In trying various scenarios with memberships that involve multiple contacts (our most common scenario is partners/spouses), where I landed at this point that seems to work best for my needs is to use households, have the membership at a household level, and use the "Household Member is" relationship on the membership type so the membership applies to everyone with that relationship.
The issue I'm running into with this is when I run a membership report it includes each member of the household (which is good!) and ALSO includes the household itself (not so good). Particularly when it comes to generating a membership sign-in list for our meetings (and our meetings can be pretty large), it's not ideal to have the households on the list.
Unless I'm totally missing it, I don't see that you can filter by contact type on the membership reports. If I could limit the contact type to individuals that would solve my problem. I'm comfortable with SQL and could take the query listed on the Developer tab as my starting point, but if I do that am I then in the realm of creating an extension to do this?
I also did a lot of reading up on Households in general and it looks like a lot of people don't use them at all. I could go the "payment by other member" route and do a soft credit but that seems cumbersome to me (you have to create the payment on the NON-paying user FIRST from what I can tell), so given all of this how have others gone about handling memberships with multiple contacts?
Thanks for your thoughts and experiences on this.