When you get married, a comprehensive legal framework is automatically put in place. It establishes default rules for everything from property division upon death or separation to who can make medical decisions and what kind of parental rights you have. But what happens to long term partners who aren’t married or registered domestic partners, or who are in a significant relationship with someone other than their spouse?
For people building families outside of the traditional marriage model—whether as a polycule, a platonic co-parenting unit, or an intentional community—this automatic protection does not exist. This means that unmarried families need to proactively agree on what kind of legal protections they want and document those agreements in writing. Without this documentation, the state will default to the traditional rules for non-married partners, which can leave your chosen family vulnerable.
The “UnMarriage Toolkit”
The good news is that you can recreate most of this legal framework by setting up a series of legal documents that work together to inform courts, banks, and hospitals of your wishes. These documents work together to tell other people how you want your property and your assets handled and what kind of medical care you want in the event that your relationship changes or you become ill or incapacitated.
The core set of documents in the “UnMarriage Toolkit” include:
Last Will & Testament / Revocable Living Trust
These documents work in tandem to ensure that your property goes to the people you want it to and does not get tied up in the probate process. Without them, state law will often dictate that your property goes to your nearest blood relative.
Cohabitation Agreement
This is the backbone of your legal framework. It defines how you handle shared/separate property, finances, and responsibilities during the relationship and what happens upon separation.
Voluntary Declaration of Parentage / Parentage Judgment
In California (and many other states), legal parentage is a defined status that is crucial if parents separate and don’t agree on custody and visitation. This is especially true for non-biological third parents. Simply listing the intended parents on a birth certificate is often insufficient to establish legal parentage if the intended parents aren’t married. Unmarried and non-biological parents should consider formalizing their legal parent/child relationship through a parentage judgment, declaration of parentage, or similar means.
Powers of Attorney, HIPAA Authorization, and Beneficiary Designations
Together, this vital trio specifies who can make financial or medical decisions for you, who can access your medical records, and who inherits certain accounts like retirement funds or life insurance.
How to Get Started
Certain parts of the UnMarriage Toolkit, such as creating Powers of Attorney or signing a Voluntary Declaration of Parentage, are straightforward enough to complete without legal representation. Other matters, like drafting a will and trust or developing a co-habitation agreement, are possible to handle independently but are often better executed with the advice of an attorney experienced in these documents.
By setting aside time to take these steps, you can actively protect your chosen family and ensure that your life together is grounded in security and intention, not just assumptions.
I’ll be writing more about the UnMarriage Tookit in future posts. For now, you can check out my post on Cohabitation Agreements, or look for my next UnMarriage Toolkit workshop on my Workshops page.