#you'll do

During the colonial period, free persons of color who possessed less than a specified degree of black blood, usually a quarter or eighth, were designated “white” and entitled to legal and social privileges that came with that status. As a result, intermarriage offered black men and women a way to secure preferential racial status for their descendants. This was one reason why colonial whites viewed intermarriage as so threatening.

When a high earner marries a lower- or non-earning spouse, marriage significantly reduces their average tax rate. This can mean thousands of dollars in tax savings. In fact, the marriage tax “bonus” can be as high as 21 percent of the couple’s total income. However, not all married couples receive tax benefits. Similar-earning spouses can face a marriage penalty, meaning they pay more taxes as a couple than they did as individuals.

Love is the only publicly acceptable reason to marry, but it is far from the only one. Despite romantic notions about love and marriage, marriage is fundamentally a legal institution. It is a way to confer valuable rights and benefits, and sometimes it is the only way to receive these rewards. A vast misconception about modern marriage is, as the nursery rhyme states, that love comes first. This isn’t always true. Sometimes love comes later. Sometimes it doesn’t come at all, and legally, love is irrelevant.

As child welfare advocates have long argued, children are most protected when they are treated equally, without regard to their parents’ marital status. Protection, not marriage, should be the ultimate goal. Currently, it is not.

Wealth could insulate men from the stigma of being unmarried, but for men without money, marriage remained an important status symbol, and this was especially true for African American males. Black men had fewer opportunities to become wealthy and were specifically encouraged, often by the US government, to look to marriage, rather than wealth, as a source of social status. The government hoped that by linking social status to black men’s role as husbands and providers it could minimize its own economic responsibility for the newly freed African Americans — especially for black women and children