To think it is important to be legally married

[SweetSally]

I wonder why so many couples are against marriage? Many would say it's a piece of paper...when it's not. Why can't people see the benefits of marriage?

Many would say it's waste of money - is it really? One thing is getting married and another thing is splashing cash on a grand wedding...

I welcome your views (and please let's be nice to each other and accept everyone's opinion)

Please vote - is it important to be legally married?

Straight CP is coming in crackerofdoom, so there's that. Honestly though I'm not sure either it or a direct equivalent of the French pacte would solve most of the issues stemming from falling marriage rates.

The people who would actively choose to engage in either of those are going to be disproportionately the people who understand and take steps to protect their legal position now. The sort of MNers who have trusts, wills, review appointments with their solicitors on a regular basis, and who understand what being married and being unmarried means and have made life decisions on that basis. And they're not the people who tend to have problems now. I'm not saying they'll never be in a position where being married might've been better, but they're informed and thus pretty well protected.

OTOH if you never sort it out because one or both of you don't want the state involved at all, or you're too disorganised, or you don't understand that there might be benefits accruing to you for legally formalising your relationship, or one of you is still married to someone else and never sorts the divorce out, or one of you knows fine well what the benefits might be and doesn't want the other having them, or you're not interested in a piece of paper to validate your love... those things are no less true if you also have the option of straight CP and pacte equivalent.

They would probably also create some problems too, in that those aren't recognised in most countries of the world. So sooner or later a UK couple who have a CP or pacte and weren't aware of this will run into trouble in a country where they're not recognised.

That's not to say we couldn't have equivalents, and of course we are having straight CP in the near future. Just that it's probably not going to solve many problems.

I'm married,I love my dh very much but I really don't like being married. We got married for inheritance tax reasons which is the only meaningful difference between being married and not being married that we couldn't replicate in other ways. I'm one of the vanishingly rare women mentioned up thread who is seriously financially disadvantaged by being married. I feel trapped by marriage sometimes.

@FfionFlorist I totally get your point. I am better off financially than my fiancé so if we were to marry actually he would have a claim to everything which would make it very difficult shold we were to ever separate (I have two bio children from a previous marriage).

Surely it is up to everyone to understand the pros and cons of marriage. If they don’t and get caught out then that’s their own fault. Little sympathy for a high earner who feels fleeced on divorce or a low earner who walks away with nothing from a relationship and is surprised.

Of course it’s not just a bit of paper which is why I won’t ever marry again (luckily I managed to divorce without paying him a penny) .

I choose to share my house and money with my partner who I love very much but I’m not letting the courts decide how much I should give him if we split up.

It’s not marriage that’s important. It’s making sure that you are legally and financially protected in the even of death or divorce. Marriage is obviously the easiest way to do this- but not the only way.

It’s not marriage that’s important. It’s making sure that you are legally and financially protected in the even of death or divorce. Marriage is obviously the easiest way to do this- but not the only way.

For some things, it is the only way.

Personally I think you can do whatever you like as long as you don’t complain about consequences of your own choices or make other people feel bad. I have a few early 30’s friends who feel the need to be very vocal about how terrible marriage is and ‘they would never be owned by someone’ but we know them well enough to know they’d jump at the chance if their DP proposed, but he won’t, because he says it’s ‘just a piece of paper’
Funny that, it's often the men who say it's just a piece of paper (often men who are financially advantaged by remaining unmarried). The women who tend to say it's just a piece of paper usually seem to be the ones who'd quite like marriage but (understandably) it's probably face saving to pretend it doesn't matter anyway than it is to deal with the situation that her and her DP want different things.

Those people who have both made an informed decision about remaining unmarried never seem to downplay the significance of marriage as a legal contract, because they understand what it entails and have opted not to enter it.

Yes, there are some state bereavement benefits that you have to be married to get.

Perhaps in that case, the reason the mum has a good personal pension and the dad doesn't is because he ended up doing jobs without pension benefits in order to be in the right area of the country to support her job

Nope that didn't happen. My mum changed job, left the company she had the pension with and started self employed work to facilitate my dad's job and to save him traveling.
My dad was also employed for longer during the marriage than my mum, then went self employed aswell.

Oh then he had an affair 5 years ago, she took him back. In July this year he lost the plot and started being mentally abusive to her. Gaslighting, phoned the governing body that oversees the work she does to make false claims, told the police and anyone who would listen that she had been physically abusive to him for years (never happened) Chased her out her home so she couldn't work anymore (she used the house as her place of work). Now she is left jobless, technically homeless, and now she won't be able to raise enough money to buy a house of her own and is unlikely to get a mortgage at her age.
Apparently police can't do anything as there is no evidence of his abuse, and anything my brother and I told them wasn't enough unless we actually witnessed it, like locking her in the house alone, removing smoke detectors, continuously following her around the house accusing her of all sorts. The list is endless.

my Oh and i will probably not get married his exw shafted him badly and my ex cheated we are quite happy as we are and im capable of being independent if he did die, we are in our early 60s though and no shared kids so maybe that is why we feel differently

If Britain is going to be a society with falling marriage rates, there should be some mechanism like the French PAX where you acknowledge that your partner is your NOK but which is inexpensive to obtain and easy to dissolve.

