In the twenty-first century, marriage practices in the Islamic Republic of Iran have evolved rapidly as unfulfilled expectations of intimacy in marriages have caused an increase in divorce rates, and the tendency to postpone marriage and engage in unsanctioned sexual relationships. In the past decade, the emergence of white marriages, or cohabitation, has made these unsanctioned relationships more visible. This practice exacerbates what the state has long called a marriage crisis, and as a result, clerics and state actors publicly condemn white marriage because it violates Islamic principles. Still, some Iranians prefer this conjugal arrangement to sanctioned permanent or temporary marriages. While scholars of gender and sexual politics in post-revolutionary Iran have addressed temporary marriage, Iranian women’s mobilization of the law, and women’s negotiation of rights with the state through shari’a (Islamic law), they have yet to examine white marriage. Through an ethnographic analysis of narratives from clerics, legal experts, and practitioners of white marriage in Iran, this paper argues that through their everyday practices, white marriage practitioners have sparked a public discussion on the politics of intimacy and forced state actors and clerics to revisit legal and Islamic debates about gender. It also examines the relationship between Islamic jurisprudence and the civil legal code, and the implementation of the state’s hybrid laws that operate at the societal level, beyond the official discourse. At a time when state repression and gender oppression are used to justify either isolation or military intervention throughout the Middle East, this paper brings to light the co-constitutive power dynamic between the everyday and the normative, where white marriage practitioners indirectly engage with legal and religious state actors.