The state should be preoccupied with parenting, not partnering, argues Phillip Hodson. The Big Day should be when you decide to have a baby, not when you go to the altar

I am a marriage counsellor who has never married. If this seems slightly redolent of a Catholic priest giving advice on G-spot technique, bear with me. I have also been "happily unwed" to the same woman for 27 years. We have three adult children (two stepchildren) and more cats and mats and cooking pots than I care to list.

As a therapist, I also understand the reasons why most of my fellow citizens will decide to marry. It is a traditional institution with something to recommend it. For me, personally, I cannot entirely see what. But, at the very least, you end up being called husband and wife instead of that litany of uncertainties commencing with "partner" and ending in "whatsit".

The reason I am sharing my prejudices on this page is that I am angry. I am angry with Gordon Brown. I am angry, too, with the sheer dead weight of the forces of governmental conservatism. And I am most alarmed by the prospect of dying.

Through no fault of my own, I have acquired a piece of property in which I live. As time and markets go by, this property has increased in value. Nothing odd there. Yet, as a result of these increases, my solid, reliable partner and I either have to face a shotgun wedding or, at some point in the future, hand over the price of a small chateau in France to the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Tax in general and inheritance tax in particular evoke many feelings, some of them confiscatory. However, when it comes to one's own hard-earned cash, one feels differently. All right, I feel differently. Whatever the size of the sum, it does not seem ideologically proper for the Treasury to snaffle this loot just because of a matrimonial anomaly.

You see, apart from a quick fix at the registry office, there is no other way to save our bacon. The rules of inheritance tax state that while husband and wife pay nothing on mutual transfers of marital property, a couple living together get fined for their presumption. My actuarial calculation is that, without this wedding, any surviving partner of our union will be skinned for about £220,000. He or she will then lose our home to meet this bill. (You may say it shouldn't be worth so much. I will say that is beside the point.)

So what's the big deal about signing up? If students are now prepared to embrace bankruptcy to cancel their loans, where's the hardship in getting married to escape Gordon Brown's Presbyterian caress? Well, I will tell you. It deeply offends my principles.

First, there's a simple matter of equity. The tax rules governing long-term cohabitations, gay relationships and all other forms of marriage ought not to be discriminatory. If you are recognised for most purposes as a stable household, above all in the census, then you should be taxed as one.

Second, I've invested years defending our status quo. For instance, when we had a child, I had no right to register the baby because I "wasn't married to the mother". On the other hand, I could register the child since I was "present at the birth". The registrar eventually, albeit reluctantly, resolved the conflicting rules in my favour. Gaining other paternal rights was more complex. To give me formal legal standing as a father, we finally had to draw up a will in which the mother named me as the child's sole guardian upon her decease. During her lifetime, it's been on trust.

Third, I object to the matrimonial ideology. One of the joys of our arrangement is that we have never taken each other for granted - indeed would have been foolish to do so. A voluntary partnership requires constant affirmation. We have no stereotypes to snare us - no "ball and chain", no "'er indoors", no "old man" or "old lady". We retain our identities.

Fourth, who wants to join a failing institution? Things are far from well with the nuptial movement. If marriage were quoted on the stock market, the shares would be in free fall. One-third of all new marriages end in divorce within five years. Many of those who were formerly married have since renounced the institution for good. Modern mums tell their daughters to see the world and establish a career before settling down. Their often unspoken message is: "Don't make the same mistakes I did by marrying in haste."

Traditional marriage, in our view, is an implicit cause of divorce; containing the seeds of its own downfall. The terms of the marital contract are grandiose, sketchy and in some cases impossible to fulfil. You cannot promise to be the same person for the next five years, let alone for the rest of your days. The basic causes of domestic friction are never addressed. Where in the marriage contract does it tell you whether to have one bank account or two? Or who takes the children to school? Or who loads and empties the dishwasher?

As for sex, the traditional deal, while silent on the need for good pillow talk, manages to make a fetish of phallic penetration. To this day, no marriage is lawful in this land until the husband's penis enters his wife's vagina. Apparently, oral sex and mutual masturbation simply won't do. Church and state require intromission. This, I contend, is a distasteful invasion of personal liberty.

Underpinning our objections, I suspect, are contemporary philosophic shifts away from the official regulation of private feelings or personal morality. I have never believed my domestic sleeping arrangements are the business of any man or any woman from any ministry. I "married" my partner, as it were, in the act of choosing to make a home with her, as she did with me. Today, fully one-third of men and a quarter of all women prefer to cohabit. This to me represents the one truly authentic "deregulation" of the Thatcher era - the "privatisation of marriage".

To those grotesque Anne Atkins caricatures in the Daily Telegraph and Mail who protest that research shows cohabitation is inherently unstable relative to marriage, I ask which university of the blindingly obvious did they attend? The state of marriage, by definition, attracts all those who believe in lifelong monogamy. Cohabitation, on the other hand, includes those who say things such as: "Well, why don't you move in for a bit and we'll see how it goes but no great dramas if we split up, eh?" When you compare apples with pears, you get sour grapes.

I also think that obsession with marital status distracts attention from the one really portentous vow we ever have to make in life, namely our decision to reproduce. This is where legal and ideological reforms need to bite. Technically, you can never divorce your children, nor should you try. But in our society men, in particular, sometimes dump their offspring in order to achieve a more gratifying marriage.

I find it scandalous that we make so much relative fuss about the scale of adultery while remaining utterly blase when parents enter a second union before they've finished looking after the children from the first. I would prefer to live in a society where anyone who caused a birth was deemed to be legally, morally and fiscally "married" to that child for 20 years at least.

To this end, we should update our folklore. The narrative mantra ought to run: "You go into puberty. You eventually have safe sex. Then you have some more. You leave education. You grow up. You shack up. You break up. You settle into your career zone. You live with someone else. And then comes your truly, madly, deeply Big Day. 'Shall we have a baby?'"

I believe all the emphasis in our legislative and tax system, as well as the organisation of private ceremonies, should be poured into this single, defining moment. The state should be preoccupied with parenting, not partnering. The vital question for any responsible adult is mating, not marriage. Ring out those natal bells! But for God's sake let's reform inheritance tax first, before I am forced to swallow too many principles and make a thoroughly dishonest woman out of a thoroughly decent partner.

Phillip Hodson is a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. The views expressed are entirely personal

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