So marriage is not singled out by commitment, or permanence, or children, or love. It is also not distinguished by religion: some marriages are religious; but many aren’t. The real distinction between marriage and unmarried partnership is the role of the state. Marriage is a form of relationship recognised and regulated by the state. [...]
In a marriage regime, the legal rights and duties that are given to married people are given to them just because they are married, and not because they are engaging in relationship practices that create vulnerability or are unique to marriage. [...]
The legal rights and duties of marriage have also been profoundly gender-unequal in many countries. English law recognised the possibility of marital rape only in 1991; before then, husbands coercing their wives into sex had committed no crime. Married women in various times and places have had no legal rights to their own children, no rights to own property independently of their husbands, no rights to resist marital violence, no rights to divorce.
Parents may be permitted to authorise their children’s marriage, which typically means forcing young girls to marry older men and thus to submit to sexual abuse and rape. Child marriage of this sort happens not only in parts of the world where arranged marriage is common, such as India, Africa and the Middle East, but also in countries where the dominant form of marriage is romantic. For example, children as young as 10 have been married in the United States in recent years, under laws that allow children to be married if they have parental consent, or a judge’s approval, or are pregnant – even if they are under the age of sexual consent and therefore are pregnant as the result of statutory rape. [...]
State-recognised marriage means treating married couples differently from unmarried couples in stable, permanent, monogamous sexual relationships. It means treating people in sexual relationships differently from those in non-sexual or caring relationships. It means treating those in couples differently from those who are single or polyamorous. It expresses the official view that sexual partnership is both the ultimate goal and the assumed norm. It expresses the assumption that central relationship practices – parenting, cohabitation, financial dependence, migration, care, next-of-kinship, inheritance, sex – are bundled together into one dominant relationship. And so it denies people rights that they need in relation to one practice unless they also engage in all the others and sanctify that arrangement via the state.
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