To think we would alleviate a lot of misery and some poverty if we phased out marriage in favour of a straight financial contract without a monogamy requirement?

[thepeopleversuswork]

So my view is that its unrealistic to expect people to be monogamous for life.

There will be a small number of people who genuinely remain happily monogamous for decades, yes, but for the overwhelming majority of people a scenario where your financial security is explicitly tied to your ability to remain monogamous is outdated, unrealistic and punitive.

It pushes people to remain with someone long after the relationship has passed its sell-by date and often leaves them trapped with someone they no longer love or even like very much because they don't want to upset the children or disentangle finances.

Could we reimagine a kind of financial contract that essentially requires the financially stronger partner (usually, though not always, the man) to guarantee a certain level of financial support to the weaker partner for the duration of the time the children are at home or potentially later potentially renegotiable in the event that financial capacity changes -- but without the absurd requirement for monogamy?

Haven't thought this through in great detail so bear with me but to me the main reason why divorce is often so rancorous and damaging is because of the "cheating" and the recriminations as to how that should impact on the finances (ie you left me for your secretary, I'm going to take you to the cleaners).

If people were free to renegotiate their emotional commitment to one another without having to redraw the boundaries on the financial commitments linked to child-rearing, or vice versa, it would remove a lot of the most emotionally difficult elements of marriage breakdown, and the stigma.

Children would become more comfortable with the idea of their parents as a financial partnership who love and are committed to them but without the expectation that they have to remain together in perpetuity.

I have observed so many times that the thing that damages children in divorce is not so much the separation of their parents in itself, but the behaviour of their parents either in relation to new partners or in relation to money and the division of spoils.

If the financial element were clearer and not tied to sexual fidelity, and the stigma was removed around people dissolving relationships, would that not make it somewhat easier for children to accept this change in a non-damaging way?

Finally, getting rid of marriage would get rid of the loathsome cult of the wedding and all the toxic effect it has on generations of young women.

Anyone with me?

SurreyHills nope. Not angry. Very happy really. I enjoy other people’s weddings as much as the next man. But I do think they are very damaging to female ambition and empowerment.

Call me a hairy feminist... I just think so many girls get diverted from what they really want to achieve in life by the fantasy industry about marriage and weddings. In the majority of cases getting married is a life limiting step for girls.

It can and should offer them financial protection and I am fully down with that but so many of them get tripped up on the bollocks trappings and sell themselves short.

I don't object on principle to the idea of some form of marriage or similar where the parties agree in advance that adultery won't be grounds for divorce, nor usable as part of an unreasonable behaviour petition like it is with CP. Alongside the institution/s that are already working well for many of us, not instead of.

However the idea that it will make people behave better if they meet a new partner seems astoundingly naive. There are still inevitably going to be lots of people who only wish to be in financial partnership with one person and sometimes one of those people will decide they want to be in exclusive financial partnership with someone else. There are probably a few situations where it might inspire better behaviour, but a lot of the time when someone is behaving badly it's simply because they want out. That wouldn't change.

twilight

As I said, marriage is far too easy.
Apart from abuse, i don't think the others are any reason to split up when you have children.
It just says did not know one another well enough before saying I do.
Back to the pretty white dress.
It's the kids that suffer, the bar is set so low these days.

been married to dh nearly 20 years and have never been interested in anyone else, not even bothered about looking at either.

maybe the solution is just to come down harder on men who don’t support kids.

I think in UK more children are born to cohabiting parents than married and have been for a while. So making sure non residnet parent pays a reasonable amount of support for their child would help many more children.

Maybe even have the government pays out a minumim amount when non resident parent can't then recoperates it from non resident across their lifetime and final estate.

If people want open civil marraiges no-one is stopping them now from having that now.

so many women get tied up with the idea of wedding planning and focus on the big day they forget there is life afterwards.
the number of posters on here that say their fiance is bad tempered, disrespectful etc but 'i love 'im' then they wonder why it goes toes up and he's a shit even though they are married and she is now pregnant.

PrincessConsuela yeah you might be right... It might be unrealistic.

I suppose what I really want for my daughter and her peers is to go into marriage with their eyes properly open to what it means, financially and in terms of their opportunities.

I have lost count of the threads on here where women pop up bemoaning the absence of a proposal from some no mark bloke they have been living with for a decade and have 3 kids with.

And I just want to shout at them and say “it’s not about the Disney wedding. It’s about your right and you children’s rights to some agency in your lives.”

I just wonder if there’s a way of reframing marriage - “detoxifying the brand” - to get rid of this poisonous legacy of women waiting around to be asked, then later waiting around to be allowed to work, waiting for him to pull his weight in the home, waiting for him to fulfil his commitments.

As long as girls grow up thinking that getting a ring on their fingers is the end of it they will never be able to make their choices and never be free.

Women in the modern, Western world have never had more power over their own destinies as they do today. If a woman is career-driven, no-one forces her to marry or have children, and even if she does both, she can still choose a spouse who is willing to be the primary caregiver for the children, or she can use paid childcare.

I don't think doing away with marriage will change the fact that for whatever reason, be it societal pressures, conditioning, or biology the average mother (employed or not) is more deeply focused on her children than is the average father. That's not to say that fathers don't or can't care for their children, too, but it's generally not quite the same...

