What Happened to the Marriage Alternatives? Same‐Sex Couples in the United States and the Distinctiveness of Marriage

ABSTRACT Objectives Our goal is to understand if US adults with same‐sex partners viewed marriage and domestic partnership differently, and if so why. Background The retreat from marriage in the United States is a fundamental preoccupation of American social science. In a classic 2004 essay, Andrew Cherlin argued that marriage in the United States was in a process of deinstitutionalization, in part because the distinctiveness of marriage (compared to cohabitation) was shrinking. Marriage itself was controversial in gay rights circles, so it was not clear if and how same‐sex couples would embrace marriage once they earned the right to marry. Method We compare marriage to a domestic partnership institution that was created to offer a set of state rights similar to marriage. This is a conservative test of marriage's distinctiveness. We examine marriage and domestic partnership through the eyes of same‐sex couples in the United States, who until recently were excluded from marriage. We use administrative data on California domestic partnerships and American Community Survey data on marriages to compare same‐sex couples' uptake of domestic partnerships and marriages when both were freely available starting in late June 2013. We use data from the nationally representative How Couples Meet and Stay Together survey of 2022 to examine the relative preference of adults with same‐sex partners for marriage or domestic partnership, and how they justified their preferences. Results Given the choice between marriage and domestic partnership, California same‐sex couples overwhelmingly chose marriage. Same‐sex couples were very attentive to the regulative, normative, and cultural advantages of marriage over domestic partnership. Conclusion Marriage in the United States remains distinct from the relevant alternatives, and by this measure marriage as an institution remains strong.