What does it take for a couple to stand out as married to others? In Morocco, an ideal scenario to marry today involves families celebrating three stages: an engagement, a legal contract, and a wedding. Yet, as I will show, couples may also turn out to be married without such ceremonies. Other elements can make for evident marriages. Still, legal recognition has, over the past decades, become increasingly essential within people’s own creations of conjugal bonds. Moreover, family and penal code revisions, together with the civil registry’s expansion, have profoundly changed proceedings and possibilities to legally marry. These processes defy simple binaries of legal versus licit domains. Legal and licit understandings of marriage interlace both in people’s own evaluations and in state officials’ approaches. However, as I will argue, increased emphasis on legal registration also heightens state control over family ties and reduces people’s opportunities to leave marital definitions open-ended as this suits them over time.

一对夫妇需要什么才能脱颖而出，成为与他人结婚的人？在摩洛哥，今天理想的结婚场景包括庆祝三个阶段的家庭：订婚、法律合同和婚礼。然而，正如我将展示的那样，夫妻也可能在没有这种仪式的情况下结婚。其他元素可以促成明显的婚姻。尽管如此，在过去的几十年里，法律承认在人们自己创造的婚姻关系中变得越来越重要。此外，家庭和刑法的修订，以及民事登记的扩大，深刻地改变了合法结婚的程序和可能性。这些过程无视合法域与合法域的简单二进制文件。对婚姻的法律和正当理解在人们自己的评价和国家官员的方法中交织在一起。然而，正如我将论证的那样，