To think that women should stop starting families before they get the ring?

[MeteorGarden]

Ok so hear me out.

I’ve read a few threads now from women who have got themselves into the same difficult situation and judging by hundreds of comments, they are seriously not alone!

They desperately want to marry DP who ‘always said he would’ But now (a few children/ years later) has declared he has no intention of marrying them.

It follows the same pattern, OP wanted to marry early on and DP was open to it but didn’t actually pop the question. OP didn’t force the issue (god forbid she be labelled ‘pushy’ or ‘crazy’) and instead started a family with DP (OP seemed under the delusion that having his children would make him propose).

Why!??
A) Would anyone ‘start a family’ with a man who isn’t proposing to you? If he’s open to it why isn’t he doing it?
B) Is having children becoming just an alternative to getting the ring/ security you want?
C) Would anyone think having his children will make him propose? If you have the kids without a ring it’s fair for him to assume you’re happy enough with the current situation!
D) are so many women put off flatly asking for what they want? It’s terribly backward to just quietly have his children and keep his home in the hope that one day you’ll be ‘rewarded’ you with a proposal! We’re living in a society where you can carry his children but feel uncomfortable asking WHEN he’s going to propose and pushing the issue?!?!

The stories I’ve read are horribly deflating and I empathise with their explanations of frustration and humiliation but wonder if perhaps it could have all been avoided?

We have so much more freedom and independence than our grandmothers, but we’re expected to pretend we don’t care about marriage or kids for the first year of dating so as ‘not to scare a man away’!! WtF?

I wouldn’t ever plan a family with any man I wasn’t married to. It was spelt out to me that the time to lock down my chosen relationship was BEFORE I had children or made irreversible sacrifices!

This kind of thinking seems to instil fury in a lot of modern women but why? Taking the more ‘modern’ approach really doesn’t seem to be working out very well for alot of women so would a bit more tradition In our approach to getting the ring really be that bad?

Maybe if women banded together and made ‘getting the ring’ more socially acceptable we’d be able to push the point and get answers before wasting years with a guy and learning the hard way! Right now it feels men have more power over the marriage process than they really should!

* This applies only to women who ‘want’ to marry but aren’t getting the ring. Not those who don’t want to marry!

I own a house without a mortgage and I have enough savings to live for a few years until I get another job. We should be ok.

People who are dependent on other people are often much more vulnerable as you can never fully know what that person is going next or what debts they might run up. If you are married you are responsible for another person's debts. A lot of women are very dependent on men and all too trusting.

Why do we need another thread on this, this week?

NameChanger22 - no human being is fully independent. You would not survive without all the infrastructure around you and millions of other people in this society doing work that directly or indirectly benefits you. Yes, of course someone who does not have a job is more vulnerable financially than someone who does. Children are vulnerable because they are too young to earn money and too naive, immature and inexperienced to he able to fend for themselves. An unmarried woman dependent on her partner's salary is more vulnerable than a married woman who is dependent on her partners salary. There are ways to limit your vulnerability and marriage can benone of those. It is impossible to make yourself invulnerable.

Marriage can also be a way of increasing your vulnerability. I agree, nobody is immune to things going wrong. But I know I can depend on myself to do the right thing. I've never met a man who I could say the same about. I would not want to be tied to a man I didn't trust by marriage. Marriage is a trap for a lot of women.

Liskee have you even read the thread? I and others have taken the time to point out exactly what the differences are at great length.

NameChanger22 the majority of women especially mothers to younger children, are not in a position to be completely financially independent. That's your position now - what position were you in at 25? 30? When did you have your DC?

"To all of you dependent on a man, what happens if your husband loses his job or takes up gambling as a hobby?" Healthy young women with DC if their husband lost his job could go back to work and he could cover the childcare. If he's a gambler I'd advise (and have) ltb, sever debt ties ASAP.

I own a house without a mortgage and I have enough savings to live for a few years until I get another job. We should be ok - what if you were to become too sick/disabled to work?

Wouldn't it be a little bit impossible to sever debt ties with someone you are married to and have joint finances with?

I own a house without a mortgage and I have enough savings to live for a few years until I get another job. We should be ok - what if you were to become too sick/disabled to work?

Same as anybody, I would need society to support me.

Since adulthood I've always been independent. I wouldn't want to be anything else, not if I can possibly help it. Marriage would be voluntarily giving up that independence. I had my child mid 30s and made sure I wouldn't need a man to support me first.

At the end of the day it comes down to money.

