Recognizing Care: The Case for Friendship and Polyamory

Canada’s The Globe and Mail recently reported that the American companion of a Canadian woman had been deported: The elderly women, who have little money and no car, left Canada after Ms. Inferrera, a 73-year-old American, was deported – prompting a public outcry. She and her friend of three decades, Ms. Sanford, 83, are inseparable. In addition, Ms. Sanford suffers from a heart condition and dementia and Ms. Inferrera looks after her (Taber, 2012). The American woman had been refused permanent residency despite numerous appeals, although eventually this decision was reversed (Taber, 2012). Arguments for same-sex marriage often appeal to cases like this, in which longstanding relationships are ignored by authorities, and this harms crucial interests of those involved. But these two women were not romantically involved, and so, presumably, did not consider marriage an option. Why should their relationship lack recognition and support because they are ‘just’ friends – friends who have cohabited for decades and cared for one another materially? In this article, Professor Brake argues that friends such as these, and other non-traditional partnerships, deserve marriage-like entitlements. “Mere friends” are not the only neglected category of caring relationships. Groups of more than two are another. Imagine that the two women had lived and shared their lives with a third friend for a similar duration and with a similar degree of interdependency. If there is an intuitive pull to the thought that the two women in the real-life case had a special claim to immigration eligibility, why would the addition of a third life partner weaken their claim to special consideration? In this case, their lives would have twined together in mutual interdependence as did the lives of Ms. Sanford and Inferrera. If the basis of such a claim (at least intuitively) is that the parties have demonstrated a deep commitment and depend upon one another in daily life, a group of three people could demonstrate exactly the same characteristics. It might be responded that recognizing more than one relationship is simply infeasible, opening the state to all sorts of ludicrous claims. However, immigration now recognizes multiple family members; if the women had been sisters, they could have received special consideration under Canada’s Family Class Immigration, whether the sponsor had one sister or two. It might also be thought that while a sister-like relationship between unrelated women might deserve treatment as “family,” the line should be drawn at sexual, polyamorous relationships. But if the nature of the three hypothetical women’s relationship also had a romantic or sexual element – or if two of the women had such a relationship while the third was a non-sexual indispensable friend to both – how would that relevantly change their claim to possessing a deep commitment and mutual interdependence? Here, as in previous work, Professor Brake makes the case that justice requires extending marriage-like entitlements much more broadly. Marriage – or a marriage-like legal framework – should have a legal future, but that future should not exclude friendships or committed polyamorous units. In the next section, Professor Brake reviews her previous arguments for extending access to marriage-like rights more broadly (Brake, 2010, 2012). This argument proceeds within the philosophical framework of political liberalism. Those already familiar with my arguments for “minimal marriage” may wish to skip to section 3. In this section, Professor Brake discusses general challenges to arguments for marriage reform, before proceeding in section 4 to the case for extending some current marital rights to friendship and polyamory.

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