It’s surprisingly hard to talk about any kind of privilege — and that’s no accident. Privilege lives in the background. It’s context more than content. It’s the invisible knapsack of automatically conferred social benefits. It’s about what most people in a culture generally presume, more than what individuals consciously decide or do.

Because it’s ambient and ubiquitous, privilege generally is damn hard to see and discuss directly. If you could easily point at it and say “look, there it is!” unequivocally, it wouldn’t hold nearly so much power in everyday life.

This includes couple privilege: The presumption that socially sanctioned pair-bond relationships involving only two people (such as marriage, long-term boyfriend/girlfriend, or other forms of conventional intimate/life partnerships) are inherently more important, “real” and valid than other types of intimate, romantic or sexual relationships.