Friendship marriages and platonic life partners

Rhaina Cohen's book, drawing on interviews with people who have organized their lives around primary friendships, documents the form's contemporary existence with care. The subjects include pairs who bought homes together, raised children together, and made medical decisions for one another, without considering themselves a romantic couple. The reporting establishes that the form is not rare, that it is sustainable across decades, and that the people in it generally describe their lives as flourishing. The book has been widely reviewed and has prompted public conversation about the place of friendship in adult life. The conversation includes people who would not enter a friendship marriage themselves but who recognize the over-investment in romantic partnership the book critiques. The visibility Cohen has helped to produce is one of the conditions for the next stage of institutional engagement with the form.

Lillian Faderman's scholarship on romantic friendships in earlier centuries, particularly among women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provides the historical depth that situates the contemporary friendship marriage as part of a longer pattern. Faderman documents women who lived together for decades, who were referred to as spouses by their contemporaries, who shared property and households, and whose relationships were variously sexual, non-sexual, or unknown to historians. The historical depth matters because it counters the impression that friendship marriages are a recent invention. They are a recent rearticulation of a long-standing form, and the rearticulation is occurring in a legal and cultural environment that the previous incarnations did not have to navigate. The work of Faderman and similar historians has provided a deep reference point for contemporary advocates and writers.

The Boston marriage, a nineteenth-century New England term for two women living together as a household, has been studied as one of the documented historical forms of female friendship-marriage. The term covered a range of relationships, from clearly romantic to clearly platonic, and contemporary discussions sometimes use it as a reference for friendship-marriage forms. The descendant forms in the contemporary period are not identical to the Boston marriage. They occur in different legal and social contexts, they include men as well as women, and they navigate a culture that the nineteenth-century form did not have to navigate. But the lineage is useful, and naming it gives contemporary friendship marriages a place in a recognizable tradition. Some advocates have argued for reviving the term, while others prefer new vocabulary that is not tied to a specific historical setting. The vocabulary work is ongoing.

In some jurisdictions, one adult can adopt another adult, creating a legal parent-child relationship between two consenting adults who are not biological relatives. The mechanism has been used by friendship marriages and by same-sex couples in eras before marriage was available, as a way to establish legal kinship that produces inheritance rights, hospital visitation, and some other protections. The workaround is imperfect. It does not produce marital tax benefits, immigration sponsorship rights, or many other marital protections. It can be reversed only by complex procedures. And it imposes a parent-child framing on a relationship that is not parental in any other sense. But for some friendship marriages, the workaround is the best available instrument, and its continued use illustrates the gap between the relationships people are building and the legal forms available to recognize them.

Other friendship marriages assemble a bundle of legal instruments to approximate marital protections: wills, durable powers of attorney, health care proxies, beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and insurance policies, cohabitation agreements, joint property titles. The bundle approach gives substantial practical protection but is expensive to assemble and maintain, requires legal advice many couples cannot afford, and produces protection that is weaker than marriage because it is not portable across jurisdictions and is more easily contested. The reliance on the bundle approach is a feature of the patchwork around friendship marriages. The collective task of designing better instruments, perhaps a registered friendship partnership analogous to civil unions, is one direction the next phase of recognition could take. Some advocates have proposed exactly this, drawing on the civil union template.

Some friendship marriages include children, raised jointly by the two friends. The legal status of the non-biological parent varies by jurisdiction and by the specific arrangements made at the child's birth or adoption. Second-parent adoption, where available, can secure the legal relationship. Where it is not available, the non-biological parent may be a legal stranger, with the same vulnerabilities the civil-union-era same-sex couples faced. The children themselves grow up in a household that the surrounding institutions may not recognize, and they may have to explain their family structure to teachers, doctors, and others. The experience of these children is an early signal of how the form is being absorbed culturally. Some report unremarkable experiences; others report repeated explanation, occasional hostility, and the kind of expert-witness role to one's own family that earlier non-conforming families have produced.

