What is the Couple Form?

I’ve started using this phrase- the couple form- because it lets me talk about the couple as a social structure, rather than just as two individuals. The couple form is a means of social organization. It’s one that we naturalize, because that’s how effective social structures work. But I want us to start looking more closely at it and de-naturalizing it, so that we can see what we want to keep and what we want to change.

“Couple form”:

Form=mold, structure, way of organizing. “Form” gives the couple a social shape, and draws our attention to how the couple is socially (re)produced. 

Couple=2 people tied together in a romantic agreement. Traditionally a man and a woman, straight, and monogamous. The couple also has a deep structural connection to whiteness and property through its association with marriage. Many social movements in the last hundred years have been about people outside of the traditional couple form trying to gain access to its benefits.

The couple form is a social relation that encourages and recreates a certain set of desires and a certain way of loving. A certain narrative and life path. A certain set of feelings. It gives language and direction. It gives shape.

If we picture our life journeys as a forest at dusk, full of paths in different directions, some unmarked, some well-trod, the couple form is a well-paved and well-lit highway cutting through the forest. It has street names and stoplights and lots of other cars. It says “this way!!”. 

The highway is so large and so loud that we can forget that there even are other paths. Those other paths, when we remember them, can feel terrifying and lonely. We might not be sure where they lead, or whether we will meet anyone else on the way. It’s hard to see in the forest, so we might not even be sure whether or not they exist.

I want us to remember that there are other paths, even if they’re faint, and that highways are social structures with social consequences.

Let’s look at some of the things this highway of the couple form creates, encourages, and reproduces. 

The couple form is:

• A major means through which a person becomes socially legible and socially respectable. Being part of a couple, especially part of a married couple, gives you entry into social life. Think: plus ones at weddings only for serious romantic relationships, couples trips, politicians needing to be married to be electable. 

• A rite of passage and entrance into adulthood. A marker of success and a goal. Think: wanting to be married by a certain age, a wedding as the most important day of someone’s life, marriage as the logical “next step” in a long-term relationship.

• A way of organizing desire and feelings. Do you love the right way, have the right feelings, want the right things? Will the things you want be respected or celebrated by others?

• Access to economic benefits and security. Think: saving on rent, taxes, health insurance, wills. A means of accumulating and passing down wealth.

• The condition for social reproduction and the social legibility of the nuclear family. Think: A circle/loop of reproduction, wanting the same things as your parents, needing to be part of a couple in order to have kids, division of labor. 

• A plot structure. Think: romantic comedies, marriage plot, reality dating shows, dating as a major conversation topic. 

• A lens through which we see and organize relationships. Think: DTR, labels, just friends, all the boxes we have for relationships and the norms for what someone deserves from us based on what box they’re in. It also organizes the paths that are open or closed for us around connecting to others. Think: he’s taken, they’re available, emotional affairs. 

The ways we structure our lives around the couple form are often so invisible that they’re like the air we breathe or the roads we drive on. We take them for granted. I want us to see the highway as a highway, so that we can think about what other paths may be possible, and whether or not we’d like to take them.