How many more women are going to find themselves in this situation ?

[sofrustratedbylackofknowledge]

Thread borne by the sheer amount of posts this week alone, of women who have moved in with wealthier men . Men who own houses solely in their name.. and women who have children with them without a contract of marriage or civil partnership..

The relationship breaks down and the woman is either not working or massively economically disadvantaged compared with their partners .

Made even worst by the courts bias towards shared care rendering CM almost negligible...

Why are women putting themselves in this situation. ?

Marriage has a lot of patriarchal connotations which are 'no go' for some women... but now we have civil partnerships why would you not go for this option .. ? Or is it the man refusing to commit ?

Also really concerned about the massive number of contraception failures . So many women taking the pill finding themselves pregnant and deciding to continue the pregnancy with no legal protection ..is the pill /implant failing ?

I can wholeheartedly assure you I do not want to get married. Never have, never will. I’m not a raging feminist but marriage has just never appealed.

It’s really odd and a little insulting to assume that ‘deep down’ most women want to walk down the aisle and are in some kind of denial if they say they don’t. Do you honestly think there are no happily unmarried women?

As for financial protection and kids…I have two DC. I bought the house we live in on my own as their dad had no money (and lots of debt). I earn 5x his salary and can manage perfectly fine on my own. I am not marrying him and potentially linking myself to his shambolic financial situation.

Women should be educated to develop financial independence regardless of their marital status.

If men were REQUIRED to reduce their hours (and subsequent pension contributions) to care for their children
they'd all be having the snip!
men expect to be able to leave women to do the menial tasks, the reason they agree to have children is to advertise to other men that they have the ability to capture & enslave a woman, it's a way of advertising thier status, they don't expect to have to lower themselves and do women's work.

it is now on curriculum- since 2014
. Martin Lewis, amongst others, had petitioned for it, and was successful.

He’s also wrote and launched the first ever dedicated text book in 2021.

his course is actually available on line to adults too.

The problem is proving this in a court of law. Marriage is essentially a contract with a date, signatures and proof of commitment to the relationship. How do you prove you have lived together 15 years in a committed relationship? A marriage certificate is a catch-all fail safe agreement. Lots of men would be lying through their teeth and trying to wriggle out of admitting they were in a long term commuted relationship when it’s (what they see as) their money on the line.

i was one of those blinkered women who had dcs and gave up work whilst partner earned the money and had the house in his name - we weren’t married for a very long time due to his reluctance to actually commit to it. Luckily (after years of being unmarried) once I sat him down and explained all the ways in which this left me and the dcs in a very vulnerable position (largely thanks to knowledge I soaked up from MN) he realised he was being out of order and we married. But I would say the main reason why women get into this situation is ignorance, pure and simple. Many people still believe there is such a thing as common law marriage. I remember my dm being really shocked when I told her I’d be entitled to a bit of child maintenance at best (and if he deigned to pay it) if we broke up before being married. She thought the law protected women who had children with a man as do lots of people.

Educate your dd’s! Girls (and boys) should be taught this in school IMO.

It’s not the dark ages, women are perfectly capable of understanding finance and taking actions to protect their future financial position. And do that every day. They just don’t post about it on MN

The demographics of MN being what they are, the cohort of unmarried women who fully understand the consequences of their decision and who've been able to adequately protect themselves are if anything liable to be overrepresented on here.

There’s a lot of smaller property where unless it’s violence, the police did not bother following up on stuff he’d taken. Unless she could prove he was neglectful (and she was late to report financial and other abuse) then the courts werent bothered about how he was constantly messing around their DC and when he was supposed to provide care.

So for example he claimed she’d gifted him a lot of stuff that wasn’t true. Plus lots of money committed to home improvements from one account, and already spent on future holidays, and based on their shared earnings their DC was being signed up to nurseries (her ex then pulled all funding and claimed poverty). She was trying to unwind a long term relationship (or at least exit it with what she was rightfully entitled to, her own stuff!) and he was hugely difficult at every stage, no incentive for him to participate like an adult.. he just wanted to go off with his new girlfriends, hide money, and punish my friend when he was stressed.

I don’t know what you think marriage is?
pit is purely a legal and f8ncnaical garment to ensure assets are shared, and both parties have next of kin rights. It also means wealth can be passed between partners on death without inheritance tax. Plus a whole bunch of other legal and financial rights.

The laws are there. We don’t need another set of laws. Just for people to realise that if they won’t sign the legal contract to say they’re in a committed relationship then they can’t expect to be treated in law as committed.

As for financial protection and kids…I have two DC. I bought the house we live in on my own as their dad had no money (and lots of debt). I earn 5x his salary and can manage perfectly fine on my own. I am not marrying him and potentially linking myself to his shambolic financial situation.