If a woman is solvent then cohabiting and having kids with a bloke without marrying is fine. If fact if she's wealthy then it could be to her detriment financially if they divorce. If the woman is poorer (more likely, especially post kids, mat leave, career break etc) then she's better off wed.

So many women are disillusioned by all this.

It's a legality at the end of the day.

@bourbonbiccy she says all sorts of horrible things about unmarried mothers: “why would anyone start a family with someone who hadn’t proposed”. And “I wouldn’t ever plan a family with a man I wasn’t married to.” Pretend all you like but the outdated misogyny is there in black and white. Or maybe you just don’t want to see it.

@round - what would you do if you lost your job? Namechanger22 makes a good point that marriage is a risk. For some it might financially benefit them (or give them protection in mumsnet language) for others it does not. It’s can be a risk.

In short, If you marry someone you might get some of their cash on divorce. Or they might gamble away all their money and they might get yours. So marriage can go both ways as it were. Many women on mumsnet would make sentiments like the op “never have children without being married” etc as they have lovely ideas of a “daddy” type husband giving them lots of lovely things. But unfortunately it doesn’t work like that or at least not always. Sometimes he doesn’t have any money. Or spends it all. Or has less than you so ends up forcing you to sell the house you paid for so you end up with less than you would have if you hadn’t bothered to get married. And so on.

Marriage can be a financial risk

I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone who thought common law marriage existed

^^

I did. Before MN informed me otherwise. Cheers 🥂, vipers.

Weddings have stopped being primarily about the marriage and turned into an event where the imagery is seen as more important.

^

Totally.

I know that's not really what this thread is about but the whole big white wedding thing, I just don't get it. Just don't. To me it's just all for show.

And the resolution study you linked to apparently showing widespread belief in common law marriage surveyed 281 people. Two thirds of whom apparently said they thought they were in a common law relationship but not what that meant. Many surveys are just there to make news for an organisation.

If we surveyed 281 mumsnetters, how many would believe that their husbands could not change their will without their consent or that they get to make medical decisions for their husbands as they are their “next of kin”? Where are the threads on those sorts of misconceptions? Why just bashing unmarried mothers?

You can’t be for real Delphi? Why on earth did you think that? Did you think your dh\dp was your next of kin?

What sort of age are you Delphi Apia you don’t mind me asking? Where did you get the idea from that there was common law marriage in England? Did you rely on it?

YABU
I think there should be more encouragement for marriage and the benefits praised more, but grown women can make whatever choices they think best for them.
And I don't know what a ring has to do with anything. I think it's actually what is discouraging a lot of couples from getting married.

What about this one?

Another excellent post from Graphista.

Obviously if women have done the research, are financially independent and solvent in their own rights and in fact better off than their partner, then marriage may NOT be for them.
But that isn't really what (or who) the OP is talking about - she's talking about the many many women who think that they will be all right, that they can trust their partners not to screw them over and that they have rights as "common law" or cohabiting partners that they simply DON'T have because they are not married.

I was with my first boyfriend/fiancé for 11 years. I thought I knew him, I thought I could trust him with my life, I thought he'd never do a bad thing to me. Then he met someone else and he was a different person. All those things I thought I knew about him? Half of them went out the window overnight. I discovered then that people behave in relationships very differently to when they're out of them - while in a relationship, they suppress the parts of their characters that don't work well within the relationship (abusive relationships don't count here) - but once they're no longer bothered about the relationship or the other half of it, those characteristics come out again.

How many people do you hear say "he's changed so much since he took up with X"?
Or "I never would have believed he would behave that way to me/us" (in Graphista's own post, she says similar)

It's NORMAL - it's a rare person who stays exactly the same once they're out of a relationship. And, even if they start off still caring about you, the moment a new partner comes along, that starts to tail off. When your husband leaves you for an OW, there is a short amount of time when they feel guilty and will try to be as nice as possible - but this soon changes, especially as there is frequently pressure from the OW to change.

You cannot, ever, trust that the man you are with will stay the same to you if/when you split up. The chances of it happening are so low.

So protect yourselves - by marriage, by legal paperwork, by being the higher earner, by having your own assets, whatever - otherwise you could end up being another one of those "I never thought it could happen to me" stories.

THAT is what the OP is saying.

No that isn't what the op said. She said she'd never have kids before marriage,she suggested all women band together to lock down men with marriage and that the maj are pretty useless in providing security for their dc.

If the op had said protect yourself financially;make sure you always have the means to earn your own money and support yourself;make sure you have a decent pension of your own and assets
/ house in your name so you aren't forced to beg a ring off a man you don't wish to be married to I( and I'm sure others) would have had less of an issue with it.

