marriage of convenience

Merriam-Webster (opens in a new window) dates the phrase to 1711 and defines it as “a marriage contracted for social, political, or economic advantage rather than for mutual affection,” and more broadly as “a union or cooperation formed solely for pragmatic reasons.” The broad sense now does most of the work. Among the dictionary’s recent examples from the web are opposition parties joined to keep a rival out of government, and the enemies of the Islamic State.

Fiction kept the narrow sense and supplied it with an ending. The trope (opens in a new window) lists the reasons one is entered, among them social standing, money, a green card and a pregnancy, and records the convention: “An expectation is that one or both of the people will fall in love with the other.” It also records the appeal to writers, “a cheap way to get two characters together without any of that dating and love nonsense.” Its standing is lower than its plot. A 2024 Time article quoted on the dictionary’s page reports that marriages of convenience “are seen as settling or even unfulfilling.”

Under load, the phrase is an accurate description of the market used as an insult. The rest of this lexicon sells the same transaction under other names: provider energy, wife material, and in Japanese a job hunt called konkatsu, each a statement of what one party expects to get from the other. A marriage of convenience writes those terms down before the wedding. Arrangements that leave the terms unwritten are called romantic, and their terms are read out later, if at all, in the division of the property. Fiction treats the written terms as the obstacle and love as the resolution, and changes only the order in which the 2 arrive.