Why get married?

For me, I wanted to always be able to make the decision that works best for us as a unit rather than me individually.

E.g Partner A gets a job in a new city. Partner B can only get a lower paying job there but the household overall will be better off. If I was partner B I would only agree to this if married so all assets we built were legally ours jointly.

Many people shrug or rant that marriage is 'just a piece of paper'. But I hope the previous 3 pages of posts have convinced you that it is a very important piece of paper for a range of reasons and that for nearly everyone, it is a very good piece of paper.
There are some other important pieces of paper: make sure that the deed to your property shows you both as joint tenants so that if something happens to one of you the other takes full control of the property without needing to do anything more than update the land registry. If you are tenants in kind you will have problems!
Find out who the beneficiaries of your DP's pension(s) are: you should be the main one as should he since the survivor will need all assets to support the DCs.
If you've read those posts you know what the legal implications are and you've heard about die-hard life partners who married with one on a hospital deathbed because that 'piece of paper' just steamrolls over all the complications and ensures that the surviving partner is treated equally. This is why second and third marriages take place: the couple values each other above all others.
As PPs have mentioned, the 'wedding ceremony' doesn't have to be a big deal. Just like when you signed the papers on your house, you could just marry quietly somewhere with a few random witnesses in a solicitor's office or at the registry office.

Following this thread with interest as I instinctively do not want to get married & never have. I’m the higher earner (3x more than OH) and he has no savings etc. We have one child. We rent & do not own a property. I don’t really plan on marrying him (or anyone else) 🤷🏻‍♀️ I have life insurance so that they’d be ok if I died.

This sums it all up! If you are the person who took time out to have babies it places you in the more vulnerable position - named beneficiaries can be changed and would be if you broke up. Personally, got married for love/romantic reasons but after kids I see the legal benefits as more important - why wouldn’t you want to protect the person you love and procreated with to the fullest possible manner. If children weren’t involved I wouldn’t be too pushed. Each to their own, but I would have felt it very naive to take a career break and create dependents with someone who wasn’t fully committed financially - putting your money where your mouth is the phase that comes to mind!

That’s the best argument for getting married anyone could wish for.

There's a car crash. He is badly hurt. You are nothing to the hospital without some kind of contract. His parents or aunt or uncle make all the decisions. They don't even have to consult with you.

Get the paperwork.

We got married because it was a lovely romantic thing to do and we both wanted the life experience, very glad we did

also year before twice family invited just me to their weddings despite us being together for 5 years and living together and we felt that a few family members would respect ( or at the very least could not dismiss) our same sex union a lot more if we made it public and legal , again very glad we did this and the support we felt for our relationship was overwhelming ( from most 😂👍)

When someone dies, a relative needs to register the death unless there are no relatives. Even if you've been living together for 30 years, you are not a "relative" so e.g. an estranged sister or cousin who barely knew the deceased gets precedence over a long-term partner.

Marriage is also internationally recognised and is very straightforward for people to immediately grasp the relationship. A partner could be a 20 year relationship or 2 weeks. Much easier to be able to tell a hospital, funeral parlour, tax man etc that this is your husband/wife.

For me, being married seems to be recognized more than getting any of those legal rights in place i.e. pension, health etc . It shouldn’t necessarily be that way but it seems like that. Also, I just couldn’t understand the rationale of being together for years on end and not just filling in the form and popping to the registry office to cover yourselves in case of every eventuality.

@Needmynailsdone Strange that you reference travel as we also travel a fair amount. I take comfort that if anything happened abroad, it’s easier to be the wife than to be someone with a document that allows me to do x,y,x ( if it even applied in that country).

Weddings are another thing entirely though. No idea why anyone would want to waste money on that outdated ridiculousness.