Women should be educated to develop financial independence regardless of their marital status.

I agree with you - but you are the exception - very few women earn 5 x more than their DH’s, especially when they are mothers.

I’m not typing this to be argumentative because I think it is a good thing but not every school teaches it. Unfortunately

I’m unmarried and genuinely don’t know.. is there a difference with who is assumed your next of kin, if you’re married? Eg medical decisions, who makes them for you if you’re out of it? Not even sure if relevant!

I wouldn’t marry without a pre nup (including treatment of assets and childcare in case of separation). I wouldn’t have kids without being married. I want to pre-program it as much as possible, I know it’s not failsafe at all but the more certainty the better

It seems the crux of all these divorce complaints is not mapping out a pre-nup, having no incentive to work or not having individual wills.

Wtf? Educate yourselves and your dcs, marriage is for romance or to realise a pre-conceived idea. Inheritance tax is a misnomer if there are proper wills in place.

Why does being married change some women into relaxing and letting go of all financial responsibilities?

*I can wholeheartedly assure you I do not want to get married. Never have, never will. I’m not a raging feminist but marriage has just never appealed.

It’s really odd and a little insulting to assume that ‘deep down’ most women want to walk down the aisle and are in some kind of denial if they say they don’t. Do you honestly think there are no happily unmarried women?

As for financial protection and kids…I have two DC. I bought the house we live in on my own as their dad had no money (and lots of debt). I earn 5x his salary and can manage perfectly fine on my own. I am not marrying him and potentially linking myself to his shambolic financial situation.

Women should be educated to develop financial independence regardless of their marital status.*

Then you MUST BE AWARE that this post does not relate to your situation !!

It is about the thousands of women who are NOT in your fortunate set up.. .

No one with any iota of common sense would think that you need legal protection...

However , back in the real world there are MANY more women in the opposite situation

This thread is about them . Not you .

This is about the many many women living with men who have NEVER offered a legal contract of marriage or civil partnership. Not once have I mentioned 'a wedding' .. 'walking down the aisle' .. this is not about romance ..

It's about women with less earning power than men because they have children that are the responsibility of BOTH .. and yet he continues to further his career .. his pension.. .. his savings .. whilst she sacrifices her career , savings, pension .. and whilst there is recompense via the marriage contract /civil partnership. There is nothing for the unmarried .

I've noticed a few things...

Firstly, I agree with @PurpleButterflyWings about women denying they want to get married when really they do. I think women, especially younger women, are made to feel silly or even crazy for wanting marriage after being together for a few years. The amount of women I hear that seem to fall over themselves to insist how much they don't want to get married is ridiculous - it's this idea of not wanting to "scare a man away".

Secondly, I think the whole 'gold digger' thing is used against women. If a woman said "I want to get married so I'm entitled to X from my high earning partner if we split" she'd be called all sorts. So women have to make sure their motives are pure and 'good', meanwhile men avoid marriage specifically and explicitly to minimise their financial risk.

Thirdly is about the contraception thing also mentioned on this thread. I think many women are lulled into a false sense of security. The vast majority of my friends have been on the pill since they were 13-15, either for period pains, acne or irregular periods, and they've been on it ever since. They don't even think about it anymore, and so when they are prescribed things like antibiotics that affect the pill, they don't even think to ask about how their contraception will be affected. So if the doctor doesn't bring it up, they just continue none the wiser. This all isn't helped by men who insist that they can't possibly wear condoms.

I've also seen people get accused on here of being akin to abstinence-only educators because they've talked about how young men and women need to understand that the pill is not foolproof and they ought to wear condoms too if they feel strongly about not getting pregnant. I think it's really irresponsible to give the impression that as long as the woman takes the pill everything will be hunky dory and no one needs to worry.

Are you talking from experience?

I'm sure some are planned, but there will be plenty of others that were not planned

@sofrustratedbylackofknowledge

*MEN had to pay the childcare from their salaries..

If men were REQUIRED to reduce their hours (and subsequent pension contributions) to care for their children..*

Well why aren't they?

Why do women say oh theres no point me working to pay my salary out in childcare

Why do they reduce their hours without demanding their ohs do the same?

I’m divorced. It cost us £1400 inc vat. And took 11- weeks (ok can’t do it that quick now since law changed).

