As noted by other posters above, this is not some sort of “virtue judgement” so much as it is an observation based on the differences in the protections afforded to married vs unmarried couples in this country.
As with so many other things in America, you’re free to do as you wish - but when things fall apart and the system doesn’t help you because of how the laws are written, don’t be surprised…
Doesn’t change the point many of us have been making in this thread, which is that buying a house as a resident is already a questionable idea…but buying one with an unmarried partner is probably especially foolhardy…
(EDIT: in case anyone is wondering…I’m someone who has been divorced. I’m remarried to someone who is a member of the LGBTQ community. We lived together for a fair amount of time before getting married. So no, I am not some sort of preachy member of the religious right - very far from it, in fact. But even as someone who more or less got screwed in family court the first time around…I think anyone approaching a long term relationship with children, joint owned houses, etc while being unmarried in America is a fool. Marriage is not “just a piece of paper”, it’s a way of getting the government to actually acknowledge and respect your relationship, and it affords you various rights and privileges not afforded to unmarried couples. There are alternative ways to get SOME of these rights and privileges in some states, but not all of these privileges and not in all states, and when **** hits the fan it can be very hard for an unmarried couple to accomplish things that would otherwise occur more or less automatically if the couple was married. There is a reason the LGBTQ community fought so hard for marriage rights in America…and it’s not just to be able to say “we’re married”. Oh, and guess what? If you have kids and joint property etc and you break up, you’re still going to be going to family court to hash all that out. You don’t get around that just because you never signed a marriage certificate. (Just ask my wife, who has kids from a previous unmarried relationship, and whose family court situation has been a total debacle for years.)