To not get the whole getting married thing

[Snoozebox]

I know I am ignorant about the legal benefit side of things. I need advising!

Seriously, what are the advantages of getting married as opposed to just living with a partner?

I find the whole furore over the actual wedding ceremony just bizarre. I can't get my head around making a public celebration over a relationship which is mostly private. I don't get why we even need marriage in our modern society. I thought living together is commitment enough

AIBU? Someone explain to me why marriage is special, please!

The absolute minimum wording is "I (your full name), take you (your partner's full name) to be my wedded wife/husband". Most people would consider these to be wedding vows (and they are described as such on registry office websites).

I don't like weddings. We went to the registry with my mum and dad. No music, no frocks, no rings, no party. I didn't change my name and no one was notified of our marriage. (We bought a house together later and I think that's when first asked). It's just a piece of paper that you sign. And a vow you say. No harder than a citizenship ceremony.

It gives you a lot of legal protection. It's simply a declaration to the govt of your relationship. I don't get the emotional ties to it.

And some pensions do specify you have to be a legal spouse to benefit. I was in the news corp one and it specifically has a widow pension for married couples.

Onedirection marriage in the UK was not about the Church trying to make money.

The Hardwick Marriage Act in the mid-18thC was to do with the protection of property rights after one too many cases of heiresses running off with fortune hunters (or so thought the members of the Commons and ords of the time). It was State regulation of marriage which put paid to the previous rather liaise faire attitude to marriage that we had in this country. But because at the time the Government believed in a small state (sound familiar?), the job of administrating the business was shoved onto an already pre-existing network of local officials who were already practised in keeping records, namely Anglican vicars who kept baptism and burial records for their parishes.

We could easily have gone the French route and had marriages solemnised by local court officials or councillors instead and it be a completely civil affair, but we didn't have as many of those as we had vicars, so parish level it was.

OP I have little to add to the many posters who have already replied, except to add that any relationship that involves joint assets, and possibly minors as well, is not a private affair. There is very little in this world that is completely private and not in some way connected to the public.

So from reading the CAB website it seems the main advantages of marriage are:

• Next of kin status if one partner dies
• Having access to partners bank account if they die (although if you're not married this will transfer to their estate and you'll get it through their will - DP and I have a joint will leaving everything to each other, or the DCs if we both die)
• Parental responsibility (although my DP does have as his name is on the birth certificate)
• Inheritance tax (although you don't pay any tax on anything under about £300,000 so that wouldn't apply to us anyway)
• The lower earner is protected if you split up

Have I understood that properly? I earn more than DP so would marriage put me at a disadvantage if we split up?

I love the idea of marriage. I hate the idea of a wedding! If I get married it will be myself, my oh, our son and our parents as witnesses

Cheers for those answers - I have been married for a v v long time and would hate to have to try and find my marriage certificate! Also kept my own name so people generally are just taking my word for it.

Sorry for side tracking thread.

My pension scheme allows cohabitating couples to nominate their partner as eligible for a spouse pension, after you have lived together for 2 years. All you have to do is fill in a form and send it back.
My partner is named as next of kin on my hospital records and GP records.

You can get the legal protection you need by going to a solicitor for substantially less money than even a simple wedding.

I'm sorry but just living together IMO isn't that big of a commitment, if you live with someone and it doesn't work out then you simply part ways and move into another property, but if you're married and it doesn't work out then you have to go through with a divorce.

On a positive note though marriage is a great thing. I'm not naieve to think that all marriages are rosey and not all of them work out but to want to show your commitment by legally "tying" yourselves then that has got to be a good thing. Me and my dh of ten years didn't feel the need to marry or "show off" our love and commitment I front of everyone we knew so we eloped and got married in Cyprus, just us, our parents, mine and dh sisters and our son who was two at the time, we knew we love each other, we wanted to commit but we didn't need to parade it all to prove how committed we were.

You don't think separating if you have bought a house and have children together is that big a deal?

We are not talking about young people who have just moved in with their first boyfriend in a small rented flat.

And I am in a very long term relationship. We have lived together for nearly 25 years. We are very committed to each other, but not married.

cath I'm sorry but that's utterly ridiculous, break ups aren't any less painful if you're unmarried.

I was never a fan of marriage until I researched the issue.

The thing that did it for me was the way DH and I organised our savings for a house deposit, trying to take advantage of good ISA rates at the time by filling up one ISA allowance in my name, then filling up an ISA allowance in DH's name (at the time, ISA limits were £3600 per year). We had done this for a number of years.

I realised that if I died, DH would have no claim over of those any savings in my name if we were unmarried and visa versa. Everything that was "mine" would automatically go to my parents, and this was unjust as it was the both of us going without and living like misers to save the money. I also wanted DH to be able to access my bank account if I died, as I was the one whose account held the grocery budget.