Part of reason it was quick and surprisingly painless was because of the framework of the marriage act around “fair settlement”

I view that £1400 a cheap price to pay for the legal and financial protections I got when we split, and for the protection I had during our 30 year marriage.

we both informed ourselves, agreed we’d minimise cost by behaving like grown ups and figuring out what we would do, and went to solicitors only for the things we had to.

on MN divorce board, I go on and on about women not heading straight to “good solicitor “ in an adversarial way but to stop and inform themselves and save time, money and stress by amicable separation- parking the rage till the job is done

But the board is full of tails of spending £13k, £30k etc on divorce. And that’s becuase it’s these people who have got into such difficulty that post the most.

frankly there are stupid and revengeful people trying to split whether married or not. And they post here. Then there are people like me that can’t believe that people cut their noses off to spite their face with such regulatory

I’m not married but have many of the securities already in place. for those who I know are in a vulnerable position it generally began because the male partner is older, and the woman is moving into his established life. He’s on the housing market, already further down the career path. The risks of being a SAHP and part time without a share of the asset from the time together is often ignored with the here and now benefits.

Of the women I know (friends, family, acquaintances) in this position it's almost always because they simply don't want to work and that takes precedence over whether it's a bad idea to get into the situation in the first place.

*Newlifestartingatlast
*
The laws are there. We don’t need another set of laws. Just for people to realise that if they won’t sign the legal contract to say they’re in a committed relationship then they can’t expect to be treated in law as committed.

Yes I absolutely agree and this is very well put.
However so many women persuade themselves that he IS committed... because he's 'happy about the baby' .. it's a very cheap line... cheap in all senses of the word.

Others might be fully aware that their relationship has more red flags than a Liverpool match but are convinced that a baby will change his mind.

This always baffles me because there's nothing like a baby to strain a relationship, and in my experience most men could take or leave fatherhood; they go along to get along or cede to family pressure, but they aren't going to fall in love with family life, quite the reverse. Not a gamble I'd take.

Personally I would like to see a change in the law which makes 'the father/mother/partner to a birth have his/her assets assessable in a split ..'

So for example :
Lived with a woman for 15 years. 3 kids . Not married . Split treaded in EXACTLY the same way as a marriage ..

That would be awful. You should not be sleepwalking into a contract.

Our women need to be taught not to rely on a man, so many times here we tell of our stories to educate our fellow posters - the problem is,they don't come here for help until they are aready in the shit.

As I say, deep down I think most women want to get married - not only for the fact they've got security, and it shows commitment from him, but it also feels awkward when virtually every woman you know - sisters, nieces, cousins, friends, work colleagues, neighbours etc etc, are getting married, and YOU are always the bridesmaid, or just a guest.

When every woman has a ring on her finger - it's heart-breaking for a woman who's with a man who refuses to get married. I wouldn't stay with a man if he wouldn't get married. I just wouldn't.

God yes, this was me at one point. It was also very humiliating. But I was very clear - no wedding, no baby. And I was very diligent with contraception I also had a friend in the same position, but she’d already had her partner’s baby and had given away her bargaining chips.

To be honest, if a man has more money than the woman he is with, and has more assets, and is very solvent, they often won't get married. Many well-off men won't get married if they have nothing to gain from it.

But this has only been the case in recent decades, when women have been prepared to have children without being married. 50 years ago, if a rich man (or any man for that matter) wanted a live-in partner and children, then marriage had to come first.

That sounds great. I think.

I reckon these days marriage isn't for life. It's until you find someone better or see a bad side to your husband/wife.

If you don't bother you won't need a fair settlement, what's yours is yours, what's theirs is theirs, what you have between you still belongs to the both of you and you work it out like adults.

NO NO NO, suggestions like this really boil my blood.

Protection is there in the form of marriage & people can opt in if they wish - as it should be. Women have full control of their reproduction systems in this country & they can choose whether to have children without the benefit of marriage.

I’m by far the higher earner in my relationship which is exactly why I’ve chosen NOT to get to married, why should I lose my protection because some women make bad decisions & CHOOSE not to use protections already in place for them? Not getting married is my only financial protection & you’re advocating taking that away because other women are blinkered & prioritise “love”. Why the hell should I automatically be opted into a system that could completely financially screw me over? It should always be opt in.

As well as screwing over higher earning women, your suggestion will also disadvantage children from first marriages. Say a women divorces & gets a decent financial settlement to support her & her children from that marriage but then she subsequently has another child with another man, that man would then have access to her all her assets which should be her children’s security.

I’ll probably get roasted for this but I think you’re deluded if you think most women don’t know what they’re doing & that they’re they’re putting themselves in a vulnerable position; I think most do know but choose to push on anyway in the hope that the man will change & the baby will somehow keep him. I also don’t believe a lot of contraception failures are as accidental as some women will have you believe either.

Instead of going down this route, we should be teaching women critical thinking skills & giving them the tools & opportunities to be financial independent in their own right.

Women who want children are on a countdown. Many choose to have them in insecure relationships, rather than risk never having them, then just hope for the best.