To not understand why people get married?

Also adding , as a PP pointed out if you're foreign/an internationally mobile couple , being married is a ticket to a lot of shared privileges. Not every country, company etc recognises unmarried partners equally.

I don't think that the law 'punishes the woman' insofar as it treats marriage as a sharing of assets.
Even if there were no children involved the lower earner after a long period of marriage would be entitled to an equal share.

There should be more provision IMO for asset sharing agreements within a marriage

It’s a legally binding contract in the eyes of the law.

Yeah, personally I’d never do it again lol

To punish the harder worker

Exactly.

Mummy tracking is about child birth - not marital status. And many woman don't know about the benefits of marriage, scale down with a partner not a husband supporting them anyway.
It's all about individual choice.

There's nothing wrong with stepping back a bit once you have kids, whether you're a man or woman. The problem is people assuming that you're going to do that. And they do it mostly to women not men.

That is a bubble I'm afraid.

Being real, most working class men are not taking parental leave from their jobs and continue to internalise the idea that childcare and housework is womens work and tea should be on the table because they are the provider (and many are, even in low paid jobs, because often the woman is a sahm woth kids and on benefits). This reinforces their male partners view that the woman is sat at home "not working" while he os slogging away in a manual job and is therefore more tired than her. The expectation is then that she will cook and clean and look after kids because essentially she has had a "day off" waiting for him to come home.

Many middle class professionals have the same internal narrative as demonstrated by the men who avoid childcare by staying late at work or say that they are on annual leave and need to rest and therefore can't possibly spend time with their kids.

@cgauUwahahaha

I completely get this. But I actually think sometimes marriage makes women more likely to get mummy tracked.

Women who are married to a man with a decent income have a financial cushion. But that’s a double edged sword.

Youngish but no kids immediately after is what I meant

@Thepeopleversuswork It's not just about earnings though. The main earner could get made redundant, get sick, etc at any time.
A woman is more vulnerable because of the physical impact childbirth and pregnancy. Not to mention being mummy tracked.

Having said that, I agree that marriage isn't automatically better for the woman. It depends on the balance of assets and expectations. And baggage.

I'm a high earner (currently earn 20K more than my husband) but we have the same earning potential. Would I have married an average earner ,older with assets ? Probably not. If I'd not gone on to have kids I'm basically subsidising him.

If I was young, earning a lot but wanted to have kids immediately I would have done. Had I been injured in childbirth or similar my career might have been over, and he'd need to support me.

As it stands I married youngish but no kids, our careers grew together.

@LostittoBostik

Of course we should campaign to change the law. But until it is, if you're unmarried you have zero rights and if your partner decides to financially shaft you after children they simply can do so. I don't think blaming women for making a rational choice is the right approach

I am talking about women who earn more than the partner here. Of course if you are not working or you are a low earner you should get married. Thats a totally different situation.

I find it so strange when know-it-alls ask for advice they clearly don’t want, or think they know better than.
Why ask? Oh wait….

No it's not about "it is what is is", but it is about the LAW is what it is.

Of course we should campaign to change the law. But until it is, if you're unmarried you have zero rights and if your partner decides to financially shaft you after children they simply can do so. I don't think blaming women for making a rational choice is the right approach.

I didn't want to get married until after we had children (over a decade). I hadn't realised how much of my financial autonomy I would lose in becoming a mother, just by the responsibility of care giving.

This.

Do you earn a lot more than your partner? How do you split childcare/other domestic responsibilities? What financial risk are they exposed to in your relationship?

Also: it does make a difference to how permanent the relationship feels. I only got married after being together for a decade, having a child and a house together etc. I thought we were just doing it for the paperwork. We both said afterward that we were surprised how much of a difference (positive) it had made for both of us. It was way more romantic than I was expecting. I'm not a sentimental person at all.

@PregnantWithHorrors

But part of that situation is that a majority of us are the financially weaker party when in a relationship with a man, and that there are wider societal and cultural factors shaping that which cannot be waved away. All women are at some risk of being impacted by these. Simply being of the sex who get pregnant is in itself a risk factor for being made poorer. We could do with more understanding of this, not less.

I completely understand this but in my view the prevalence of marriage plays into those wider societal and cultural factors.

I’m going to caveat this heavily as I recognise that marriage is a very important tool to protect women who don’t work and that a lot of people have very equal marriages. But it is at it’s heart a patriarchal institution which codifies traditional sex roles in the family.

Of course you’re right that by virtue of the fact women carry, bear and nurse children they are more vulnerable. But there’s something a bit fatalistic about saying “it is what it is”. The expectation that they will marry someone who will “take care of you” is still held up as a life goal for women.

Its everywhere in popular culture. How many times have you watched a character on TV wistfully telling his daughter he wants to be able to “walk her down the aisle,” as though this was the best she can hope to achieve. The centrality of marriage in our culture holds women back at the same time as protecting them. It teaches them to scale back their ambitions. It teaches them, crudely, that they need a man for money.

I’m not arguing that we should do away with marriage: it clearly plays an important role in protecting people and is culturally important to many people. But I think we need to really reframe the way we present it to girls: instead of seeing it as their ultimate life goal they need to start thinking of it as one of a suite of tools.

