Aibu to think if you want the legal protection of marriage then get married

[Sofabitch]

I was listening to the radio this morning and they were talking about how widows allowance isn't paid to couples that weren't married, even if children are involved.

Aibu to think marriage is essentially the legal joining of people and if you want to be recognised legally and finacially then you should get married.

I guess the supreme court will ultimately decide if I am being unreasonable. But i can't help but think people dont realise the legal security marriage offers and they should.

In the context of today's society that is, where unmarried fathers have equal rights as parents and their children usually have their sur name even if they didnt support child after ending relationship with child's mother.

What matters is education then people can make an informed choice. Astonishingly my dh,aged 82, didn’t know that a common law relationship wasn’t legally recognised.
The facts ought to be covered in secondary schools.
Marriage can be as inexpensive and private as you wish and confers legal rights financially and socially. However if neither of you wants to marry and both of you fully understand all the implications of your choice that’s fine. The problems occur when one or both partners make assumptions which have no legal weight.
Education is the answer including for those from countries where different rules apply.

I'm a British expat living in a Scandinavian country. Here, if you've been living together for a certain amount of time (can't remember how long) or you've been living together for any amount of time and have children together, you can register your status as "cohabiting". You fill in a form, need two cosignitories, and send it to the tax office. That's it. You are then treated by the state as if you were married. If one of you stops working, the other gets a massive tax break, so it's a good incentive for people to register if they become a sahp. But no one calls it "basically a marriage certificate" or thinks of it as being married. No one sees it as a "big deal" commitment wise, it's just a financially prudent box to tick at the tax office once a year. I think that's what puts people off marrying. My dp and are aren't married and TBH even a quiet civil ceremony in the uk would be a big deal. We talk about it sometimes but are stuck on the details as I strongly don't want a fancy wedding, just the smallest possible affair, but he wants a big "proper" wedding. I'd have anxiety about upsetting my family with an elopement. No one would accept that we were just making a fancially sensible decision, it would carry so much baggage. But we registered as cohabitants over here without anyone batting an eyelid. No weeping mothers following us to the tax office to submit our form. I think something like that could be a good idea in the uk.

What makes me is when the children of unmarried parents usually have the mans surname. Have your cake and eat it hey chaps . Seems the not bring traditional only works one way.

Agree entirely with Celtic.

@nordic

If your dp would agree, couldn’t you just have got married in the uk without telling anyone and therefore avoid the weeping mothers? I’m glad there’s an alternative in Sweden though. I like being married and we are churchgoers too, (shoot me), so we would always have gone down the marriage route anyway, but I really don’t get why there’s no alternative for those who feel strongly against it.

I wonder what excuses Those Men (mentioned by @celtic) would say if there was this alternative like that in the uk...

What Celtic said.

Every man has heard at least one sob story from a man they know about how they got divorced and their wife “took everything”.

They consider that they have a right to keep the money they earned because they earned it. Funnily enough they don’t seem to consider that the non-financial contributions their wife made to the marriage or the career hit she might have taken to raise his children should be taken into account when dividing marital assets. No, it’s all just about how the court system discriminates unfairly in favour of women and men are left paying the bills and not having custody of their children. (Mate, if the court has decided that your wife is the children’s primary carer, it’s because you as a couple decided it would be that way during your marriage. Did you ever offer to go part time or be a SAHP during the marriage so your wife could advance her career? No, thought not.)

These sob stories put a lot of men off getting married, I think.

My uncle was ranting and raving about having to “give” his ex wife so much of “his” money during the divorce for years.

He seems to have calmed down a bit now and has just announced that he is getting remarried to a lovely lady (his own age, with no children), which we’re all delighted about.

My partner and I were of the opinion that a piece of paper won't change how we feel about each other so why get married.

We now have 2 children and as I've had to drop to part time hours if something happened to him, i wouldn't be able to afford to keep a roof over my children's heads.

