We finally married for love. I did it for health insurance too

For decades, Carlos and I were not married. And I didn’t think so. I made comedy material out of it and used it in LA clubs like the Ice House and the Comedy Store:

“I’ve been in the same relationship for 25 years, and I’m still attached to the word boyfriend. How is it that we come up with new words for technology every two minutes? Texting, sexting, Googling, pinging. But when it comes to extended relationships, we have: lover, family friend, significant other, long-term friend. Recently, someone told me about a new term: husband equivalent. Husband equivalent! Why does this sound like a sugar substitute to me? Carlos is the equivalent of my husband. All the great pleasure of a husband and only half the promise.”

The audience always laughed. And if Carlos was in the room, someone would casually look at him and shake his head, as if he were someone who pulled his feet. The truth was, I was better off not getting married. It wasn’t just him. It was us.

Outside of comedy clubs, when I’m asked why we’re not married after almost 30 years, I’ll say: “We’re waiting to see if it works out.” People thought it was hysterical. It wasn’t meant as a joke. We were very different people.

There was a period when I started calling him my husband just to simplify things, but I was still likely to call him my boyfriend. “You’re very open about your relationship,” a woman once told me on the second day of a two-day conference. It took me a minute to realize that he thought the man I called “my husband” on the first day was different from the man I called “my friend” the next day.

For a long time, marriage was not what we needed. We had already built a home, a life, a circle of friends and a level of trust. But then I made a big career change. After 30-plus years in advertising — comedy was my side gig — I stepped back from full-time agency leadership and went part-time by choice, finally giving my work holism less oxygen. With that choice, though, I lost my health care. Suddenly, marriage was no longer a punch line.

Carlos had SAG-AFTRA coverage, the “forever” insurance that comes with the vest. If I become his legal wife, I will also be safe. So after three decades of marriage equality, we tied the knot. For love, yes, but also for health insurance.

Except “forever” wasn’t forever. During the COVID-19 pandemic, SAG-AFTRA furloughed their top healthcare players. Carlos lost his cover. Wives of senior players are supposed to stay on the plan until we retire at age 65 — the age I turned this year. The promise of continuation is lost.

Marriage, it turns out, didn’t just change our status. It also changed our relationship with home. Previously, we owned it as “joint tenants”, each holding 50%. After we get married, we can keep it as community property. We are both fully owned. It also feels permanent.

Until one day I heard about racial compacts in Los Angeles real estate. I pulled out the original 1921 act and saw the words that would disqualify us both from living where we do:

“No part of the said premises shall ever be leased, rented, sold or transferred to any negro, or of the African race, or of the Mongolian race, or of any race other than the white or Caucasian race.”

Neither Carlos, who is Afro-Panamanian, nor I, who am Jewish, would have been allowed to live here when this article was written. We are only here now because after 1948, the courts said that such agreements were unenforceable.

Suddenly, all I saw was parallel. First, “forever” insurance that wasn’t forever. Then, “community property” that came with an act that once denied our existence. Now, even the protections that allowed an interracial couple like ours to marry in the first place – are lovers. It turns out that both interracial marriages and interracial contracts are protected by 14th Amendment rights. As in Roe v. Wade was, and we all know how that turned out.

I never thought much about sustainability until recently. I was happy with the equality of spouses, with the idea that every day Carlos and I chose each other without the approval of the state. But age, illness and insurance have a way of forcing practicality into romance.

In Los Angeles, eternity was always an illusion. Hillsides are prone to landslides. Wildfires destroy entire neighborhoods. Asylum policies are challenging, and immigration raids destroy families overnight. Even the freeways we once thought of as immovable divides and buckles over time. Why should marriage or property be any different? The paperwork is being rewritten. Laws are repealed. The protections you thought were inevitable are up for debate.

The city reminds us every day that sustainability is fragile. And yet, we remain. Not because paperwork binds us, but because we choose. After all these years of jokes about “spousal equality”, it turns out that true equality is: eternal on paper eternal in practice. We’ll take the latter, every time.

The author is a writer and storyteller for the page, stage and advertising industries. She lives in West Hollywood with her husband and Instagram-viral cat and dog. Visit her website rochelle-newman.com.

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