UNMARITAL BLISS.(Dorian Solot, Marshall Miller)

Dorian Solot and Marshall Miller are the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project and the authors of the newly published book "Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple," which advocates for the rights of couples who live together without being legally wed. Solot and Miller have been unmarried for nearly a decade, since they were undergraduates at Brown, and they decided to write the book because they were frustrated by the presumption of matrimony by which they were often met--the prospective landlord who wanted to know when they were getting hitched; the car-rental company that charged extra to allow Solot to be listed as a second driver. "Unmarried to Each Other" addresses couples in all kinds of unmarriages: those who can't marry because they are gay; those who won't marry because of political objections to the institution; and those who just haven't yet made up their minds. It includes practical information about how to obtain domestic-partnership rights, as well as tips to help couples figure out whether they are ready for unmarriage, such as "It would be a rude surprise to find out a year from now that your partner saw cohabitation as an unspoken engagement when you thought it would be a good way to save on rent and see how things unfolded."

The book's publication was celebrated at a party the other day, in the Upper West Side home of Ashton Applewhite and Bob Stein, who have been unmarried to each other for going on ten years. At the party, Solot, who is twenty-nine, said that when she met Miller, who is twenty-eight, she did not immediately think, Here's the man I want to be unmarried to for the rest of my life. "It was not one of those head-over-heels things," she said. Neither Miller nor Solot had actually ever popped the question of whether to become unmarried; their relationship had just evolved in that direction. Though both agree that everything is working really well as it is now, Miller said he did not rule out the possibility that things could end in un-unmarriage. "We joke that we can't get ...