Unmarried couples may not be harassed by hotel clerks now, but many say they still experience pressure to marry. But without marriage, Breckon says, there is a constant need to confirm her commitment to Smith. The back door isn't open. Just because we're not married doesn't mean there's an escape path. Things often get stickiest when unmarried couples decide to have children.
Relatives turn up the heat, and for many, there is internal pressure to formalize the relationship.
Marie Davis, who lives in Vermont and has participated in our Alternatives to Marriage Project, hasn't decided yet whether she wants to marry her partner of three years. But she says it's hard to know whether she could resist the pressure to marry if they decided to have children. She was married within three or four days of telling her parents. They flew out and did this clandestine little marriage ceremony, and now they're having a big wedding. But even this last bastion of societal expectation is slowly shifting.