Married Americans enjoy over 1,000 benefits and entitlements that are withheld from our non-marital counterparts. Health insurance, immigration rights, tax privileges (such as the estate tax), and hiring policies favor the married. Marriage is subsidized and incentivized by the federal government. Social customs such as blockbuster weddings, subsidized honeymoons, and gifts reserved for wedded couples reify matrimony as a centering norm and further the idea that "marriage is best," a commonplace in popular psychology, where marriage-averse people are often tarred as "commitment-phobes." Despite this blatant and widespread prejudice, non-marital Americans -- non-marital people -- have not galvanized as a group to demand equality and inclusion. Why? Moving Past Marriage argues that it is because of our troubled relationship to history. As women's history once was, non-marital history has been buried, so that the disenfranchisement that non-marital people share in wedlock-dominated societies, as well as our remarkable, far-ranging achievements, have been hard to spot. In recovering our own history, non-marital people can become self-aware as a group and begin to challenge marriage-centric thinking and practice.

Jaclyn Geller is a reader, writer, and professor. She professes at Central Connecticut State University and specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. She grew up in Southern Westchester, where she read The Sound and the Fury forty times and. Not much else seemed to happen. She studied at English at Oberlin College. After graduation, she worked for a Jewish organization and impressed everyone with her ability to answer the phone, saying, 'Good morning, Special Projects.' When a co-worker clasped her hand and intoned, 'Don't worry, Dear. You'll be married by next year!', she intuited that it was time to move on. Geller earned her doctorate in English and American Literature at New York University, where she met luminaries such as Adrienne Rich and began what would become a pattern: expressing admiration for learned people, only to have them walk away in the middle of her panegyric. She is the author of Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique as well as articles on early-modern satire, Samuel Butler, and Samuel Johnson. She lives in Central Connecticut with her family and friends.