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See other comment. The issue is actually autonomy not marriage. No one has a right to control another's autonomy. Life is not binary and to make it so is to neglect reality. It is possible to love someone and spend a lifetime with them while never owning their autonomy.
Divorce, at a minimum is a hassle, a scare tactic, and a massive financial and emotional burden that has nothing to do with the partnership. If one needs such leverage, they are stealing the other's autonomy. If someone wishes to leave, they should have every right to leave freely. The imbalance in relationships should be the burden of the relationship not some court arbitration. When the imbalance occurs it should be addressed immediately. This should be a cornerstone of culture. A partnership should never be a leverage point because owning another's autonomy is fundamentally wrong.
So, your actual problem is the legal expense and legal hassles involved in divorce?
Many/most of these are to do with the painful untangling of shared resources and responsibilities that come from sharing a life and resources. Marriage simplifies many things for two people - ‘we own this thing together’ becomes much simpler with marriage. The legal process of negotiating whether 20 or 40 or 50% of the house belongs to partner A is what tends to cause the pain.
No my actual problem, as described, is autonomy. I've yet to see anyone that seems to fully grasp the point I am making. It is a subtle difference.
In writing science fiction for a hobby, I have explored a lot of this recently. I can't say that I have it all figured out or am some kind of expert. I've explored the idea of systems where there are the resources and systems in place to arbitrate without the need for any absolute laws, a place where the guidelines are communicated clearly and a reasonable and just outcome is possible without an arbitrary binary law. With a lot of idealized assumptions glossed over for the sake of conversation, any system that addresses the needs of more people amicably is a better system.
The way marriage is set up presently, it is made for the needs of a majority, but there are many outliers. If you consider this system in abstract, there are 3 people in the marriage; person A, person B and the superior member of the arbitrator as a governing stakeholder. The role of the stakeholder is to uphold a set of complicated laws that may or may not fit the situation of the individuals. In essence, the stakeholder takes away the autonomy of the individual, more or less equally. To our culture, we ignore this loss of autonomy and the neglected outliers. If these types of oversimplified laws were superseded by a system where it is unacceptable to have minority outliers, and the law can flex to the situation in a deterministic, unbiased, and just way, it changes everything about the system and institution of marriage. This is hard to think about in a modern context without a detailed story to explain it by example. The entire system in the present is based on a loss of autonomy. I consider every loss of autonomy to be a form of slavery. That is not to say it is some binary good or bad. It is hyperbole intended to stress a weak spot in present culture. We largely fail to culturally understand how important autonomy is and all the places where we have given it away to others.
I grew up in places where no one had the money to get a divorce, and where it was used as a form of control and abuse. I've seen it making people miserable because of stupid choices they made long before their prefrontal cortex was developed. It mostly harms the people at the bottom.
If you trace back in time, marriage has always had an element of misogyny and loss of autonomy. It was far worse in the past. I think that line of evolving change will continue and people of the future will look at the present much as we do the past. Asking myself how that will play out in the distant future, I believe the answer is a much better social awareness of autonomy. This is the trend line that we are on, and improvements have been made, but those will continue into the future. The present is not some benchmark of perfection.
Firstly, of course many people cohabit very happily for a lifetime, there’s no requirement to get married. They settle their affairs with bespoke agreements property contracts and wills. It works fine for them - it’s just a bit more complex than the standard package that marriage presents , but not a real problem.
Don’t want marriage, but quite fancy the tax benefits? In the UK you can opt for a Civil Partnerships which handles most of the outliers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_partnership_in_the_United_Kingdom
Bottom line -for people who want to get married, there’s marriage. For people who want to formally merge most of their financial affairs and tax obligations, there is civil partnership, for everyone else, there are bespoke legal and financial arrangements and contracts.
No compulsion, no loss of autonomy (other than mutually agreed) and certainly no slavery.
Good, eh?