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A marriage of convenience (plural marriages of convenience) is a marriage contracted for reasons other than the reasons of love or family. Instead, such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose, such as immigration.

Historically, marriages were often arranged between families in order to protect wealth, title, inheritance, or similar issues of property. Such marriages went forward with little or no consideration of love between the people to be married. Arranged marriages remain common in many parts of the world to this day, famously India and other parts of East Asia.

For a long time when European nations were constantly at war, their royal families would arrange for their children to be married into other European royal families. The most famous example of this was Queen Victoria, whose children married into different royal houses, and earned the nickname of "the Grandmother of Europe". This type of marriage of convenience served several purposes. One being is that in many nations in was unacceptable for nobility to marry another social class. Another was to forge alliances between two nations. Yet another was to stave off the threat of war. The downside to this came during the First World War, especially in Russia, where Tsar Nicholas II's German born wife was widely accused of being a German spy and sabotaging the Russian war effort. (Although it is probably not fair to call the marriage of Nicholas and Alexandra a marriage of convenience, as many friends and family members attest to the fact the couple was indeed deeply in love with each other.)

In more modern times, marriages of convenience are often contracted to exploit legal loopholes of various sorts.^{[citation needed]} A couple may wed for reasons of citizenship or right of abode, for example, as many countries around the world will grant such rights to any wedded resident.

Another common reason for marriages of convenience is to hide one's homosexuality in cases where being openly gay is punishable or potentially detrimental.^{[citation needed]} A sham marriage may thus create the appearance of heterosexuality. Such marriages may have one heterosexual and one homosexual partner, or two homosexual partners. In the case where a gay man marries a woman, the woman is said to be his "beard". Oscar Wilde, Cole Porter and Rock Hudson are said to have had marriages of convenience to hide their homosexuality. See also Lavender marriage.

The phrase "marriage of convenience" has also been generalized to mean any partnership between groups or individuals for their mutual (and sometimes illegitimate) benefit, or between groups or individuals otherwise unsuited to working together. An example would be a "National Unity Government", as existed in Israel during much of the 1970s or in Second World War Great Britain. More specifically, cohabitation refers to a political situation which can occur in countries with a semi-presidential system (especially France), where the president and the prime minister belong to opposed political camps.

Such partnerships are often referred to jokingly as "marriages of inconvenience", particularly where real co-operation between the parties is absent.^{[citation needed]}

The phrase is a calque of French mariage de convenance - a marriage of convention, or marriage of suitability.

[edit] In modern media

• The 1990 film Green Card starring Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell is about a man who wants to stay in the US and therefore enters into a marriage of convenience.

• The 1995 - 1997 Fox network sitcom Ned and Stacey is based on a marriage of convenience between the two title characters.
• On the 2005 Family Guy episode Perfect Castaway, Lois marries Brian after they thought Peter was dead at sea. The marriage didn't last long when they found out Peter was alive.
• The 2007 film, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, focuses on two straight males who unite in a homosexual marriage of convenience.