Moving Past Marriage: Why We Should Ditch Marital Privilege, End Relationship-Status Discrimination, and Embrace Non-marital History

Jaclyn Geller, PhD

Jun 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Laural Merlington

About this audiobook

A must-listen for anyone who has felt they are at a disadvantage simply because they are single or unmarried. Married Americans enjoy over 1,000 benefits and entitlements that are withheld from our nonmarital counterparts. Health insurance, immigration rights, tax privileges (such as the estate tax), and hiring policies favor the married. Marriage is financially supported and incentivized by the federal government. Social customs such as blockbuster weddings, subvented honeymoons, and gifts reserved for wedded couples reify matrimony as a centering norm and further the idea that "marriage is best," a commonplace in popular psychology, where marriage-averse people are often tarred as "commitment-phobes." Despite this blatant and widespread prejudice, nonmarital Americans-nonmarital people-have not galvanized as a group to demand equality and inclusion. Why? Moving Past Marriage argues that it is because of our troubled relationship to history. As women's history once was, nonmarital history has been buried, so the disenfranchisement that nonmarital people share in wedlock-dominated societies, as well as our remarkable, far-ranging achievements, have been hard to spot. In recovering our own history, nonmarital people can become self-aware as a group and begin to challenge marriage-centric thinking and practice.

About the author

Jaclyn Geller, PhD, professes at Central Connecticut State University and specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. She is the author of Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique as well as articles on early-modern satire, Samuel Butler, and Samuel Johnson.

Laural Merlington has recorded well over one hundred audiobooks and has received several AudioFile Earphones Awards, including one for Never Say Die by Susan Jacoby.