Something potentially strange about PIL engagement.

[Talksense]

PIL are in their 70s and had DP in the mid 1980s. FIL was married before meeting MIL but divorced as his then wife didn’t want kids.

PIL went to see the doctor as they had been trying for a baby for 12 months without any luck before conceiving DP a few months later. Apparently as they were getting older they wanted to focus on having a baby over a wedding. MIL was giving me unwanted advice on how to conceive when all this came out. I didn’t think much of it apart from MIL trying to pry if we were trying to convince/plans to start a family. DP believes the story to be nonsense and that she’s just trying to hide that FIL only proposed as she was pregnant/DP wasn’t an accident.

Im not sure, surely PIL living together, not even engaged must have been somewhat out of the ordinary. I couldn’t give two hoots if they had a shotgun wedding but actually quite curious on societal norms at the time. PIL are definitely not the hippy types and from two very traditional working class families/communities.

I agree @Phos, times had changed by the 1980’s, but the change was relatively recent.

Prior to the ‘80’s, I don’t think it was uncommon for newly married couples to have “premature” babies six or seven months after the wedding. My Mum was interested in genealogy and there were plenty of seven-month babies on my Dad’s side, including my Grandpa. 🤣

Im not sure, surely PIL living together, not even engaged must have been somewhat out of the ordinary.

No, it wasn't. Not unusual in the slightest. You're thinking of the 1950s.

@Phos pretty normal in some circles I think. Both my grandmothers were pregnant on their wedding days (1931 and 1934). One of my great-grandmothers didn't marry the father of her first three children, mostly because he was married already.

Of my 9 aunts and uncles, 5 got married because of a pregnancy - between 1953 and 1973. (All 5 later divorced, more or less acrimoniously. I understood my dad's attitude a lot more once I realised this!)

I remember a friend talking about how her sister had been engaged for ages with no apparent plans for a wedding. I asked "do they live together?" and when the answer was yes suggested that the engagement was probably a sop to her parents. That was 1994. We were church people but not fundies. And note that my question implicitly allows the possibility that they weren't living in sin

I was born in the early eighties and all my school friends’ parents were married. By the late eighties some of them were divorced but they had all been married at the time of my peers’ births.

I have older cousins who were cohabiting with their now husbands by the early Nineties, but they were doing so under strict instructions of “no babies until you’re married”.

I lived with my boyfriend from the mid 80s.
We did get engaged, but never married even when we had kids although that was in late 90s.
Didn't feel unusual at the time

Lots of cohabiting in the 80s . And lots of babies born from those relationships. Less ordinary than now. But not unusual.

My parents had my eldest sister before they were married in the early 60s so by the 80s it was very usual .

You say only 15 years between your grandparents in their 80s and PILs in their 70s, but there was huge social change during that gap between when each of them were young adults. Your grandparents would have been young adults in the late 50s/into the 60s, when it was pretty scandalous to have a child out of wedlock. Mother/baby homes leading to adoption were very common, and people got married out of obligation.
Then the contraceptive pill was introduced in the 60s giving more freedom in physical relationships, leading to a change in behaviour, and eventually in turn, a change in opinion. Going into the 70s, there were changes to the welfare state, including the introduction of child benefit for all children (previously only available for parents of 2 or more children) making it financially easier to keep a child.
Then going into the 80s, there were changes to legal rights around family, legitimacy, more rights for women.
And throughout all of this, a slow decline in religious practice contributing to a generally more positive (or at least less negative) view of single mothers.
So by the time your partner was born it's perfectly believable that they focussed on conceiving a baby rather than a wedding - especially considering that it would have been a second wedding for your FiL, and at that time, a second wedding would have been a lower-key affair.

Nobody had invented ‘societal norms’ in the 80’s 😃

I grew up ina working class community. 70's it was still a bit shocking. 80's and would say was the first decade it was normal

The appalling state sponsored forced adoptions of the children of single mothers were still going on until the late 70s.

