Long-Term Commitment Issues

Updated on June 11, 2008.

LYN FREUNDLICH and her partner of 16 years, Billy Brittingham, are in many ways a typical family: They have two kids, own a home and have done basic financial-planning maneuvers like purchasing life-insurance policies. The one thing they don't have? A marriage license.

"We have made a very conscious and political decision not to get married," says 39-year-old Freundlich, who lives in Jamaica Plain, Mass. "Our reason not to get married had absolutely nothing to do with commitment. We've been together for a long time and worked hard on our relationship, and that's not going to change."

There were more than five million unmarried, cohabitating couples counted in the 2006 U.S. Census. That was a 43% increase from a decade earlier.

Why not just tie the knot? The reasons are plentiful. Same-sex couples living in any state other than Massachusetts (and California as of June 17, 2008) have no choice in the matter, since marriage isn't a legal option. More and more opposite-sex couples, meanwhile, are using cohabitation as a trial run before marriage. And in other cases, a partner would be financially punished by marrying — perhaps by being written out of a parent's will because the parent disapproves of the mate. Still others are philosophically or morally opposed to marriage. For example, some straight couples are boycotting marriage until gay couples are given the same freedom.

Whatever the reason, cohabitation remains highly controversial. In fact, it's still considered illegal in several states. In 2004, a woman who worked for a North Carolina sheriff's office was given the choice of quitting or marrying her live-in boyfriend of 12 years when it was discovered they were cohabitating. She quit. Other states with laws against cohabitation are Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Virginia and West Virginia.

Granted, cohabitation laws are rarely — if ever — enforced. (The penalty is typically a fine plus a short prison stay.) But that doesn't mean cohabitating couples are just like married folks, minus the marriage license. Married couples automatically enjoy financial and legal benefits — such as the right to make health-care decisions on the other's behalf — that cohabitators do not. "Under the law, [unmarried couples] are treated as separate people — even if they've been together for 25 years," says Harold Lustig, author of "Four Steps to Financial Security for Lesbian and Gay Couples."

The good news is that with some careful financial planning, cohabitators can re-create some — but certainly not all — of the legal and financial protections offered by marriage. "Unmarried couples have to do more paperwork," says Dorian Solot, executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project and co-author of "Unmarried to Each Other." "You can't get everything, but you can get a lot of the most important protections," she says.

Here are the steps that all long-term cohabitating couples should consider.