To think that some married women on here think they are better than unmarried women?

[malificent7]

After reading the thread about legal rights, marriage and birth certificates I was struck by the patronising way in which some married women spoke to those who are cohabiting or not married.
True married women have better rights but it was the way in which the relationships of unmarried women were dismissed as lesser and these women were being sneered at.

Someone told a woman who had been cohabiting that her relationship meant nothing and that if you are not married you are single.
REALLY? I am not married but I am not single. I don't even live with the guy but why is my relationship seen as less valid? Some married people hate each other and don't have the guts to leave. Some of the best love affairs involve people who live miles apart.
I don't like the fact that I have to put single on a form . Why can I not be in a relationship?

Ok, If you are married you have some legal rights and security that the unmarried have but shouldn't we question this? Why should we make vows especially if you don't believe in the laws of marriage? Also, it was originally a religious ceremony..I don't believe in God and I am not a commodity to be given away by my dad to another male.

Does it lead to stability? My dp is divorced. The marriage vows didn't stop things from falling apart.

Marriage can be a great thing but the tone in the last thread was old fashioned and practically berated women for not managing to get a man to marry them. Surely there has to be other options if you don't believe in marriage ? It is a patriarchal tradition after all to do with male prperty rights. Also, many men want pre nuptuals as they are now wise to gold digging wives.

I think you can have some marriages which have less love than some cohabiting relationships. Why is one type of relationship more valid? I find it all very old fashioned.

Judging by the number of men who don't leave their wives a dime on divorce, I am not convinced by the stability argument.

The 1 in 4 thing can’t be right - how on earth are they defining unplanned for that to be correct? It can’t be unplanned in the sense that the couple were using contraception.

I don't believe the 1 in 4 figure.

Loads of people claim the pregnancy was an accident. You see it on here all the time. Men surprised their partner got pregnant despite not using protection, they don't seem to understand it, it's ridiculous.

Women who think they maybe didn't take the pill right. People who say 'I know it was stupid but we had unprotected sex now I am pregnant'

I have seen a few where it's been claimed women thought their partner was infertile because they tried for a baby with a previous partner and it never happened. Who has unprotected sex on the theory their partner is probably infertile.

Then there's the women that claim no of their several pregnancies were planned. I am sure some of these might be true, but I believe most aren't. Most of these are on the threads complaining their have no rights because they didn't get married or legally protect themseleves. When asked why they had kids without any legal protection, its usually 'the pregnancy was an accident'

Yes accident so happen. But not using protection, or not using it properly is not an accidental pregnancy in my view.

I've heard (and read threads on here) about unplanned pregnancy where unplanned means 'we didn't use contraception but it was only once'
To me if you opt to have unprotected sex that's a planned pregnancy. Having unprotected sex says 'I'm open to having a baby'.

Or I was on the pill but it failed. Pill failure rate is low, so was it actually being taken properly?

Basically, I think a lot of claim accidental pregnancy when it was just down them not being responsible with contraception.

1 in 4 pregnancies is unplanned?

I'd love to see a stat for that

Even looking at 'typical' rather than 'perfect' use, contraceptive effectiveness is well over 90% in most cases (except for condoms, which although are 98% effective with perfect use, typical use is 82%)

Given the majority of people who don't want to get pregnant will use some form of contraception

And 1 in 6 couples experience infertility

Even accounting for contraceptive failure, how do you get to 25% of all pregnancies are unplanned?

Wow Any what a really shitty sexist post.

Do quote and tell us how you know the unmarrieds on here secretly wish they were married and after that tell us which reasons they are happy being unmarried are shitty.

FYI I was asked 16 years ago almost 14 years into our relationship.I didn't want to get married. We both hate that kind of thing. What shitty reasons have I given for staying unmarried for nearly 30 years in a happy secure relationship?

Ok so this says 1 in 6 unplanned and 1 in 3 ambivalent with only half planned.

www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/1113/26112013-One-in-six-pregnancies-are-unplanned

Do women who’ve never had contraceptive failures not realise their just lucky?

