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

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. A well-known fictional example is the dilemma faced by Rose DeWitt Bukater, the central character in the 1997 blockbuster film Titanic.

In more modern times, marriages of convenience are contracted, for example, for reasons of citizenship or right of abode or, in situations where homosexuality is punishable or potentially detrimental, to 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". Both Oscar Wilde and Cole Porter are said to have had marriages of convenience to hide their homosexuality. See also Lavender marriage.

The phrase "marriage of convenience" has also been generalised 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. Another example on a smaller scale would be the ongoing effective coalition between the Liberal Party of Australia's Campbell Newman and the Australian Labor Party-dominated Brisbane City Council.

Such partnerships are often referred to jokingly as "marriages of inconvenience", particularly where real co-operation between the parties is absent.

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

The 1995 - 1997 Fox network sitcom Ned and Stacey is based on a marriage of convenience between the two title characters.

Marriage | 政略結婚