Bridal Vows Revisited

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"I don't strive for permanence," declares Janna Cordiro, 30, a public-health educator in San Francisco. "That's the end. I'm more interested in the process: Will we make each other happy every day?" she says, laughing. "Obviously, you're not gonna make each other happy every day." Janna and her partner Sebastian Toomey, also 30 and a Web-page designer, had lived together for nine years when they recently moved from Atlanta to San Francisco--partly to take advantage of its domestic-partnership laws. They are among a growing number of heterosexual couples for whom cohabitation rather than marriage is their first live-in partnership. When Janna and Sebastian moved in together in college, both assumed the relationship would be temporary. For the first five or six years, they made short-term commitments based on circumstances: "'Until you finish college,' 'Until our lease is up,' 'Until grad school is over.'" They laugh when they recall how they've outlasted most of their friends' more "committed" relationships. Sebastian is convinced that their decision not to marry is part of the reason. "We think," he says, "How do I treat this person with respect now?, not How do I work out this problem? Because we gotta make this last forever."

The latest research shows that about 55% of cohabiting couples get married and about 40% break up within five years. Many of them do hope to last, though, say Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot, nine-year cohabitants who started the Boston-based Alternatives to Marriage Project to support couples who did not wish to marry or could not marry. Should a relationship be called a success, they ask, only when one partner dies? "In a culture where marriage is not assumed to be permanent," Solot argues, "it's important to celebrate the milestones along the way--like five years or 10. They're so much more precious." Janna, who's seen "a lot of negative marriages," doesn't want to marry. If they have children, the couple will take legal steps to protect them. Still, both hope they will just go on and on. After so many years of short-term commitments, what is their next phase? Sebastian replies, "The foreseeable future."

MARRIAGE WITH A PRENUP: 18 YEARS, THEN FOREVER STARTS

Adam and Cindy (who requested anonymity), an entrepreneur and a concert artist, both still in their 30s, married in May after dating for two years and living together for eight months. "We wanted to be sure we'd be happy together," he explains.

Sure is a relative term for Adam, who'd been divorced and had to part with a lot of money from his new business. So he asked Cindy to sign a prenup. "It took me a little while to get comfortable with the idea," says Cindy, who had never been married before. She accepted the logic of it but didn't tell her friends because she felt it was "too personal between us."

A prenup made sense, because Adam entered the marriage with significant financial assets. But, increasingly, lawyers are starting to write prenups for couples who have scarcely a dollar to their name--and school loans to pay back. Boston attorney Peter Zupcofska of Bingham Dana saw three such couples recently. "Two were fresh out of med school, and one out of law school," he recalls. Each wanted to protect a professional license from becoming joint property.