This would make very little difference. When couples choose not to get married, it's generally because at least one of them (usually the man) doesn't want the associated legal commitment. If someone doesn't want to marry their partner, they won't want a PACS with them, either.

Once civil partnerships are available for straight couples in the UK, I think a lot of women will get a nasty shock when they ask their
"feminist" partners for a CP. It'll emerge that "I don't believe in marriage, it's patriarchal" was just an excuse all along.

Making a mutual, informed decision to marry or not depending on your situation is most important.

Marriage tends to have most benefit to women whose earnings and pensions are compromised by having children, with the toll of maternity leaves, reduced working hours, reduced career progression or sacrificing paid employment tending to affect women more than men.

Where there are no dependents or the dependents from a former relationship are compromised, the benefits of marriage will be different, but you still need to be clear about pensions and legal sides like wills.

There are too many "just a piece of paper" relationships, where a man refuses to commit and compromise his assets leaving the mother of his children massively disadvantaged. Where a woman holds the greater assets, it is more unusual for the man to have been compromised by family life. Being transparent about the impacts of marriage is fine. Cynically stringing a partner along and keeping your cards close to your chest is not.

The women who tend to say it's just a piece of paper usually seem to be the ones who'd quite like marriage but (understandably) it's probably face saving to pretend it doesn't matter anyway than it is to deal with the situation that her and her DP want different things

Not for me
I just never grew up envisioning being married, to anyone
Never dreamed of the white dress or being a wife
Never played weddings as a kid with dolls or otherwise
I just holds NO appeal for me.

squeekums
All of that is valid, other than conflating weddings with marriage, but you're not claiming marriage is "just a piece of paper" (presumably because you know it is more than a piece of paper).

Women who have decided they don't want to marry know what it entails and decide it isn't for them. Those women almost never say "it's just a piece of paper" because they know full well it is more than that, is a legal contract and it's something they decided isn't for them, which is totally valid. They don't need to lie to themselves and other by pretending that it's just a piece of paper and we love each other as much as other people and anyway look at people who've got divorced and we don't need a big party to have some sort of rubber stamp on our relationship because we don't need a piece of paper to prove our love

If it’s mutually agreed then people can have any relationship set up they like.

In real life the unmarried couples with DCs that I know, it’s the man who insists “we don’t need to get married to prove our love” while the woman very much wants to be married.

In that case missyoumuch, why did the women have children with men who wouldn’t marry them? I seriously hope none of these women as SAHMs. That is crazy and puts them at a serious disadvantage.

the men who say ... The women who tend to say

It not really that useful to split the reactions along male/female lines. If you look at the divide in terms of the more / less financially secure allowing for earning power it gets much clearer

The people who are significantly disadvantaged are the less financially secure who become dependent upon the goodwill of their more financially secure partner.

Dont need to fix whats broken. Legally it still doesnt matter. I dont know the financial benefits myself, but i do think you’re no better with marriage than you are without.

I think this is exactly the kind of thing the OP was talking about - you say you don't know about the financial benefits, but also state that legally it doesn't matter. It might well matter very much - you might find yourself in a situation that you never anticipated and be helpless to deal with it because your relationship has no legal status. You might not, and I hope you don't, but surely it's at least worth learning what marriage actually means before dismissing it.

Yeah, that comment is entirely uninformed. You can't know whether a person is better off with marriage or not if you don't know what it entails. It's impossible.

Dont need to fix whats broken. Legally it still doesnt matter. I dont know the financial benefits myself, but i do think you’re no better with marriage than you are without

The financial benefits kick in if a relationship ends. Marriage means:

No IHT if one of you dies
Guaranteed survivor pension (my husband’s only pays to a spouse or civil partner)
Bereavement benefits
Automatic right to 50% of marital assets including pension on divorce

All that security at a cost of around £100. Marriage has to be the best value insurance policy ever.

1. The ceremony in church or registry office does not have to cost much at all. It is the things people choose to add on top like expensive white dress, food, drink which makes it expensive.

1. I think it's a more permanent way to bring up children and better all round and I write that even as someone who had to pay well over 50% out to my lower earner husband on divorce after 19 years and 5 children.

1. I do not support changing English divorce type rights to apply to those who are not married as lots of people make an actgive choice to protect their assets for their children from a first marriage and not being married is safer (or even not moving someone in - i don't think I would move anyone in again - I like not having a husband or partner living in the house).

Speaking as a happily unmarried woman, you would have to be insane to enter a long term relationship, especially without children, without first fully informing yourself of the consequences of splitting up with someone you are not married to. Or of their death.

Sorry- with children obviously.

Yes, both marriage and cohabitation should be active choices. The decision to have a long term relationship and be unmarried is every bit as important as the decision to get married!