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What seems to be missing here is common household. That's what most married couples do, and most friendships and other arrangements don't. Me and my wife have common bank account, which each of us can use independently, common property that we both use, etc. Treating it on the individual basis, ignoring that fact, would both clearly unjust (a family with one income would pay radically different taxes than a family with the same income but earned by two people, for example, even though they essentially are in the same financial situation) and would create a huge mess in practice. That aspect makes the marriage unique, as there aren't many other arrangements in the society where people essentially form a single economic unit long-term. Theoretically you could do it with your good friend, in practice pretty much nobody does. This is much more important, IMO, than "love".
I see a few issues with this view. The first is simple: If you changed marriage to explicitly define it as a "common household", with no allusions to families, love, sex etc., how would you think people would react? In my experience, most are quite protective about the definitions of modern marriages. I'm pretty sure you'd be extremely unpopular on both the right (which still mostly clings to the old definition, even while it hasn't been enforced for decades at this point) as well as the left (which will badger you about how some marriages don't share a house, others not an account, but they all love each other, and you can't take that away from them!).
The second is at least two pairs of (male) friends from my old school clique did in fact share a common household for nearly a decade each, living together, pooling money for the majority of expenses, such as grocery buying, furniture & shared electronics, even (more than) yearly vacations together. They were as close, and the arrangement was stable for as long as, quite a few marriages, so from this perspective it was a great injustice that they got treated differently! It also didn't create a mess in practice, it was just kind of unfair.
The third, basically the counter-side to the second, is that it's actually pretty common for marriages nowadays to not at all be a single economic unit. The average marriage I know has three accounts, One for each and one shared, and how much is actually pooled into the shared account varies widely. Many keep the majority of the money to themselves once they earn well enough so that the basic necessities are just a small part of the expenses. Retirement accounts are generally kept strictly separated with no pooling except maybe informal arrangements. Arguably, messes happen in practice because too much was pooled together, not the other way around.
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