The issue of fidelity is a different kettle of fish. I don't believe that it's unreasonable to expect lifelong fidelity, but if someone's not willing to commit to that, that's their business. It's certainly not necessary to get rid of marriage altogether just because it's not for everyone.

For me the problem stems from the fact that relationships are, first and foremost, still viewed as existing primarily for the purpose of procreating and/or rearing children.

People often seem to be taken by surprise that once you add a third or fourth person into that dynamic, it's invariably going to change the nature of your relationship with your partner. I believe that having children ruins far more relationships than it ever strengthens, so perhaps the problem is not that 'marriage' etc is outdated, but people are still having children unquestioningly because marriage-children-happy families thereafter is still perpetuated as the societal ideal, and therefore a lot of people just unquestioningly follow it, or at least, don't give it sufficient consideration before embarking on a course of action that is invariably going to change the nature of their primary relationship.

I decided very young that I never wanted to have children, I ended my marriage after 20+ years, but not because either of us did anything unforgivable, simply because we reached a mutual decision that neither of us wanted to spend any more time with the other. I don't view it as a 'failed' marriage because we had 20+ mostly happy years together. If we'd had children though, there would now be a question of custody, maintenance etc, etc, the children being viewed as being from a 'broken' home etc, all of which is nonsense and brought about because of the existence of a piece of paper which two adults decided was no longer relevant.

I don't think making a commitment to another human being is in any way odd, but I do think the institution of marriage is rather a notion that flagrantly denies the reality of what human beings are about. We're fickle, prone to changing our opinions and attitudes, our tastes change over time, our interests also, so I think a piece of paper that legally binds you to someone in perpetuity, and actively punishes people, who, by simple dint of the fact they are human, change over time and wish to be freed of their marriage, is a bit outdated, not to mention a wholly unrealistic endeavour in the first place.

I don't regret being married, but I was ambivalent about it at the time and went through with it because I couldn't honestly think of a good reason to say no. I wish I'd just been more strident about my feeling that there was no actual reason to do it, that 'just because' wasn't actually a reason in itself, and that it wasn't going to change how I felt about my spouse. I suspect that refusal would have meant the end of the relationship in any case, but I think in hindsight that they had all sorts of different ideas about what it would mean than I did, but they didn't make that sufficiently clear.

I'm not sold on the concept of monogamy being forced by a legal requirement either. That, again, just screams of being in total denial about the nature of human beings.

Knickers to that. If I'm joining my finances with someone they can bloody well keep it in their pants!

I'd favour a fixed term contract, say, five years. Or ten years, where you have the option to renew if you choose, and if not, the contract ends.

What @sadsisters said.

XDownWithThisSortofThingX you put it beautifully and in a far more nuanced way than me.

I guess it’s an imperfect solution and maybe the least worst way.

I can’t help thinking, though, that the “punishment” of divorce is hugely disproportionate to the “crime” of cheating which is an entirely biological and natural urge.

Nope, your view of marriage is not the same view as mine and a lot of other peoples.
I also think you have totally missed the point in what marriage is!

There will be a small number of people who genuinely remain happily monogamous for decades, yes, but for the overwhelming majority of people a scenario where your financial security is explicitly tied to your ability to remain monogamous is outdated, unrealistic and punitive.

TBH, from the people I know and have known, I would have thought it was the other way round. I.e. that the overwhelming majority stay happily in a monogamous relationship for ever and a small number don't.

Finally, getting rid of marriage would get rid of the loathsome cult of the wedding and all the toxic effect it has on generations of young women.
Whoah! Loathsome cult? I agree that these days it can appear to have got a bit out of hand with fortunes being spent and the expectations getting dizzyingly higher. But it wasn't always like that and doesn't have to be now. We had a lovely, sane, family based wedding at a modest budget.

Vettiyalruken: but isn’t the solution not to tie finances to someone?

Is it a coincidence that an advert for a divorce law firm popped up in the middle of this thread?

If you separate marriage and monogamy it could increase poverty if providing financially for children was dependent on marriage rather than paternity.

Personally I think it's best for my children to have parents in a monogamous relationship so i wouldn't change it.

But what if your partner dies or is unemployed for a long period of time? Financial security shouldn't depend on luck either. I think all men should pay a tax to balance out the burden of child rearing and the money raised could be paid to primary carers.

Esme you got me... it’s an advertorial for a law firm 😂

StoneSourFan I totally know what the point of marriage is. I just think increasingly it doesn’t deliver on its promise.

I guess but I prefer the idea of a fixed term contract

Could have been an interesting discussion if people weren't determined to take it as personal condemnation of their individual life.

For me it was slightly different. I didn’t view marriage as a “to the end of my life” thing. We were quite happy with “until it doesn’t work any more”.

I don’t view marriage ending as a failure.

I do think society needs to be more appreciative of other circumstances and that “marriage and kids” isn’t seen as the normal (and often only!) route.

I’m fine with how it is but if you want an open marriage you could go for it.

I do think the idea of linking sexual fidelity to financial well-being is pretty Byzantine though... can’t really get past the idea that we need to rethink this.

I’m totally with you, OP. However you’ve picked the wrong forum here if you’re looking for assenting voices. The prevailing mood here always strikes me as staunchly pro-traditional marriage/monogamy in a way that sometimes surprises me (even still, after hanging around here for 14 years).