Should friendship have the same legal rights as marriage
A French MP proposed legal recognition for friendships, but scholars warn it could undermine their defining freedom.
Friendships are crucial to wellbeing. Despite research linking them to better mental health and longer lives, they have almost no legal standing compared to marriage.
A French member of parliament recently proposed putting friendship in law. This would give friends legal rights around care-giving leave, housing and inheritance.
Belgium allows people to register as legal partners since 2000. This applies whether they are coupled, friends or family.
Legal recognition could divide scholars and sociologists. Friendship's strength is its freedom and flexibility.
Marriage has ceremonies and contracts. Friendship lacks clear beginnings or endings.
A person often has several significant friendships with competing claims. Trying to define it in law risks destroying the freedom that makes it valuable.
Still, legal recognition could help the estimated 5.7% of Australians aged 65 and over with no family ties.
- 5.7%
- Australians 65+ with no family ties
- 2000
- Belgium legal partnership model start
- relational freedom
- Key characteristic of friendship
Why it mattersMore people now live outside traditional families. The law struggles to protect relationships that matter most to them. Yet law also shapes which ties are recognised as mattering.
AustraliaAustralia already grants unpaid carer's leave to friends who live together, but not to friends living apart, a legal gap as households change.
✓ Claims checked against the source. checked 1 h ago
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