The 1:4 unplanned is self reporting as unplanned rather than the truth which is a careless and selfish attitude towards the consequences. Contra sis highly effective these days but you have to bother to use it.
I don’t care whether people choose to marry or not but I do think the “We’ve been together three months and are having a baby” is beyond stupid, beyond inconsequential and very damaging to that child and future children.
Controversial but children are best reared in stable, enduring, committed and equal relationships- statistically that means marriage.
Am I a better person for being married - definitely not. Does a 25 year plus marriage suggest an ability to maintain a relationship, an ability to look to the future, an ability to compromise and learn from each other? Probably. Are my children better off because they come from a stable and secure foundation - Definitely. Is life easier with one family, two parents - I’m pretty sure it is.

I can see why you don't like the term stupid for women who sleepwalked into the situation sarahandduck, and I don't use it myself. But when a woman doesn't know the law relating to cohabitation, she's literally uneducated on the subject. The men in your examples are a lot of things, but naïve isn't one of them. They're acting in what they perceive as their own interests.

We can call the men in your example whatever we like, I've got a few suggestions, but meanwhile better education is still needed and what we call the men will make no difference to that. Some of the women sleepwalking into this situation (because let's be honest, most cohabiting with kids situations don't unfold as you described) have been ignorant. Ignorance can be fixed.

I worked on the government sexual health and teen pregnancy strategy, so am quite familiar with contraceptive failure

The statistics are at a population level. Perfect use is how effective the contraceptives is when used precisely correctly. Typical use accounts for 'we used contraception but slipped up' - and then there's actually contraceptive failure.

Genuine contraceptive failure happens. But there's a reason the gap between perfect and typical use is so small for LARCS - because there's less margin for user error.

I'm simply not buying the self reported figures

That's suggesting astronomically failure rates of contraception, way way beyond what any of the data shows

Do quote and tell us how you know the unmarrieds on here secretly wish they were married and after that tell us which reasons they are happy being unmarried are shitty.

Sorry P3ony, I tried to avoid that conclusion and have been avoiding saying it for a while. Believe it or not, I don't actually like winding people up.

But after the same discussion over and over, it's how it looks to me. In these discussions, married women are always being accused of being superior (this thread is a case in point) and smug for stating simple legal facts. In this thread (or maybe it was the other one), I've had my intelligence, integrity and sense of self denigrated simply because I am married. In addition, I am constantly confronted with other people making my marriage about them (including a lovely post the other day from someone who said that women get married to prove that they "beat off the competition" and caught a man - do you think that's sexist too?). I have to wonder why they have such an emotional investment in it if they sincerely have no interest.

What exactly would this look like to anyone?

As I specified, I'm not talking about every unmarried person. That would be ridiculous. But a fair proportion of the ones who get into these discussions? Yes, it looks that way.

Got to say I expected a far worse roasting than that, though. It's now the weekend, perhaps it's coming.

Do women who’ve never had contraceptive failures not realise their just lucky?

Of course not. However, I don't believe a lot of contraception failures are just random failures. For example my auntie said for years, that her sin was a contraceptive failure. Actually she had food poisoning. She had had the runs and vomiting. A day after she got better she had sex. She admits that she had been told, by the doctor that she should use condoms if sick as the pill may not work properly.

But she thought it would be ok and she would probably be covered. But she got pregnant. That's not an accident. She knew there were risks and ignored them.

You even see threads on here, where women admit they didnt use protection and it still say it's an accident. Or women who partners knew there was no contraception but still consider it an accident.

There's always debate over what counts as planned and unplanned isn't there? Personally, having had an unplanned pregnancy where there was no contraception but we just wrongly thought it'd be fine and took a risk, I do actually think there are a lot of us who convince ourselves we won't conceive when we're having unprotected sex. DH and I were idiots but it's a common enough malady of our species.

I also think some of us get more careless in situations where we're less bothered about the consequences. I would never have taken the risk that led me to conceive when I was a teenager, or with a newborn when I knew I really couldn't deal with a pregnancy. When we were already married and knew we wanted to start a family in a couple of years, perhaps that contributed to our carelessness. I genuinely didn't think I would conceive from the particular sexual episode, so the pregnancy was unplanned, but I'd say there's a large grey zone too.

That sounds really interesting to be involved in banana!

What shitty reasons have I given for staying unmarried for nearly 30 years in a happy secure relationship?

Sorry, forgot this bit. I can't remember what your personal reasons were and I'm sorry, I don't care enough to rake back through the thread to find them. I didn't have any one poster in mind when I wrote that post, except for the one who apparently thinks all married women are irresistible sexpots. (Which is true, obviously.)

