals could exercise autonomy in crafting lives of happiness and fulfilment outside of traditional marital commitments.

Emotional Well-being and Relationship Satisfaction

One of the strong associations with the institution of marriage is emotional security and stability. Would a so-called world without marriage promote a focus on relationship quality, rather than its legal status? For starters, free from the many arbitrary sociological norms of marriage, freed from the pressure to adhere strictly to such norms, would people be motivated to ‘get their relationship right’? Would they strive to make their marriages as emotionally rewarding as possible? Would they communicate and confront problems in healthier ways than do many currently married spouses? Would they value emotional intimacy, self-sufficiency and experiential growth even more than they do now?

Financial and Legal Implications

The legal and financial privileges that marriage offers would be less easily replaced in a non-marriage world: inheritance rights and the ability to file the taxes of a surviving partner, to name just two examples, would require other solutions. But perhaps a non-marriage world would develop new legal protections and benefits, provided on the same terms to all couples.

Conclusion

Without marriage, we could all have the chance to shape relationships in ways that are based on mutual consent, emotional connection and personal development. Though sometimes painful to do, it would foster more inclusive worlds, with greater autonomy and emotional wellbeing. We would all have greater freedom to build the different relationships that we want, not the ones that we feel duty-bound to have for the sake of societal norms.