AIBU to think if you want marital rights then you should get married?

[KitKat1985]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42134722

According to this BBC article, 2/3rds of cohabiting couples wrongly believe 'common-law marriage' laws exist when dividing up finances, and there are calls now to introduce some form of legal financial protection for 'common-law marriages'. AIBU to not get this? Surely if people choose not to get married (or have a civil partnership for same sex couples) then they do so knowing that they don't have the same legal protection as married couples. It was one of the reasons me and DH decided to get married after co-habiting for a couple of years. Surely if you choose not to take on the legal and financial commitments of getting married, then you can't expect to have the same rights if you break up / your partner passes away? And surely for some couples the whole reason they don't want to get married is so they can just walk away from things if the relationship fails, without having to have the legal and financial complications involved in getting divorced? Is it really fair to then force those people to have to support their partner if they break up even if they actively choose never to make that commitment in the first place?

Excellent posts PoorYorick

I suspect some of the 'anti marriage' brigade here have a few well thumbed copies of 'BrideMonthly' on top of the wardrobe, a secret pintrest wedding dress board and gaze longingly at images of sparkly rings 😁

Thank you. Gah. People have the perfect right not to marry if they don't want to, I generally assume they're smart enough to have reasons for their choice. But there's only so many times I can hear variations of 'but why can't I be married without being married?' before my head starts melting.

I totally believe the women who say they hate the idea of a white wedding or big ceremony. I just think they're daft if they don't realise that's not a requirement of the marriage contract.

It's rationalising maybe

But they’re not getting married because they don’t want to get married, a lot of the time. They’re not getting married because their partners won’t marry them!

Well surely, shouldn’t they have sorted that out before they settled down and had a family with the man who won’t marry them?

If you want to marry a man, and he refuses to marry you, and yet he expects you to put yourself in a vulnerable position by being the main care-giver, then you are being very foolish agreeing to what is an incredibly misogynistic and exploitative arrangement.

It that kind of subservient behaviour towards men (i.e. longing for them to commit to you as you would commit to them, while you make yourself financially vulnerable by caring for his children) that is born of an attitude “from the dark ages” and is profoundly un-feminist.... You then expecting the State to pick up the pieces and rectify imbalance between the sexes that you’ve allowed to develop!

No, I’m proud that the UK has a sensible
approach to marriage, giving the option for people to take that route or not, and requiring people to take responsibility for their own relationships!

How would protecting unmarried women and their children legally affect married people? Why do you all care so much about keeping relationship protections for married people only? With protection for unmarried people it would still be open to people to choose to get married, like it is here in NZ. It’s just that no-one would be able to sleepwalk into a vulnerable situation (would still be open to people to contract out of automatic relationship rights).

To me, saying “well, you should have thought about it, shouldn’t you” is like saying no one should have children unless they can afford them. Yes, ok, but (happy) accidents happen, situations change, people change... Once you’re in the situation there’s no point agonising about how you got there. The law should fit around the reality of people’s lives, not impose an outdated moral judgment on those who don’t conform to social expectation.

I just don’t get it. Thank god I live in a more enlightened part of the world.

Just a thought, and forgive me if this is wildly out - I’m not English - did the people banging the “relationship rights only for married people” drum also vote to leave the EU?

Interesting thread. Strikes me that some will enter into a legal contract for work, for credit etc so many things. Not for marriage though. I don't think people should marry unless they actively want to. But for a woman I don't think wife without the ring etc is as beneficial as it is for men.

I know of too many who got with their man, had the children..and now that we're all grown up into our 50s most aren't with those men they set up home with.

The men they joined their voices to "marriage is just a piece of paper!" are married now. But, not to them.

As long as women are sure what they want, then all good. But you aren't retaining any more rights or freedom etc, than if you were married. Not if you're wife in everything but name anyway.

Even if. I thought marriage is outdated may - I sure as hell am not telling any man that. Keep your own counsel is no bad thing

"I suspect some of the 'anti marriage' brigade here have a few well thumbed copies of 'BrideMonthly' on top of the wardrobe, a secret pintrest wedding dress board and gaze longingly at images of sparkly rings"

This really adds to the general air of contempt and dismissiveness about other people's points of view.

@AssassinatedBeauty I chose to ignore that comment, along with some of the others I was pretty shocked by, because I don’t consider myself “anti-marriage”. I think marriage is a wonderful thing.

I just don’t want women to suffer because their partner won’t marry them.

Like LittleKiwi, I find you guys utterly bizarre. The level of smugness is pretty overwhelming, too.

In Australia people get married because they want to make a public lifelong commitment to each other. Legal rights and obligations are conferred as a matter of course to all cohabiting couples. That protects women and children from men who would otherwise disregard their moral obligations to vulnerable women.

In my case (19 years’ living in sin, two children), I’m actually disadvantaged by this, as I earn 90% of the money and the property is solely in my name. I’d be better off in the UK where I could walk away completely unencumbered by my partner, but this system is fairer. It doesn’t require an extra legal hurdle for what’s morally correct to occur.

Your system is weighted in the favour of men by allowing them to not take responsibility for situations they have contributed to by omitting or refusing and entirely arbitrary legal step. It seems to be the apotheosis of victim-blaming to then turn around and tell women they should have been more careful.

Just a thought, and forgive me if this is wildly out - I’m not English - did the people banging the “relationship rights only for married people” drum also vote to leave the EU?