At least if the worst happened we would benefit from death in service and pension. Mine may not equate to anywhere near his but it's a buffer of the worst was to happen and our children will have a roof over their heads.

We planned a quick no fuss wedding for May.

I agree OP.
YANBU

Good plan Dolly.

If he has some spare cash, he could also pay into a pension in your name.

In my experience people seem to get fixated on the “wedding” bit of a marriage. Getting married does not mean having a big wedding. The sooner women & men realise what protection the legal contract of marriage gives and separate it from a massive expensive party the better for all.

One of ours friends was shocked to discover he couldn’t register his children’s births alone as he wasn’t married. They are only unmarried as they are both set on having a massive shindig of a wedding that they’ll never save up for. Madness to leave the people you love with less protection and rights because you’re wanting an expensive party. So YANBU

But how do you make men be better people? You can't. Women would be far better insisting on marriage before children. That would weed out the duds.

Funny though when you get those couples who bore on about not needing a piece of paper to prove their love, etc etc, then when they realise there's money involved suddenly that 'piece of paper' becomes of vital importance ...

My uncle was ranting and raving about having to “give” his ex wife so much of “his” money during the divorce for years.

That is undoubtedly an issue, but women also have a part to play in that as your uncles new partner likely had.

Make it socially unacceptable to be a twat about child support and that would help. At the moment too many women are of the opinion that it's scandalous, except for their poor DP/DH/son who got ripped off in his divorce and is now paying his ex shitloads which she uses for haircuts and false nails.

That would also give women more options re marrying or not, if you knew he'd always do the right thing because not doing so was as shameful as other types of child neglect.

The Swedish system, or CPs for heterosexual couples, or the French pacs system, all sound like good ideas for people who don’t like the words marriage/wedding/wife and what they infer, which I can understand.

The problem as many people have said is that the chances of such legislation being created in the UK soon are minimal. And even then, where do we value this as a problem for people? I heard an interview with an MP who said that legislation protecting rape victims can’t go through til after Brexit. I’d rather see that go through first. Then there’s the cost, when nurses are going to foodbanks and the ambulances are queuing for hours outside A & E do we really want money spent on this instead?

I know every thread can be derailed with the above or “well at least we don’t live in Syria” but when the legal framework for recognising and protecting people in relationships already exists, there really are bigger problems in the UK than what essentially boils down to a relatively small group of people having a problem with semantics.

Derxa that is true and I walked away from one man who wouldnt get married. But I was conscious of a ticking clock and married an arsehole.

So this is an issue I understand. I walked away with nothing to get away from controlling xh. But that is another thread. What I mean is that women are up against it in so many ways. Paid less which even if they go it alone makes it harder and also it the economics of family unit gives them less voice. Ticking clock on their fertility.

Ill be told i was stupid but now i understand that it was coming from a low self esteem. I had dc with arsehole dc because i had optimism that i could sort the rest out later. "The rest" being finances and job and life love fulfilment and happiness.
The one thing i knew i couldnt sort out later was being too old to conceive.

I guess im lucky now that i have modest security in my house and a job but i have no freedom as 100% responsible for dc.

I think govt childcare would give women the freedom to walk away from arseholes who dont value them.

Then maybe men as a sex would have to go back to the days of being formally and legally committed to a family. They have it all for 'free' now.

Obviously some men are decent enough not to exploit the system and their own wife but not all. Men suit men. How do you say that in latin. Buyer beware. Men suit men.

It could be Nordic, but as with any of the potential alternatives to marriage being proposed, it's not going to go to the heart of the main problem we have, which is that people don't know. They don't bother, they think they're ok, they don't need a piece of paper or they put it off and it never gets done.

The people who in Sweden don't want to get married but care enough to fill in the form and get the signatories and send it off, are the people who in the UK don't want to get married so go to the solicitor to make what arrangements they can instead. The sort of people who amend their life insurance to reflect the fact that they won't get bereavement allowances, that type of thing.

So by all means we could introduce something like you mention, but the people it will help will primarily be people who were ok in the first place.

