Basic Trope: A couple live together, and possibly have kids, but aren't legally married.
- Straight: Alice and Bob are two lovers who have built a life together but aren't married.
- Exaggerated: All of their previous marriages ended after a few months, but Alice and Bob have been together unmarried for years, and never do marry.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob have lived together for just a few years and have a baby.
- They're engaged.
- Justified:
- They don't want the legal and financial issues that would come with divorce were they to marry and later decide they didn't love each other anymore.
- Bob is a time-traveler without Undead Tax Exemption so it would be impossible for him to legally marry Alice.
- Alice and Bob have no problem with joining their lives together, but don't believe in marriage as an institution.
- Alice and Bob are an interracial couple in a setting where interracial couples could not legally marry.
- Alex and Bob are a same-sex couple in a setting where same-sex couples cannot legally marry.
- Tropistan is an extreme religious state, and only marriages officiated by the Church of Tropius have any legal validity. Alice and/or Bob don't believe in Tropius, so the priests of the church refuse to officiate their union.
- In this setting, only royalty and nobility get formally married (and, indeed, are the only ones that can afford weddings.) Everyone else (such as Alice and Bob) just moves in together with little or no fanfare, and they're considered married.
- In this setting, Sex Equals Love, and Alice and Bob are permanently bonded to one another.
- Alice and Bob are the only people on Earth; there is no legal rigamarole to go through or wedding to have.
- Even though they love each other, Alice and Bob have Commitment Issues and can't promise to be together past the immediate future.
- Alice and Bob have both been through divorces, and don't want to go through that again.
- Alice and Bob feel that they simply don't need rings and a piece of paper to prove their love for one another.
- Alice and Bob don't believe in getting married unless you're the religious-type, and both of them, for the most part, identify as "non-religious."
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob are still legally married, but separated years ago and haven't seen nor heard from each other since.
- Fourth-Date Marriage
- Subverted:
- Alice and Bob decide to formalize their relationship.
- The law where Alice and Bob live allows them to get a document stating that they are, for all intents and purposes, a married couple.
- Alice and Bob have had a wedding and signed all the papers.
- Double Subverted:
- They decide to cancel the wedding because it would cost too much.
- While they do get some of the benefits of marriage (for example, being each other's default next-of-kin if one of them winds up comatose in the ICU), they don't get all of the benefits (for example, tax benefits and Spousal Privilege.)
- They find out that, due to some technicality, their marriage was not legally valid.
- Parodied: Alice and Bob are the only couple in town to not be married, and also the only couple to actually love each other; all other couples are downright venomous toward each other.
- Zig Zagged: Alice and Bob have lived together for ten years and have three children. They decide to marry, but several years later find out that for some reason that marriage wasn't valid, so they get married for real. They later divorce.
- Averted:
- Alice and Bob are married.
- Alternatively, Alice and Bob aren't in a relationship.
- Marriage does not exist in this setting, or common-law marriage is regular marriage.
- Enforced: The couple couldn't be married do to either Deliberate Values Dissonance or actual Values Dissonance because the couple is interracial, same-sex, or both. The author wants to be accurate to the setting or time the story takes place in, or they themselves are against interracial or same-sex couples marrying.
- Lampshaded: "Alice and Bob love each other so much, I'd say they'd been married for years if I didn't know any better."
- Invoked: Alice and Bob deliberately decide to never get married to avoid the legal difficulties if they decided to divorce.
- Exploited: Dean, an atheist, has Alice and Bob attend a speech of his where he demonstrates that contrary to religious scripture, an unmarried couple can be just as much in love with each other as a married one.
- Alice and Bob want to enter into an Exotic Extended Marriage, but the laws of Tropestan allow only one spouse at a time. So they use this to skirt around that law and have multiple spouses.
- Defied: The law prohibits couples from being together for more than a certain period of time without being married.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Neither Alice nor Bob wear a ring.
- Played For Laughs: Everyone else keeps thinking they're married, much to their annoyance.
- Played For Drama: Alice feels uncomfortable not being able to call Bob her husband, but also doesn't want to ask Bob to marry her after so long.
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