It's going to take somebody with the patience of a saint to deal with a question as stupid as that one.

@notentirelywhelmed totally agree - especially with the victim blaming point. I am pretty shocked to find so many people with this POV on here, of all places.

@BadLad I know, I know, but it would be handy if I could just pop all of the UK’s incomprehensible points of view into one box marked clearly “nutters”

"Well surely, shouldn’t they have sorted that out before they settled down and had a family with the man who won’t marry them?" Exactly. Nobody is forcing anyone to co-habit any more than anyone is forcing them to marry, but they should understand where they're vulnerable.

Actually what's the bets if a law was passed giving "common law spouses" rights that certain people would refuse to cohabit too in order to avoid their responsibilities. They'll all just stay living at home or on their own contributing nothing financially or practically to the home their children live in because let's be honest it's FAR more likely to be men in hetero relationships where this is an issue.

We've already got a situation where men can have umpteen children by different women and are REWARDED financially while the women are punished if they have more than 2. It's mainly men that are nrp and if they live with/have more children they can pay less maintenance BUT they have less financial burden too because tax credits are paid for all their children providing no more than 2 are living at the same address. Now THAT is misogynistic!

What DOES desperately need fixed (because babies can be created from a ons not just ltr) is the maintenance and tax credit laws in how they affect children. Repeatedly on threads about this it is suggested it simply be deducted at source (be that wages or benefits) and I agree. And given UC is directly linked to hmrc there really is NO reason why this shouldn't be the case for child maintenance too.

NRTFT, but how on earth is that even going to work if we hand out married rights to anyone living together and cohabiting?!
What if you want to live together and have none of the hassle of marrying, are you suddenly expected to split half of your assets/money if you have to separate for any reason?
Surely that way lies madness as any part time just in it for the money chancer could come along.
Getting married is a legal bind that both parties agree to and willingly enter.

Just a thought, and forgive me if this is wildly out - I’m not English - did the people banging the “relationship rights only for married people” drum also vote to leave the EU?

No

NotEntirely - how is the start of the cohabitation determined?

Just a thought, and forgive me if this is wildly out - I’m not English - did the people banging the “relationship rights only for married people” drum also vote to leave the EU?

I'm UK born and bred, and voted Remain, although not entirely sure what that's got to do with anything.

Olenna

www.familyrelationships.gov.au/BrochuresandPublications/Pages/propertydivisionwhendefactorelationshipsbreakdown.aspx

It's such a sensible, pragmatic system.

Battleax - thanks, that's really interesting.

I can't see, though, what the criteria is for starting the two years: surely there are circumstances where there's a break up around the two year mark where one party argues that they qualify under the new laws because, say, the other party was sleeping over every night anyway; and the other party says that they hadn't really moved in so shouldn't be caught under the law because their lease on their old house still had a month or so to run so they weren't really co-habiting?

I suppose that's when it gets interesting and it's down to the judge. However, the two year stipulation doesn't apply to relationships that have produced children and there's a third clause too;

"The Family Law Courts can make these orders if satisfied of one of the following:
the period (or the total of the periods) of the de facto relationship -is at least 2 years
-there is a child of the de facto relationship
-one of the partners made substantial financial or non-financial contributions to their property or as a homemaker or parent and serious injustice to that partner would result if the order was not made, or
the de facto relationship has been registered in a State or Territory with laws for the registration of relationships."

Sorry; four. (In some states there is relationship registration and that is also an alternative to waiting two years.)

Thanks. This is fascinating

What is a "relationship registration" as distinct from a "marriage"?

That, I'm not completely clear on. I originally looked into it all when unmarried and contemplating emigration.

I took it to be similar to the French PACS. You probably need an actual Australian for the fine detail

Relationship registration is just an opportunity to formally register your relationship with the state. Unlike legal marriage (for want of a better term) same sex couples can formally register their relationships.

I've worked out why this thread bothers me.

If I, as the primary income earner in my household, told all of the SAHPs here that they shouldn't have allowed themselves to become (or, worse still, have chosen to become) financially dependent if they didn't want to be left high and dry because a man is not a financial plan, you'd rip me a new one for not recognising structural and legal and systemic barriers to full workplace participation.

Yet, married women on Mumsnet flock to the moral high ground because they have (in some cases) entered into state-sanctioned dependence on their husbands and that imparts something of a halo to their predicament, and look down on women who haven't struck such a good bargain without acknowledging that not all things are created equal and some people start off in their relationships behind the eight-ball. An unmarried woman in a DV relationship who's denied access to contraception by her partner who refuses to marry her and then ups and leaves -- she should have known better, according to Mumsnet.

Yet you'll argue that the Australian system won't work there due to quibbles about what constitutes a relationship and the thought that some people might shift the goalposts. You already have a system to determine if people are in a marriagelike relationship for the purposes of assessing eligibility for social security payments. Why wouldn't that work?

An unmarried woman in a DV relationship who's denied access to contraception by her partner who refuses to marry her and then ups and leaves -- she should have known better, according to Mumsnet.

Yes I know someone who was in exactly that situation. It's a much more common feature of DV than is widely realised, I gather.

That's a good enough reason to change the law in itself, to my mind.

I much prefer the Australian template to the Scottish one, too.

@notentirelywhelmed quite right. You’ve said it so much better than I could have.