"The baggage of the historical iterations of marriage weighs so heavily on the couple form that legal support and warrants seem hardly necessary to induce conformity to the romantic conventions, gender roles and sexual scripts that are historically embedded within the institution of marriage. One might even conclude that by finally eliminating the role of the state, the privatised couple form is not diluted but perfected; the rise of never married couples could be read as a historical development from the 19th-century state and philanthropic efforts to naturalise, moralise, sanction and police marriage, to the successful normalization of a self-governed married-like form." (Kathi Weeks, Abolition of the family, 2023)

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