Or we are from cultures where children outside marriage simply are not accepted. Or we foresee that we may have to take time off when we have Dc because childbirth and young babies are not predictable.

If you work and generate your own income and particularly if you out earn your partner it’s a bad idea.

^this

A friend of mine just separated from her dp of 20 years and thank god she didn't marry him or he'd be off with half her (fully paid off) house and pension. As it is he is back living with his mummy.
Marriage is definitely not always beneficial to women.

Yanbu, any woman that states "I would never consider having children without being married" is really saying that she is not financially independent. I could never marry because I am indeed financially Independent!

That, I agree with. We know that women take a disproportionate level of the domestic load at all income levels, and it isn't the case that male lower earners as a cohort behave in the same way as female lower earners. It doesn't actually matter whether this becomes more common in the future, it's enough of an issue now.

@sugarbyebye

It does sound like the law needs to catch up.

It certainly does. It may technically be true that this is still a metropolitan minority scenario but it’s on the rise and the demographics suggest it will continue to rise.

Divorce law certainly needs to find a better way to reflect this. It is currently framed around an assumption that the man will be paying to support a woman whose earnings are compromised by the need to care for children.

When what is increasingly the norm is that the woman in this scenario gives a man free money without any corresponding obligation. So she pays him to fuck off and have fun with his new partner and still has to work, support children and do all domestic work.

That's a different point again then. But still too generalised.

For one use of the term 'plan' is significant here. Women don't necessarily plan to be the lower earner or take a disproportionate share of childcare. There are a whole load of societal factors at play there. I was the higher earner before being pushed out of my job due to maternity discrimination, as an example.

It's also not simply about how much money you make, because higher earning women are disproportionately paired with higher earning men. A higher earning woman with DC may still very well be the more financially vulnerable of the two. We won't get anywhere if we consider only the woman's earning in isolation.

Agree 100% on the Disney princess point.

Basically, women do need to evaluate the situation and not generalise. I am absolutely, fully on board with that. There are absolutely situations where marriage is a disadvantage, especially if you have DC already from a prior relationship and want to protect assets for them.

But part of that situation is that a majority of us are the financially weaker party when in a relationship with a man, and that there are wider societal and cultural factors shaping that which cannot be waved away. All women are at some risk of being impacted by these. Simply being of the sex who get pregnant is in itself a risk factor for being made poorer. We could do with more understanding of this, not less.

There is also the need to consider what happens on death too, and most marriages end with bereavement not divorce. For obvious reasons, this tends to be more pressing the older someone gets, and people who didn't want to marry often start marrying or registering a CP once they get to a certain age and realise they prefer the way the law treats bereaved spouses to the way the law treats bereaved cohabitants. Unfortunately, we don't get advance warning of when we're going to die.

I presume I live in a bit of a bubble, but in my group of friends (aged late thirties/early forties), for about 75% of the couples the women out earn the men, some by a lot, some marginally. Medics, engineers, academics, senior managers. There was a mix of parental leave split between parents. I assumed this was becoming more usual? I work in a male dominated industry and have always been well paid, in line with my experience, and out earned my partner significantly, although we've swapped recently as I've gone part-time to set up a side business. It's becoming the norm for men to take shared parental leave (and it's actively encouraged), whereas ten years ago it was unusual. My partner is a software engineer and his male colleagues seem to take a minimum of three months parental leave, so his industry is changing too. It does sound like the law needs to catch up.

@PregnantWithHorrors

We shouldn't make blanket assumptions, but saying marriage is really risky unless you're a SAHM very much is a blanket assumption. And wrong.

Well, I do think that unless you are planning to take a significant amount of time out of the workforce to raise children the case for marriage is at best negligible and becomes progressively riskier the more money you make.

Let’s put it like this: the default assumption that marriage is always the best policy is wrong. Women should be encouraged to look at it on a case by case basis and properly evaluate the benefits and risks.

It doesn’t help that as a society we fetishise marriage and particularly weddings and many young women are encouraged to see a wedding as a “prize” and the pinnacle of what they can achieve in life.

The miasma of fuss and drama and the whole Disney princess syndrome is profoundly regressive and unhelpful in helping women see marriage with clear eyes. An awful lot of women still egg their daughters on here and urge them to think of marriage as a goal and this is partly why so many women still can’t tell the difference between a wedding and a marriage. It really is time we demystified this.

We got married in 2018 and it was done for love, not something you hear a lot of the time on MN but it genuinely was because of love and wanting to spend the rest of our lives together and share a name. Money didn’t even cross our minds as a reason

Same. Married 15 years now, no children (by choice). Still totally in love, still the best thing I ever did.
We had a small registry office wedding then a party. I didn't want to spend a lot and im quite anxious so being centre of attention didn't appeal.

I think the main thought I have when reading threads like these is that people tend to confuse the wedding for the marriage itself. Which is hardly surprising, as plenty of married people don't really seem to understand the legal commitment they've signed up to either!!

But marriage is a legal agreement which links you together with your spouse more as one combined unit not two separate people, which is often very protective to couples who have kids and one person much reduces their earning potential as a result. Others have already posted more detailed explanations and links so I won't repeat! It's possible to replicate the majority of benefits through other means for sure, but it's a lot easier (for many) to achieve that situation through marriage, not layers of other documents.