@P3ony

I REALLY enjoy your ability to pick and chose which parts of my OP you acknowledge having read.

Saw the ‘personally I wouldn’t do this’ loud and clear but quite happily missed to ‘THIS ONLY APPLIES TO THOSE WHO WANT TO GET MARRIED!’ And then all the follow up comments clearly expressing ‘if you don’t want to get married have as many kids as you like with whoever you want- This post is not about you, stop trying to make it about you!!

Could I have spelt this out any clearer, I literally included a disclaimer to stop the angry feminists coming on here, taking over the thread and making it all about them and their ‘offended, anti marriage agenda’ but nope. We’re allowed to have a conversation about living a life you don’t agee with, without you ramming off topic opinions down everybodies throat.

One thing I’ve really taken away from this post is that it’s not the ‘smug married’ women on mums net who are the shaming, passive aggressive, argumentative, bullies.
No that finger is pointed squarely at the ‘opponionated unmarried’

How many ‘you should all get married, god will scowl down upon your illegitimate children’ comments have we seen, vs how many ‘Marriage is just a piece of paper why would any women want that patriarchal ownership in a relationship, stop being a sponger and work full time and never see your children’

SHAMING, OFF TOPIC, BULLIES

-Ring ring ....
-did somebody order an opinion that has nothing to do with the point being raised...?
-no sorry we’re only talking about women who want to get married here.

• * completely ignores and dumps out their 3000 angry opinions and some SAHP shaming for garnish!

Somebody doesn’t like being disagreed with.

Newsflash< you posted an inflammatory op in AIBU, posters will disagree with you.>

@P3ony

😂😂😂😂

Me: Peony you’re picking and choosing which parts of what I’ve said to actually acknowledge, twisting my words completely and shaming/ being very defamatory of women on here who don’t agree with you.

@P3ony - You just don’t like being disagreed with.

Oh dear lord.

🙈🙈🙈 I hope things get better for you I really really do xx

I literally included a disclaimer to stop the angry feminists coming on here, taking over the thread and making it all about them and their ‘offended, anti marriage agenda’

Who says feminists have an "offended, anti-marriage agenda"? Not most of the feminists I know, though that doesn't mean they don't think there could be improvements to marriage and what happens when marriage breaks down.

(We've every right to be angry. There are so many things to be angry about.)

P3ony, I don't think it's OP who doesn't like being disagreed with. For someone who has no interest in marriage, you manage to get very heavily invested in these threads. It does make me wonder about you.

If you are married you are responsible for another person's debts.

Speaking of incredibly common misconceptions on MN, here's another one. No you're not.

It is possible in the event of divorce for a settlement to take into account debts, but not remotely guaranteed, and indeed I've known of a number where this wasn't the case. And do remember, the majority of married people don't divorce, and of those who do some of them don't have any assets at all. So this isn't actually going to even be an issue for most. You can of course be affected by debts the other person might hold if you jointly own assets together, but this is no less true if you're not married to them.

Also zsazsa, however underpowered the Resolution survey might be, it's still more reliable than claims you make about people you know (and you blatantly haven't surveyed all of them on the topic anyway). The reality is that lots and lots of people don't know their position. We know this from threads on here most weeks from an unmarried women who got an unhappy surprise when she separated, from people asking questions and saying things that are wrong on those threads and for a number of us, we know this because we've come across it professionally on multiple occasions.

Thus, this is an important topic that needs to continue being discussed- although I agree this particular OP isn't well framed. And while correcting misconceptions about legal NOK is also important, and I've done it myself often enough, sorry but it simply isn't as important as some of the other issues being raised. That's one area where unmarried partners aren't potentially sleepwalking into a problem. If for some reason you disagree, by all means get out there and start a thread yourself.

I agree op. If someone wants to get married they should hold out on having kids until married. If they can't agree on that then it's time to find someone on the same page.

I literally included a disclaimer to stop the angry feminists coming on here, taking over the thread and making it all about them

You are being uncharitable here OP. Angry feminists (like me!) are fighting for your rights in all sorts of ways and I do agree with your basic points. No need to lump us in with certain posters with unrealistic expectations towards young women (how are we expected to save enough to have children? I’d practically be past my childbearing years if I had to do it all myself!!)

And by marriage I obviously am not referring to silly white dresses or wedding rings. I did neither but sure did manage to get to the registrars office before we had kids. Nice lunch afterwards too