For Richer or for Poorer : We no longer scorn live-in relationships, but we still invest our social, legal and economic capital in marriage.

“How’s your husband?” I asked a colleague the other day about the man she’s been living with for 15 years.

“He’s not my husband, he’s my . . . companion,” she replied. “I’ve had a husband. This is much better.” Then she launched into an description of the pleasures of living together without benefit of judge or clergy, chief among them that, while in a committed relationship, she was not another’s possession.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “But the minute he dies or leaves you for another woman, you may be sorry.”

Have we really come to terms with the contemporary meaning of husband and wife? With the divorce rate at 55% and lengthening life spans making serial monogamy more the practice than the exception, marriage may seem to make little sense. And yet there are signs that, as a society, we are in fact more wedded than ever to the institution of marriage, a steadying force on the rocky seas of modern life.

I covered the first palimony case, Marvin vs. Marvin, back in the late 1970s for Los Angeles magazine (though the word itself, sorry to say, is not my invention). I was rooting for Michelle Triola Marvin, who had lived with actor Lee Marvin for six years, until his attention turned. While not a feminist heroine, Michelle Marvin was striking a blow for women when her lawyer argued that a long-standing live-in relationship is rarely, as the law had it then, like long-term prostitution. The case established in California law that unmarried couples have the right to establish contracts between themselves. And yet she personally lost the contractual point: The $104,000 finally granted her was for “rehabilitation,” the term often used to describe payments so an unemployed ex-wife can go back to school. Michelle’s claim to half of everything was soundly rejected.

Fast forward now to the unhappy case of Anthony and Claire Maglica, who lived and worked side by side for 20 years, shared a common house and name and built a flashlight company into a $400-million concern. Though a jury awarded $84 million to Claire, now 60, the case may be as much of a defeat for her as Michelle Marvin’s was a decade and a half before. Claire Maglica’s attorneys argued that the couple had a private agreement to share everything and that they presented themselves as man and wife. But the jury found no agreement, and its award is far less than the half interest that Claire could have claimed as a wife.

Regardless of what an appellate court eventually decides in the Maglica case, there are some things that we can already say about the situation of living together in the modern era. In the years between Marvin and Maglica, the dark shadow of illicit sexuality has been lifted from most live-in relationships, but the bias against them still hangs heavily. Although California law allows lovers to make contracts, it does not presume that one exists even when the relationship is longstanding. “Who knows what goes on behind closed doors,” my mother used to say about couples who looked happy together. And this is the attitude our society has taken, too.

While divorces are often messy, they’re a piece of cake compared with attempting to prove an oral agreement between parties who are no longer speaking to each other. Judges and juries hate to reconstruct the intent of relationships after affairs have fallen apart. Even if you’ve shared everything equally for years, the 50-50 nature of the commitment is far easier to prove for couples who have taken five minutes to say “I do” in front of witnesses.

This brings us to love. Although experience and evidence often justifies cynicism, even here in California we still reward those who make a commitment of the heart and declare their intentions toward each other in public. At the same time, we’re tough on those “lovers” who live together for long periods without making things right. We think them foolish, or messy or somehow doomed. When one party disappoints the other in marriage, we call him a scoundrel, but without that paper we often think, how naive can you get?

It’s funny to find in these cynical days that the allure of committed love is still strong. But there it is: The protections are infinitely greater, the road far smoother, to those who dare take the chance. To love and risk all, that’s what husband and wife still means. To them, we are willing to grant almost everything: a share in each other’s pension fund, insurance and Social Security benefits, a presumption of common purpose, the willing suspension of disbelief that love is here to stay. But for those who don’t, we offer a lawsuit and send them on their way.