Ann-Carol Pence and Anthony P. Rodriguez share a home, a mortgage and a joint bank account. As founders and producers of the Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville, the 47-year-olds live and work side by side, sharing all the hallmarks of a married couple with one exception: a marriage license.
“We’re not averse to marriage, but this works very well for us,” Pence said.
The couple’s decision to live together without first walking down the aisle is a popular one. According to Ann Mack, director of trend-spotting at JWT, a marketing communications agency based in New York, 45 percent of the never-married women her agency surveyed say a long-term, committed relationship is preferable to marriage. And 68 percent of men surveyed agreed.
“Moral judgments about cohabitation — once called ‘shacking up’ or ‘living in sin’ — have largely disappeared,” Mack said. “The share of 30- to 44-year-old Americans cohabiting has more than doubled since the mid-1990s, perhaps an indication that the arrangement is becoming an end in itself, not a step toward marriage.”
To that, Pence raises her coffee cup and winks.
“Great,” she said. “Living together has worked very well for us, and I hope everybody who chooses this path enjoys the same support and success that we have had.”
For a growing number of women like Pence, marriage is no longer an essential checkpoint in life.
“These women are redefining what ‘happily ever after’ means,” Mack said. “It can mean a household of one, cohabitating, or it could be single motherhood.”
Women’s gains in education and the workplace are driving factors, Mack said. Women earn about 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and more education leads to better career prospects, more upward mobility and independent living, she said.
“At the same time, men are losing ground,” she said. “They’re struggling in a post-industrial economy that values attributes more predominant among women, such as communication and negotiation skills.”
“It used to be the one significant motivation for marriage was finding an acceptable procreation partner, but that’s becoming less of a factor,” Mack said. “Now having a baby without a husband has never been easier and more acceptable.”
While heterosexual couples like Pence and Rodriguez choose not to marry, many same-sex couples who don’t have that legal right are all too eager to make the trip down the aisle.
To that end, eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage. But according to census figures released in September, 1 in 5 of the nation’s 646,000 same-sex couples already consider themselves married.
Count Atlantans Xavier Harrison and his partner, Jimmy Billiter, among them. They have been living together since 1994, when they met at the now-closed Backstreet nightclub. They exchanged telephone numbers that night. Harrison, 56, called the next day, “and the romance was on,” he said.
Despite the controversy over legalizing gay marriage, the couple said the topic of tying the knot rarely comes up. To them, they are already married and have been since July 1995 when they moved in together and Harrison bought Billiter a gold band. Going to a state where gay marriage is legal and getting a certificate won’t make a difference unless gay unions are recognized on the federal level, they said.
“Everyone who knows us knows we’re essentially married,” said Billiter, 48. “My sister’s husband introduces Xavier to people as his brother-in-law.”
Does it bother them they can’t take advantage of the legal benefits?
Sometimes, they said, “but we don’t need marriage to validate our relationship.”
It’s a sentiment that Pence and Rodriguez, who met at Manuel’s Tavern in 1987, share.
They aren’t anti-marriage. In fact, they’ve considered it twice. The first time was in 1999, the year the couple took over the Aurora Theatre and turned it into a nonprofit organization.
“We probably did most of the things that most people on all the self-help talk shows tell you not to do,” Pence said. “We immediately started living together, immediately got a joint checking account.”
A short time later, they started planning a wedding, but they ended up calling it off because of an illness in Pence’s family. She was disappointed, but they tucked the diamond engagement ring away and went on with their lives.
Years later, Rodriguez, whose previous marriage ended in divorce, suggested they get married during a trip to Paris in 2005.
“But after I did a lot of research, there was just a lot of red tape involved and we were only there for 10 days,” Rodriguez said.
The main reason they haven’t married, said Pence, “is because we run this great theater in this great community, but it’s a conservative community and Gwinnett County needs to know one set of liberals.” The couple, who celebrates 16 years together in August, said it’s up to others to make peace with the choice they’ve made.
Living together outside of marriage may not be the social taboo it once was, but cohabitating couples do not receive the same benefits as married couples, said Cindy Butler, executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, a national nonprofit that advocates for fairness on behalf of unmarried people.
“They can’t help each other with health insurance,” Butler said. “They may be prevented from being considered the ‘person of choice’ in emergency situations. Securing assets together could be difficult. They can’t designate their partners as recipients of their Social Security or pension benefits.”
Some exceptions may be made in states that recognize domestic partnerships, said Butler, but Georgia isn’t one of them.
For the time being, Pence and Rodriguez don’t have plans to march down the aisle.
When you live together, you make a conscious decision every day to be in the relationship, they say.
“I often joke that what keeps us together is the illusion of freedom,” Rodriguez said. “We chose to be together every day, but I suppose I could walk out.”
People who know the couple often think they are married, he said. “They instantly assume we are married because [we are] their idea of a happily married couple.”
To Pence and Rodriguez it’s a testament to their relationship, proof you don’t need a piece of paper to validate your love and commitment.
After all, Pence said, “everybody’s path to walk in this life is different.”
About the series
As the marriage rate in Georgia reaches an all-time low, veteran reporter Gracie Bonds Staples examines the data and talks to experts, couples and singles about the challenges and benefits of their lifestyle choices for a three-part series that started Sunday.
Coming Tuesday
Party of one: The image of single life is being redefined as an increasing number of adults are choosing to live alone.
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