Hey LF Tribe 🔥
This week is all about commitment—specifically the commitment to marry.
Let’s take a look at what this type of commitment entails and perhaps imagine new ways of shaping marriage for the benefit of modern love aka updating our marriage Terms & Conditions.
Like most T&C, we Agree to our marriage ones without actually reading them.
So let’s try to understand these ones JUST A LITTLE BETTER before deciding if we agree to them. Unlike Spotify or Facebook T&C, signing a marriage contract is a lifelong commitment 😅 so I invite you to take this journey with me toward slightly more due diligence than an app we can download and delete in under 60 seconds.
In municipalities around the globe, marriage begins not necessarily with an Instagram-worthy proposal (did you see the one with the helicopter?!), but with a formal request to a governing authority, in essence, obtaining Permission to enter into a legally binding contract. Que romantica no?
In the United States, marriage unfolds in three key steps:
Permission (Marriage License): The couple applies for and receives a marriage license authorizing them to hold a legal commitment ceremony.
Certification (Signatures): After the ceremony, the license must be signed by both spouses and generally the officiant and witnesses.
Contract (Marriage Certificate + Legal Framework): Once the signed license is filed with the county clerk or registrar, it becomes a marriage certificate—the official proof that the marriage contract has now magically been enacted. It governs property rights, inheritance, taxes, medical decision-making, and spousal duties
The “contract” itself is actually a default framework of rights, responsibilities, and obligations that automatically comes into effect once the marriage is legally recognized.
In essence, couples sign a lifelong contract they’ve never even seen much less read. An interesting aspect of this contract has over time and throughout history included certain “spousal duties” such as:
Common Spousal Duties in Law
Duty of Support
Spouses are legally obligated to provide financial support for one another, which may include food, shelter, healthcare, and other basic needs.
Duty of Fidelity (Faithfulness)
Marriage traditionally carries an expectation of sexual exclusivity. While some jurisdictions no longer enforce fidelity legally, infidelity can still be considered in divorce proceedings.
Duty of Cohabitation
Spouses are generally expected to live together and maintain a shared household.
Duty of Care / Consortium
Marriage includes the duty to provide companionship, affection, intimacy, and mutual partnership.
Duty of Good Faith and Fair Dealing
As marriage is a legal contract, spouses owe one another honesty, fairness, and transparency—especially with respect to financial matters.
Couples have the option of working with private attorneys to create prenuptial or postnuptial agreements, outlining and clarifying specific financial matters—such as property ownership, asset division, inheritance rights, spousal support—in ways that go beyond the default terms of the marriage contract.
As a love futurist exploring this process, I find myself with more questions than answers:
Who wrote these laws? Who updates them? Who decides what love “should” look like on paper?
And if we’re serious about shaping the future of love, then maybe it’s time we ask: What needs to be added? Removed? What do we want to design—and redesign—so that marriage reflects the way we actually live and love today?
When I reached out on social media about commitment, I received a full spectrum of responses about commitment. Many of them shaped by hard-won experience, including divorce, but what moved me most was how overwhelmingly positive, hopeful, and tender people are about commitment in marriage.
How deeply the majority of us long, and even pray, for the success of a lifelong promise to honor, cherish, protect and love another person.
I’m closing this week with a commitment of my own: to keep asking people what they see as essential to the marriage contract—so that together we imagine new possibilities for how love and partnership can and will flourish in the future.
Love, Lindsay