Luckily, I did look up the laws for my state, and legally we aren't technically married, but we do have the right and sometimes the obligation to apply for some marriage related benefits. It's weirdly inconsistent.

[–] Speculater@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My wife and I get a huge tax break for filing jointly, not to mention healthcare and life insurance benefits.

[–] Sombyr@lemmy.one 3 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, don't think we can do any of those to any significant effect. We're both on medicaid and non-taxable disability income. In other words, we don't usually legally have to file taxes unless we had some other kind of income that year because it's just gonna be a long string of zeros.

What we can do though is file for disability as a married couple, then we can legally save up a lot more money in exchange for being paid slightly less. The requirements for that are just living together and "holding yourself out as a married couple to the community you live." Well, actually, there is a bit of awkwardness with the wording last I checked that accidentally makes it only apply to heterosexual couples, but I'm sure they legally have to apply the rule to homosexual couples as well. We'll see anyway.

I believe we also have the same visitation rights as a married couple if we're ever hospitalized, which is helpful considering we've both found ourselves hospitalized as a result of our disabilities a few times. I'm not certain about that though. We had quite a distance separating us every time that's happened so far, so haven't had the opportunity to test that.