Why Get Married? Understanding Marriage Persistence in a Changing Relationship Landscape
Zehra YildirimABSTRACT
Objective
Drawing on in‐depth interviews, this study explores why different‐sex couples choose marriage over nonmarital cohabitation.
Background
Studies find that nonmarital cohabitation and other alternatives to marriage have become increasingly common and widely accepted in the United States, yet marriage remains prevalent and aspirational, particularly among college‐educated adults. Existing accounts emphasize marriage's symbolic value as a marker of status and adulthood, its legal and financial benefits, and its normative force as a taken‐for‐granted next step in a committed relationship. We know less about whether and how partners subscribe to these meanings, how they negotiate them in a relationship, or how the decision to marry unfolds as a dyadic process.
Methods
I conducted 34 in‐depth separate interviews with 17 economically advantaged US couples ages 25–40, some married and others in nonmarital cohabitation, to examine how respondents perceived differences between nonmarital cohabitation and marriage.
Results
Partners experienced marriage and nonmarital cohabitation as substantively similar and their relationship as already complete without marriage. They still described marriage as necessary to secure legibility, that is, to make their relationship easily and readily understandable and recognizable to others. This concern was less about judgment from loved ones than about misrecognition by strangers and institutional gatekeepers. Interviewing both partners shows that legibility is a relational property, with its burdens traveling across the dyad and concentrating unevenly between partners.
Conclusion
This study highlights the continuing importance of marriage as an institution in contemporary American society, even amid widely accepted alternatives. The continuity couples experience between nonmarital cohabitation and marriage lends some support to deinstitutionalization accounts. The persistence of legibility concerns, however, suggests that marriage has not lost its institutional force so much as shifted where that force operates, from inside the relationship to the social world surrounding it. As long as marriage remains the most legible form of partnership, opting out carries costs that even the most secure and committed couples feel compelled to avoid.