Yet the American reality was that getting married was still understood as an act of financial commingling. For proof of this one needed to look no further than the first few lines of a typical U.S. tax return. The IRS rewards married couples for pooling their incomes and filing their taxes as a joint unit. This is a startling practice to anyone from Finland, where each individual is always taxed independently—marital status has nothing to do with paying your taxes.