There are, however, plenty of others who give the "just a piece of paper", "don't need to prove our love", "don't need to show off", "don't like the word" and "too much hassle" which frankly do sound like pretty shitty reasons to me and, coincidentally, are the ones I've most heard men use to fob women off.

And then loads of women say it's an accident because they feel shamed to admit they didn't use it.

Teenagers may say to their parents that they did use it. Older women might not be able to believe how stupid they have been not using it and feel embarssed saying it to family or friends.

There was a recent thread where an OP's SIL told OP she was about to start trying, conceived a few months later and then told everyone they had not been trying. OP was befuddled, as was I.

But I remember several posts on there by people who said they had come off contraception in the interests of having a conception but still did not consider that to be "trying" because they were "just seeing what would happen". Seems nuts to me since there was one very obvious possibility that they were attempting, at least, to make more likely, but apparently a lot of people still don't see that as "trying".

AynRandTheObjectivist
I agree.
Come off contraception and have unprotected sex = trying for a baby

Some people may need to do a bit more work, be a bit more proactive, need tests etc but it's all still trying.

I hate the 'oh it was unplanned and just happened' (when we stopped using contraception to have a baby) brigade. It wasn't unplanned. It happened quicker than you expected. Spare a thought for people who are having fertility struggles before talking bullshit about how amazingly unplanned your pregnancy was when it was anything but.

Spare a thought for people who are having fertility struggles before talking bullshit about how amazingly unplanned your pregnancy was when it was anything but.

I agree, and I think I said something similar in that thread. It's not a crime, of course. But given how alone and shitty it is for people who are struggling, it's thoughtless to make them think that they are even more alone that they thought....that they are surrounded by people who apparently can't NOT get pregnant even when they use protection!

I could say my second pregnancy was unplanned. I came off contraception. It took a year to get pregnant the first time. Me and then dh agreed it wouldn't be timing cycles etc. If it happened, it happened. If it didn't, it didn't.

It did happen. It wasn't unplanned. We were having sex without protection. The consequence for that is pregnancy. You have sex without contraception, isn't unplanned pregnancy you may believe it's genuinely not going to happen.

It's like crossing the road with head phones on and your eyes closed. You may genuinely think you wont get run over, but there's a good chance you will.

But given how alone and shitty it is for people who are struggling, it's thoughtless to make them think that they are even more alone that they thought....that they are surrounded by people who apparently can't NOT get pregnant even when they use protection!

As an infertile person I'm constantly stunned by reading MN as life seems to be one constant battle against contraceptive failure!

The irony of having spent 2 years working on a government programme to encourage uptake of effective contraception, when it turns out I'm barren, is not lost on me.

well all those years religiously doubling up on taking the pill and using condoms were fucking pointless, as it turns out

AynRandTheObjectivist
Exactly. It's disingenuous.
We've been TTC for over 2 years now. A friend was talking about how their baby was a surprise and they weren't expecting it. Her mum had spoken to my mum and said it clearly wasn't a surprise at all. It was a shock to the husband but actually she'd been after a baby for a while and was taking chances shall we say with the pill.
But the big story was how exciting it was that it happened so quickly after they got married and it'll be a perfect year for them. What an amazing surprise for us both. Etc.

bananafish81
I'm with you. 2 years on TTC. Come on mumsnet and it would seem that people only have to hold hands and they get pregnant through 3 lots of contraception and the morning after pill. Apparently.

Sounds unexpected, not unplanned. Certainly you were trying.

We knowingly had unprotected sex because we wanted to get pregnant = planned

We knowingly had unprotected sex and are aware that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy, we weren't deliberately trying to get pregnant but didn't think it would happen to us = planned but unexpected

We used contraception because we wanted to prevent pregnancy but still got pregnant - either because we didn't use it properly (typical vs perfect use) or we did everything right but I still got pregnant (very small but v unlucky genuine contraceptive failure) = unplanned

We knowingly had unprotected sex and are aware that unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy, we weren't deliberately trying to get pregnant but didn't think it would happen to us = planned but unexpected
Unexpected due to adults being idiots.
What do people think happens? The fertility gods look down and say 'oooh ok. Paul and Sarah have only had unprotected sex but it was only once or twice so we've decided that the normal rules of conception shouldn't apply this Wednesday'?

The idea that choosing to have unprotected sex when unprotected sex can lead to pregnancy would only be unexpected for an idiot.