Does the Scandinavian system protect women who make long term earning power sacrifices to raise kids? Is that contribution, and the long term earning repercussions, recognised in some sort of long term settlement if the relationship ends?

I agree with pauldacre
It wouldnt protect the common law wives of men who think they're richard branson.

@CelticSelkie, if marriage is important to you and a man won't marry you, you dump him and find someone to whom you are better suited.

Did you not read what i posted?
I walked away from a man who wouldnt get married. Im single and im not marrying anybody.
My points were the obstacles women face

Ultimately, I think there are only two potential ways to tackle this.

One, some kind of automatic or at least opt out system, with the accompanying disadvantage to people who have made an informed decision not to get married because they don't want the legal status. Basically, us deciding as a society that people who can't or won't make provision for themselves should be prioritised over those who have made informed decisions not to marry their partners because they don't want the legal status.

Two, better education. Although in all honesty, and much as I acknowledge the points about not placing more blame for this on women than men... I do think there are men who know exactly what the score is and are making their decisions on that basis. So in the absence of automatic marriage rights after X years (and I suspect we'd then see the deadbeats deliberately making sure they stay on the electoral roll at their mum's and getting all their bank statements sent there) literally all that can be done is for the women who partner with those men to make better decisions. Which, until we get better at fixing it, means making decisions in the context of us living in a sexist society. I'm not saying that's fair...

Agreed @PaulDacreRimsGeese (there's something I never thought I'd say!). Whatever our views, all of us on this thread are here because we've actually given this some thought - the problem is that most people just don't, so even a bespoke relationship encoding service wouldn't help them.

@DanceDisaster yes we could have done it in secret but I hate the thought of that. I think that's the problem with "marriage" is that it feels a bit lose/lose for some people. Big traditional things can feel staged, patriarchal, or needlessly expensive. Simple registry offices risk upsetting family and friends who wanted to be part of your "big day". And a secret wedding is just a level of lying, even by omission, that I wouldn't feel comfortable with. If everyone could just see if as a legal contract and nothing more, that would be one thing, but there's so much baggage which comes with it and if you want anything different than a big church wedding it feels like you're setting yourself up to piss loads of people off.

@PaulDacreRimsGeese Absolutely, couldn't agree more. The problem is definitely lack of knowledge, and/or one partner being taken advantage of by another who wants to keep them vulnerable. My dp and I have been through the list of married vs cohabiting rights together and discussed each point and whether we wanted to make marriage a priority now or later or never, and what different legal provisions it might be prudent to make in each case. Clearly many/ most cohabiting couples don't do that - often because one party (usually the woman) doesn't feel like they have a voice in the relationship.

@PoorYorick I'm honestly not sure, I'll see if I can find out. We're only here for a few years so it wasn't something I looked into.

The last thing, not directed to anyone in particular, is that people sometimes can't help the circumstances they find themselves in, so saying things like "just don't get pregnant if you're not married" really isn't helpful. Contraception fails, and not everyone sees abortion as an option. Once you're in that situation with someone who won't marry you there's only so much you can do! And whilst I agree that not giving up career/ earning power is a good thing, not every has that to begin with. Lots of people are unable to earn over minimum wage or can't wirk at all, so for them things like "keep your career" isnt really meaningful advice. Yes lots of people sleepwalk into vulnerable situations through lack of awareness, but saying "just don't get pregnant" or "just have an abortion" is a bit naive.

If the birthrate falls then maybe govt would make changes to protect partners of the 'marriage averse' but on an individual basis women want to be a mother (mostly) even if that is at a great financial cost to them.

Women's achilles heel in this transaction is that they have a visibly looming and closing window in which to have a child. Men dont. Their partners don't.

They lose power their. They lose more power because they earn less and in the economic of their own family unit it makes sense (temporarily) to mind their own baby.

Suggesting getting married in secret is saying that people are bothered by what other people think, rather than how they feel about marriage themselves.