My partner and I have decided to get married. This says nothing about a changing commitment level but it says a LOT about how his freelancer health insurance premium is literally 20x more a month than my corporate health insurance premium. And if he needs to go to a (vastly smaller selection) of doctors, he pays 3x more per visit than I would. And has no dental, vision, or mental health (I have all three).

The tipping point was a day about a month ago when he opened his health insurance invoice in front of me and I casually mentioned that - were he on my insurance - he'd be able to save upwards of 70k over the next 10 years. So he thought that over, and realized that it was sheer madness to not take advantage of that, ideals be damned.

Well, we told his parents so far (not mine, that's going to be a shitshow that I'm not ready to deal with), and they had a kind of "it's all back on the table!" reaction. Maybe this magically means we're going to buy a home and have 2.5 kids, a dog, and monogamy. Well, we're already hoping to buy a home sometime in the next few years...that we'd share with roommates, to help pay the mortgage and try to get an intentional community going. I still associate childbirth with the Alien moves and we're happy with our pile of cats. So we're kind of slowly popping those bubbles for them, after fending off repeated "What do you mean you're just going to city hall with two friends? You've having a wedding right? You HAVE to have a wedding! And you have to invite all the family, who has a wedding without inviting everybody?!" attempts to take over our lives.

We're having a hard time getting them to understand this isn't a joyous occasion for us. Or rather, it's not 100% joyous. I make...at a minimum 40% more than my partner. In a really good year, I make more than double what he makes. Knowing that my possibly untimely death will allow him to inherit more of my money (and have less of it go to the government) makes me happy. Knowing he's going to be able to just go to the doctor when he has a problem makes me happy. Knowing that he can get his vision checked for the first time in 10 years makes me ecstatic.

Knowing this sets up a parameter that encourages him to be valued above any other partner I have in the eyes of society and the law breaks my heart. We both fear our families valuing other partners as lesser, no matter what. Frankly (and this may piss some people off, but honestly, zero shits given), we don't want to be viewed as one of "those couples", the ones that will shit on other relationships and offload emotional labor and risk onto newer people under the guise of "protecting our relationship" (which we won't ever do, but being married makes it likelier for us to be viewed that way).

Yes, we have talked and depending on what happens in the future, we would get divorced and marry into a different permutation (maybe each of us marrying a different partner, or some other arrangement) if it made sense (oh, if the 'rents are still alive when that happens...). But it really fucking sucks that there's all this bullshit that sets up an artificial dichotomy within relationships, because we can only be legally married to one person at a time (not to mention the part where - while the US has made some progress in terms of health insurance - the difference between the best and worst health insurances in this country is disgusting).

Not really asking for advice or anything. Just saying we've a damn far way to go before the legal system and society catches up to polyamory and the idea of loving (and providing/building a life) with more than one person at a time that isn't a child. 'Cause we've figured out multiple children and co-ops and various other legal entities that involve more than two people. But for some reason, our brains fucking explode when love involves more than two adults.