Is marriage worth it? On top of discrimination and being made illegal, are we about to get the booby prize? It's testimony to gay love that gay couples survive society. But could we survive marriage? Perhaps one of the reasons we thrive coupled - and we do - is perhaps financial.

Let's tally up some objective financial advantages of gay coupling:

• no five-figure wedding extravaganza for families, friends or the couple
  
• few or no children, and if children exist, they're either already partly grown or carefully chosen
  
• no joint filing of taxes - which can represent a major tax penalty for marrieds
  
• no lengthy, debilitating, destructive, expensive divorce.

The tally is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here's the breakdown:

• - Weddings have become great occasions of conspicuous consumption in straight society - perhaps in inverse relation to the decline of the family. These modern potlatches are particularly common in ethnic groups that are particularly family-oriented. This five-figure expense handicaps straight couples at a crucial period in their relationship: the outset. It can hobble the relationship with debt and financial worries. Perhaps worse it can make it raises the stakes against getting out should the relationship turn out to be poor. Not only do some gays have little taste for churches or city halls, their commitment ceremonies usually occur as a commemoration of the relationship not as a goad to staying together. Luckily most gays reject imitating straights in this respect.
  
• Straight marriage exists to pump out children. No matter what progress we're making here, gays are still banned in most places from custody, from adoption, and from artificial insemination. And the expense of going through agencies. And let's face the obvious: no "natural" childbirth except under special circumstances. So most gays are spared the six-figure expense represented by each child. In many cases now just the education of a child alone is a six-figure expense.

• Unless the Republicans triumph this fall the tax code will still penalize most couples who file jointly. In addition to this inherent filing advantage the fact that gay relationships are regarded as relationships between strangers permits gays to deal with each other economically in ways that are prohibited or penalized between married partners.

• The handicap represented by divorce definitely includes the threat of divorce. The cost of divorce itself is legion - and increasing every day despite measures to bring it under control. Feminism has had little impact here. That divorce could happen can damp down much financial decision-making in a straight marriage and result in defensive postures that can cost the couple dearly in terms of lost opportunities. Divorce can sidetrack careers, drain assets, tie up finances, jeopardize corporate ownership, release confidential information, and result in enormous legal bills. Need we say more?

Gay relationships are easy to start, separate, end - or grow, modify, change, increase, decrease. The flexibility, not just the cost, is the difference we contribute. That can mean a better chance of saving the relationship in some form. It can also mean more likelihood of spouses remaining friends. And it can mean much less expense as a coupleship.

So even with legal marriage it's unlikely that gays will rush out and stage weddings from hell, birth babies while still wet behind the ears themselves, embrace the joy of taxes like everyone else, and gleefully tear each other apart when the mental cruelty gets to be too much.