Is married life all it’s cracked up to be?

[Helmlover]

I mean, did your relationship change at all when you got married? I have been with my partner for over 6 years and we are constantly being asked when are we getting engaged, as if it is an event in our lives which is long overdue. I have just never understood people’s ‘desperation’ to get married almost, and IMO marriage is sold by society to little girls as a fairytale concept from a very young age ie. I remember being asked by my peers when I was 5 or 6 what colour wedding dress I would wear and what sort of flowers I would have etc. and I remember thinking even back then it was not something I was that bothered about doing.
So seriously, are us strange people who are not intending to get married really missing out?

I married my husband to give him the security that SAHMs are urged to marry for. He is at home, caring and raising the children while I work full time. We are equals in all things, so we formalised the relationship.

I think the fact that I am married to dh has made a difference to our relationship. I don't know if we would have got through the tougher times intact if we were boyfriend and girlfriend, rather than husband and wife.

ExH got very controlling after we got married, it was if I stopped being a person and started being a possession. DH took several years to convince me that it was something I wanted to do again, but we've been married 7 years now and he's just as lovely as he was before we got hitched. I have to say, I like saying/hearing 'my husband' and 'my wife' rather than 'my partner'.

I wish i’d saved myself the 50k, kept my name and insisted on equal parental leave after children. If you plan to keep your career going there is no need for marriage at all in today’s society.

If i had a daughter i would advise her not to bother and just make sure both partners were always equal and took half the resonsibility for everything in the partnership.

If you've been together for years and live together, I can't see the point of an engagement. It's meaningless. Just pick a date and crack on, if you want to.
We got married after 10 years and a child. Mainly for practical reasons and we fancied a party.
It was a lovely day, low key.
And, actually, the final commitment of marriage, was special, emotional and has made us very happy.

If you plan to keep your career going there is no need for marriage at all in today’s society.

IHT?

I wish I had had an alternative to marriage that gave us IHT protection. Marriage has made me feel a little bit trapped.

What changed for me after being married was that I didn't need to spend any more time at weekends planning a wedding!

The wedding was bloody brilliant
Memories of the wedding still make me feel glowy and happy because I felt so confident in our relationship that day, and it's still good about a decade on. I don't think I could have got so much joy from the wedding if I hadn't got so much confidence in the relationship. We had been partners for a number of years and were reasonably tested by life.

Marriage didn't change the relationship but it has bought recognition and clarity from a legal perspective. It was formally becoming family together before having the children. Children have evolved the relationship and adjusted our lifestyle and roles and as they grow up and presumably we return to living as a couple, it will continue to evolve.

Ironically, formally commiting to spend the rest of our lives together would have most practical benefit at the ending of the relationship by death or divorce

I find the status of marriage nice and clear. Partner can be ambiguous. It can mean decades of living with your soulmate. Some people use it for quite casual relationships where boyfriend/ girlfriend would barely apply.

I got married when I was 19, I had just had a baby and yes, partly wanted security. We have been together now for 31 years and I am so glad we provided a stable home for our kids.

We didnt have a wedding tho, just nipped down to the town hall and did it with 2 witnesses. No do or anything, just went back home and sorted baby out!

while the divorce rate maybe high more marriages work long term than don't and non marriage relationships are more likely to break up and if they do there is less legal protection so a woman can easily end up homeless if not on mortgage or deeds however if married and not on mortgage or deeds you still have a claim which helps if it all goes pear shaped,

Marriage securities benefit the lower or non earning partner which is generally the woman

If there is a high rate of divorce how do more marriages work long term?
That makes no sense..
Why are "non marriage" relationships more likely to break up?

When my parents were young everyone got married, they were Catholics so no matter how bad their marriage was, getting divorced was never an option

Marriage/divorce statistics get complicated as they get skewed by second marriages, marriages towards the end of life, impact of legislation change etc. Start looking at the statistics and it feels like trying to pin down mercury.

I suppose the difference between marrying and not marrying is that in a marriage there is a social/legal/personal point at which your relationship becomes a 'thing'. At that point you both (and society) know the status of your relationship

Living together without marrying can be far more fluid. For many couples it becomes a formal relationship when they jointly sign for a home. However if that doesnt happen eg one partner moves into the other partner's home there isnt necessarily that joint decision point. Quite literally they may not be on the same page with regards to the nature of the relationship.

A marriage has a legal start and end point. You are not married until you are married and you stay married until the marriage legally ends. Thinking of it as a graph there are firm start and end points. The graph of the emotional relationship may look very different.

Even if you take the highest divorce figure of 42% that still means 58% of marriages last until death,
The 42% includes some people who have had more than 1 divorce and statistically 2nd marriages have double the failure rate of first marriages, so in the long run almost 60% of marriages last until "death do us part"

Changing your name is a pain!

I got 2 years of tax rebate as my husband is on a tax free stipend and I get his tax allowance! We got married on the 1st April and the tax year starts on the 5th so the first 4 days of being married paid at almost £100 a day!

(This wasn't the reason we got married, but it was a nice bonus!)

Being married shouldn’t change your relationship. What it does do is make things a fuck if a lot easier when bad things happen.

It changes your legal status and if you believe marriage is only about the ‘wedding’ I suspect you don’t know enough about this to make an informed choice.

When people say marriage gave them ‘security’, the increasing divorce rate confirms that marriage is not really a permanent fixture

Divorce rate is slowly decreasing with the exception of same sex couples, where it increasing. Your post is designed to be goady and inflammatory, mocking married people.

There were 112 divorces of same-sex couples in 2016; of these 78% were among female couples.

In 2016, there were 8.9 divorces of opposite-sex couples per 1,000 married men and women aged 16 and over (divorce rates), an increase of 4.7% since 2015; however, divorce rates in 2016 are over 20% lower than the recent peak in divorce rate in 2003 and 2004.

The divorce rate for opposite-sex couples was highest among men aged 45 to 49 and women in their thirties (ages 30 to 39).

I got married for my husband - we had a baby very quickly and he needed to know i had no intention of buggering off leaving him with no parental rights (different law then). It also was a gift to my MIL who got to invite 30 of her friends to the wedding (without telling us until the deed was done) and to my BIL who got to have a small wedding with no pressure because we'd done the big do. It also meant there was one more reason not to leave when the chips were down, and they were so low so often that i needed as many reasobs as possible.

We had a religious blessing a few years later, just the two of us. Now that was awesome.

I felt more secure after marriage. It changed my mindset in that I now view us as a unit in a way I did not before.

Before marriage, I was thinking in terms of mine own future. We had separate finances, for example. When I was unmarried I had not been made any promises. He was free to leave at any point with few consequences so I felt a need to protect my own interests against my partner. That isn't a union in the way marriage is.

Now I can work on the assumption that we will be together forever (safe in the knowledge that if things did go tits up, I would be protected) and can, therefore, fully commit to the relationship.

Obviously it is a bit different for people who have been together decades, have kids and a joint mortgage because they are a bit more committed than I was.

I don’t think you understand what marriage is; it’s more than cohabiting. Some people see their long term relationship as cohabitation and coparenting. Marriage is recognised by the law as two people becoming a single unit (corny as that may sound, but that’s the starting point for each partner and the children of the marriage).

Many people who marry still see themselves as separate individuals, not as a single unit. Many people who cohabit see themselves as a single unit.

It’s about both of your attitudes today and in the event of a separation. Some married people use the law to the protect them and their children from the other partner upon separation. Some cohabiting partners know to do the right thing by each other and their children upon separation.

Romance and fairytales have absolutely nothing to do with it.