Immigration law in most jurisdictions does not recognize friendship marriages for purposes of spousal sponsorship. The marriage track requires a romantic relationship, and immigration interviews probe for evidence of romantic involvement. Friendship marriages between citizens of different countries face the same problem that same-sex binational couples faced before marriage equality: the legal instruments that would otherwise sustain the partnership across borders are not available. Some friendship marriages have entered legal marriages specifically to navigate immigration, which raises questions about the integrity of immigration screening procedures that presume to test for the romantic nature of a relationship. The immigration dimension is one of the sharpest pressure points for the form, and it is one where reform will be slow because it intersects with restrictionist immigration politics.

Friendship marriages do not appear identically across cultures. Some cultures have stronger traditions of formalized friendship, sworn brotherhood or sisterhood, and chosen kinship that provide cultural templates the contemporary form can draw on. Other cultures have weaker traditions and the form encounters more friction. The history of queer chosen family, particularly in Black and Latino communities during the AIDS crisis and earlier, established that non-biological kinship networks could sustain people across decades when biological families had withdrawn. The contemporary friendship marriage form draws on this lineage, often consciously. The chosen family precedent provides cultural and practical resources, and the collective work of the friendship marriage form benefits from the prior work of those communities. Acknowledging the lineage is important, and some recent writing has done so explicitly.

The cultural elevation of romantic partnership above all other adult relationships has been critiqued under the label of amatonormativity, a term introduced by the philosopher Elizabeth Brake. The critique argues that amatonormativity distorts policy, culture, and individual life choices by assuming that romantic partnership is the default and goal of adult life. Friendship marriages are one of the forms whose visibility challenges amatonormativity. The collective dimension is the cumulative effect of multiple challenges, of which friendship marriages are one, in shifting the cultural default away from the romantic-supremacist position. The shift is gradual, and the default has not been displaced, but the existence of articulated alternatives changes the landscape of possible choices for people whose lives do not fit the default.

Nancy Polikoff's argument, that legal protections should be detached from the marriage category and made available across a wider range of relationships, applies directly to friendship marriages. Polikoff has argued that the protections marriage provides, hospital visitation, inheritance, tax treatment, immigration sponsorship, should be available on the basis of the practical realities of relationships rather than on the basis of the romantic frame. The argument has been made for decades but has gained little traction at the level of major reform. The growing visibility of friendship marriages may give the argument new political traction, because the population of people seeking protection for non-romantic primary relationships is now visible enough to be a constituency. Whether the constituency translates into legislative change remains to be seen, and depends on coalition-building that is just beginning.

The term platonic life partner has gained currency alongside friendship marriage, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes with finer distinctions. Platonic emphasizes the non-sexual and non-romantic nature of the bond; life partnership emphasizes the long-term commitment and shared life. Some people prefer the term platonic life partner because it makes the nature of the bond explicit in the term itself; others prefer friendship marriage because it draws an analogy to the legal form they are seeking access to. The vocabulary work is ongoing, and the eventual settled terminology, if any, will affect how the form is recognized. Vocabulary affects recognition, because institutions absorb what they have language for, and the choice between competing terms affects the path of absorption.

The next phase of recognition for friendship marriages will require: legal instruments that recognize non-romantic primary partnerships, perhaps a civil union analogue without the romantic-sexual presumption; immigration policies that do not screen out the form by definition; medical and benefits systems that recognize the form for next-of-kin and beneficiary purposes; cultural production that depicts the form as a normal adult option; and continued community articulation of the form's variations. None of this is utopian. Each piece exists in some jurisdictions or contexts. The collective task is to assemble the pieces into a coherent recognition regime. The first law's question of unity, in this configuration, is the question of whether a society can recognize as primary a bond that is not romantic. The accumulating answer is yes, and the work of making the yes operational is what now occupies the people building the form.

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