I'm probably pretty aligned with you on marriage as a tool. My spouse and I married after several years together. We were already each other's ride-or-die, somewhat similar to Kim and Jimmy in this story. We didn't need the state to bless our relationship. But that state official status conferred on us a variety of legal rights and presumptions we saw value in that would have been time-consuming and unreliable to secure with legal arrangements other than marriage. EDIT: And immunity from testifying against each other was not one of them!