The best way

And yeah- you COULD still have. Great life or even a great relationship and never get married... but... what’s the difference if you get divorced and lose your spouse of 20+ years or break up and lose your partner of 20+ years? Divorce CAN be messy and expensive- but any time two people become part of each other’s lives and build something together and then go separate ways it can get messy and expensive.

You can have a “marriage” or “joining” or even call yourselves married without being married legally too- which gets rid of the divorce specific legal stuff- you still have all the mess of ending a serious LTR though. You also don’t get the legal protections and privileges of marriage- from immunity to testify against a spouse in legal matters, tax breaks, the legal ability to share certain assets, their spousal rights to visit or advocate your care if you get sick or injured- inheritance and other benefits that can only be passed to a legal spouse and so on.

In some states it doesn’t mater anyway as some form of “common law” marriage exists and if you stay together and live together long enough and do a few other common things- you’ll be legally considered married anyway. In some jurisdictions you don’t even have to be married for them to seek certain legal remedy against you in a long term serious relationship.

So I get some people are scared, and some people who have been through messy divorces want to avoid ever doing that again. All I can say is there are many ways to protect yourself- and lots of ways that don’t involve shutting off possibilities for happiness to avoid the chance of pain or unpleasantness.