Where the Heart Is

 In the future, rich married couples live apart to make sure everyone knows just how much money they have and that their wealth isn't wasted.

It all started with a young couple who were rich in debt but poor in willingness to conform, who loved each other very much. They wanted to commit to each other in a permanent and legal sense, but their leftist upbringings led them to resent the typical social definition (not to mention practice) of marriage.

Marriage, they would tell people, was an institution driven by a questionable economic system. You get married so you become someone else's economic burden, and you have kids to exploit their labour. For those fortunate enough to own property, having a kid was a good way of making sure you could still control that property from the grave, even if only at first.

So the couple married, but continued to live in separate dwellings for the balance of their happy lives together. They ate dinner together almost every night and would take turns sleeping in the other's home. And while many criticized them for not playing their lives out like characters on doomed sitcoms, they loved their arrangement and never felt the need to explain their choices to anyone else.

Eventually the rich caught wind of this, and having run out of other excesses to smear in the faces of those left wanting, they started to buy two homes. Two mansions, or two penthouses, or a mansion and a penthouse, and two cottages, and two yachts. They built separate lives from a shared bank account. Meanwhile, single moms and dads continued to struggle to make rent, which only reinforced the dual-income-dual-home lifestyle of the rich. They figured, there are homeless people in Canada, so we should take what we have and make sure we get more of it because they would want it that way.

In the future, all the rich married couples lived apart, and the divorce rate among them faded into oblivion, because husbands and wives no longer had to sleep in the beds they had co-made.