Some sections of society may have liberalised by the 80s but to say having children out of wedlock was normal and universally accepted is simply not true. Even if young people were more comfortable with it, their parents weren't.

I was born in 1983 and my parents had been living together for about 5 years at that point.

They didn't get married until I was about a year and a half old, and it was a very quick registry office jobby because my mum found she couldn't get a prescription filled for me because I didn't have her surname. If not for that then I reckon the probably wouldn't have bothered.

I can think of any of their friends that had kids whilst unmarried, but loads lived together for years before marrying

Went to university in 74, single, and certainly didn't need DF's permission to open a bank account.

Only person from school living with her boyfriend was in London. Most of us got married at 21 or 22. Lived in seaside town in Wirral. Think it still had its mother and baby home linked to the C of E in 77, but can't remember.

Strict instructions from whom? God? Their parents? Mary Whitehouse?

My parents had to get married in their teens 3 months before I was born in the early eighties. My aunt had had to give up a baby for adoption around the same time.

I was at Primary School in the 70s. My best friend’s parents got divorced and that was seen as quite shocking, but not as shocking as her mum then having a baby with a new boyfriend. My DM was slightly reluctant for me to go to their house after that!

I am adopted, born just before the Abortion Act 1967. Adoptions peaked in 1968

I got married in 1990 and had been living with my partner beforehand, and I can assure you that it was very common for people to be cohabiting (in NZ) right through the 80s.

I moved in with my boyfriend (now husband) in the early 90s, it was very common. I'd say it was still frowned upon in the 70s, and fairly normalised by the 80s. By the 90s only the devout would give two hoots.

My ds went to my parents wedding when he was 11 months old so I was 21 when my biological parents got married in 2005 they had been together 25 years ish and only got married because they got a mortgage that year my Dad has always had the opinion "it's only a piece of paper"

Interesting to see both the huge variations in attitude to cohabitation at that time, and people's determination that it was very normal despite lots of alternative experiences described on this thread!

My parents were both married before they met each other, and my mum had two kids with her first husband. They brought a house in the mid 80s and fell pregnant with me a couple of months later. They then got married when I was 2 - reason being that taxes at the time were cheaper for married couples! They're still married 35 years later

It wouldn’t have been unusual to live together at all, or really to have a kid outside marriage - I do think that long term living together with kids and no marriage was more unusual but people did it and no one took all that much interest.

There’s a massive difference between the 60s and the 80s on account of the sexual revolution / second wave feminism / legalisation of abortion / widespread use of the pill / Birth of Thatcherism that took place in between. It’s the 60s your GPS will be remembering.

Most of the changes we associate with the 60s hit mainstream society in the 70s, so the 60s are really part of mid century - very much attached to the WW2 era, the 80s are the beginning of the era we live in now, the 70s a transition decade. It was a few decades of v rapid change as Pp says.

I just did a Google for stats and they would seem to support the idea that living together wasn’t very unusual in the 80s, but that long term living together with kids was more unusual:

A BBC article reporting on ONS stats says that ‘From 1986 to 2004, the percentage of non-married people under 60 who cohabited rose from 11% to 24% among men, and from 13% to 25% for women.’

If you were living together in the 80s, the chances of you getting married within 5 years was over 50% in 85 and about 35% in 2006

illegitimate births were 12% in 1980 and 42% in 2006

on the other hand teenage pregnancy was more common - it was 4% of under 18s in 1980 and 4.5% in 1985, and below 3% by 2010.

People tend to form opinions based on their own experiences, on the whole, rightly or wrongly.
In my experience while it wasn’t ‘normal’ it certainly happened. My best friend from school’s parents weren’t married (we were born in 1984). In fact they’re still together and still unmarried. They weren’t hippies or anything like that, normal middle class couple, they just never married.

Their mother.

We have since had babies to unmarried parents within “the cousins”, and strangely they haven’t been disowned 😂