Since the last budget we are considering getting married / civil partnership simply to protect each other in terms of inheritance Tax - more specifically our private pensions reverting to the other on death without the government taking too much. It feels entirely wrong that a government edict / policy change should indirectly affect how we live our life but that's the UK we now seem to live in... get married or lose money! Feels like it should be illegal somehow.

The point PP makes above about your relationship ending in death or break up is spot on. Every relationship will end in one of those two and marriage protects in both.

People need to assess whether or not marriage will be beneficial to them after taking sound legal/financial advice. It is so dependent on your circumstances. When my non married relationship ended I walked away and that was that. Started again. My marriage cost me a lot of money to get out of, money that could have been spent on my kids. They have nothing that they wouldn't have had regardless.

but aside from pension / life insurance stuff (which I’m the nominated beneficiary for)

well, for now you are. But with a few forms and a signature he could change that faster than you think. But if you were married it’d be a different story.

I never understand the “too busy to get married” argument. We had a very simple civil marriage ceremony. All in all we were in and out in 11 minutes. My husband went back to work that afternoon. You don’t need a big “do” to be married. You’ve spent more time on this thread than we did at our marriage ceremony.

If you’re happy just being his current girlfriend, good for you. But your children deserve more stability.

@bakewellbride my adult children couldn't give a shiny shit that their parents never married.
But they are not from the 1950's so times have changed

It's not worth it for the person who has more income, assets and whatever else to be honest! Me and now DH had similar and similar future financial prospects, no way if I had more would I have got married though! I know that's not romantic but it's realistic.

Setting up wills is not the same financual protection as marriage. They can be changed unilaterally if things go wrong.

Your kids might question it / dislike it when they're older.

From someone who's a bit further down the line age wise and is in the thick of the divorce era, in the unmarried couples splitting up the women are getting spectacularly financially shafted, even more so than the married ones, and that's saying something.

This is my friend, she’s been with her ex partner for almost 30 years, her name isn’t on the deeds of the 800k house they both lived in (there is no mor). Financially she has contributed a lot to their relationship as well as being the primary carer for their two DC. It really is a mess.

Your relationship will end one of two ways: you split up or one of you dies.

If one of you dies, you will be spared inheritance tax and the process of post death admin will be much, much smoother for the surviving spouse. There is a reason hospitals organise bedside weddings: marriage really matters in the face of death.

If one of you is a lower earner in part because of childcare responsibilities, marriage protects your interests and nonfinancial contributions in the case of a split. If you are financially equal and both work FT, this is obviously less relevant, and indeed if your partner is a spendthrift it can be financially better not to be married. But 99 times out of 100 if there are compromises to be made in earning power between a heterosexual couple because of childcare/SEN/poor health the woman makes them.

Consulted, yes. But you cannot legally make decisions on his behalf without power of attorney.

He could nominate his partner as his next of kin/contact and the hospital would discuss things with her instead. He could also refuse to let them discuss anything with you if he wanted to. It is his choice, not a legal right that you have.

We married for money reasons, specifically the IHT benefit. We also married so we would automatically be next of kin as we hadn't done our wills at that point so that if one of us dies, the other can get immediate access to money.

The idea of me dying out of the blue and my long term partner having to ask my parents for money to pay the bills because he can't legally access the money in my account and having to wait for probate was a complication we didn't want.

www.simpsonmillar.co.uk/family-law-solicitors/what-are-the-legal-benefits-of-being-married/

I don’t agree that married people are necessarily motivated to work harder than cohabiting couples at their relationships as a PP said.

I think (not in all cases obviously) the hassle and cost of divorce isn’t worth it so marriage is a kind of artificial glue. I think there are more unhappily married couples than unhappily cohab couples tbh.

And that, unlike inheritance tax and legal protections for SAHPs, is not a “positive” of marriage. Quite the opposite!

And yes, your children will benefit when you both die. When my mum died, everything automatically went to my dad, including her nil rate band. And then when he died we were able to use both nil rate bands for money and for property, meaning no inheritance tax to pay on the first million.