I also had a work colleague whose partner died, and who ended up in a situation where his parents got very nasty about retrieving his possessions, which included furniture and all sorts. My mum, around the same time, also knew a woman who ended up homeless and with no money and no job after living with a widower for 15 years, and being a SAHSM for his young sons.

I often wonder if, when people on threads like this say living together and separating etc isn't that a big a deal, the issue is that they don't know anyone who has been together for more than a few years who hasn't married?

Those of us who are in long-term unmarried relationships are definitely in a majority.

However, it is not like sharing a flat with your boyfriend of three years. Most long-term unmarried couple will share their finances, their property/ies, their childcare in exactly the same way as a married couple.

Ditto most committedly unmarried couples have had the commitment discussion. It's not always something entered into lightly, or through lack of organisation. DP and I had the conversation in our late 20s where a decision to marry or not was made. The commitment is the same, as it will be for many long term couples.

I don't mean to say that there aren't couples who have done this unconsciously, where one partner is desperately waiting for the other partner to make a decision, and who isn't aware of the dangerous financial position they may be getting into.

But I have a question.....who ever checks if you are actually married? Have any of you ever been asked to actually prove you are married by a hospital, the inland revenue, the benefits office, a solicitor? I never have so surely I could tell them anything I like?

I have been. I had to supply my civil marriage certificate (and the results of blood tests and our baptism certificates) before DH's church would marry us. I've also had to show my marriage certificate for some services in the ME, and was once heavily grilled about it by a muktar when I tried to get something validated in order to change the registration of a car.

If you ever need to give permission for a hospital to perform a serious act on your partner (operation, turn off life support machines, donate organs), I'm sure they will ask for proof of marriage, or for you to sign declaring that you are a spouse or an authorised person.

No they simply ask for you to sign as next of kin.

I'm sorry Maybe, but they are! I've been through a few break ups before I met my dh and I was over them rather quickly (one man I was with for five years) but if me and dh were to ever separate then I'd be devestated and so would our children.

If you don't get married you need to be best friends with his family- they could be very difficult if they didn't like you!
Much cheaper to go to a registry office than a solicitor.
People are so misinformed about their rights - they won't know how wrong they are until tragedy strikes in some way.

That's bollocks cath. So someone who had kids with their partner and had been together twenty years would not be as upset as someone who had been married to their DH for a year with no kids?

You can't quantify people's pain based on if they're married or not.

You should campaign for the law to allow civil partnerships for opposite-sex couples. At the moment same-sex couples can have a marriage or a civil partnership and an opposite sex couple can only have a marriage.

In a civil partnership you do not have to say anything, you can simply sign the paperwork (at least in Scotland). But you still have to have two witnesses (who also sign) and a person authorised by the Registrar General to sign it too.

For either a marriage or a civil partnership there are preliminary checks to make sure that neither of the people are married / civilly partnered to someone else, that they are not marrying someone within a forbidden list of relationships (e.g. your granddad), and that there are no complicated immigration issues. That is why you can't just sign a form. You don't have any of that protection if you go to a solicitor (because they will not have access to the records). So you could be living with someone who is actually married to someone else - without your knowledge (And yes, there are people in the world who would do this, either deliberately or because they think a foreign divorce has taken place when in fact it hasn't).

"I'm sorry Maybe, but they are! I've been through a few break ups before I met my dh and I was over them rather quickly (one man I was with for five years) but if me and dh were to ever separate then I'd be devestated and so would our children."

So marriage is a sort of magic fairy glue, and it hurts when you pull apart? Like super gluing your fingers together. Something like that?

Or could it just have been that you hadn't met the person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with before you met your do?

You can get the legal protection you need by going to a solicitor for substantially less money than even a simple wedding.

Less a wedding, maybe, but not cheaper than the cost of "marriage" - registry office fees are less than £100 in some areas.
And, depending on circumstances, there are some things in law that only marriage allows - particularly in family court.

No Lweji they wouldn't as NOK has no legal standing.

Generally on admission the NOK is recorded and can be whoever the patient nominates. If the patient is unable to offer a NOK due to being unconscious, demented, etc then the medics will discuss with the family who the point of contact is. It can be difficult depending on family relations but generally speaking it would be a spouse, parent, sibling or child depending on the situation.

I think the longer you have been with your partner the less the meaning and importance of marriage seems.

I was with OH for 18 months before we married and lived with him for 9 months beforehand. We both wanted to get married because it meant something to us. If it doesn't mean anything to you and you don't have any children then why bother?

On the other hand I don't really "get" why someone in a long term relationship wouldn't want to get married, especially if there are children and one is a SAHP. When they say why bother, my response would be why not.

Yanbu I just can't understand the mindset of people wanting to be forever tied for financial reasons.

25 years happily unmarried here.