To be horrified at the number of women financially vulnerable

[Mammalamb]

Every time I’ve been on mn recently, there is yet another thread about a woman being financially abused : used by her “d” p.

do we need some sort of financial literacy or something for young women? Do we need some more help around self esteem for women to stop them putting up with this shit?

personally, I think if you’re going to be having kids or living together, then get married. Appreciate not everyone wants marriage. But if you don’t, make sure you are financially protected

I'm really shocked by it too, I don't think it's just young women its older women too.
I have made a point of NEVER trusting a man with my money. It might seem hard but I've learnt my lesson. I always put my own interests and the interests of my children first.
I've had a couple of friends whose partners have died and found out there is no such thing as a common law wife and have lost the lot to their partners family.
Another friend who put £200,000, her life's savings, into her partners home and lost the lot when he kicked her out.
It goes on and on.
I just would not be married now and everything I own would still be in my joint name if I had a partner. I have my son's inheritance to protect.

@loislovesstewie I'm sorry to hear about your husband. This is why it works here- people are protected as they would be in marriage. You split assets exactly the same as you would if you were married. You can use families mediation which is about £20 or if you can't agree you go through solicitors and the judicial process as you would in a divorce. However, defacto only have 2 years to file then the split is assumed to be complete. I think people are trying to make this more complicated than it is. I'm from the UK, there's not something on the Uk that would stop it from working or any peculiar trait or situation. It is a simple law that was made for everyone, in all walks of life to understand. The easiest way of describing it is that if you live together in a sexual relationship for 2 years you are automatically married no exceptions. After that you have to split etc as if you were married or wait out 2 years.

TBH I think variations on marriage vs civil partnership vs automatic "common law" protections which could be triggered are all good and well and worth exploring but they are a bit like buying an insurance policy. Really important to have but no substitute for the disaster not happening in the first place.

The only proper solution is to work.

It was a mystery to me why civil partnerships were extended to oppposite-sex couples instead of abolished altogether once we got same-sex marriage. It's always been possible to have a quick civil ceremony. We got married in a register office over 40 years ago. We chose to have friends and family there and to have a reception afterwards elsewhere, but we didn't have to. No music, no religion, no fuss, no need to dress up if we hadn't wanted to. Minimal cost.

That's a very quick dismissal of another country's system! It is workable, it's worked here for years, you can google the specifics (I'm not a lawyer and in fact married)🙂 it is precisely another protection by law just as a civil partnership etc is. I believe it's very nature is to protect the vulnerable from drifting into the financially precarious situations raised by the OP. Nanny state maybe (we know!) but in fact I believe it's helped people think more carefully about who they live with.

It’s taking away one drifting and replacing it with another - the drifting into a situation where you have to share your assets when you might not realize it. And it takes away the option of living together as a couple for more than two years without having to share your assets. Sounds like a cocklodger’s dream.

Where I come from, most women never give up work post kids so even though its quite a patriarchal society imho, women are actually more equipped to leave an unhappy marriage financially as opposed to the UK (where women feel empowered but yet in practice, the reality of having no income and being a single mum isn't that rosy).

I think its because it was the norm in the middle classes not too long ago for many women to not work for at least a few years post kids. As childcare is so expensive, a lot of women also feel like they can't go back to work and even the ones who can afford it don't think its unusual to stop working. Stopping work for a few years does mean that you may struggle to get back to the workplace and when you do, its on vastly reduced wages.

I feel that even if childcare is prohibitive, women shouldn't give up work unless they have other sources of income. Its a lot easier to increase hours in a part time job or find a new job. And at least money is coming in if you need an escape fund.

But you CAN have a quick 10 minute ceremony. I was witness at one.

If you were to argue that it should be a lot easier, though, then YES YES YES absolutely.

Councils are obliged to provide the cheap ceremonies but they make income from the dearer ones, so for no-frills, it's usually Tues and Weds lunchtimes in ONE OFFICE IN THE WHOLE COUNTY and you still, of course, have to sort out giving notice too.

Poor? Inflexible working hours? Live at the other end of the county? Sucks to be you!

Not sure what the solution is (oblige EVERY registry office to offer minimum price ceremonies at 8am Mon-Fri?) but things can be improved!

OK, I'm not trying to labour the point but if all of this only kicks in after 2 years then there is nothing to stop abuse before that cut off period is there? If I was to embark on a romantic relationship again and decided to have a de facto relationship then presumably before the 2 years are up I have nothing ? We could set up home together separate after 6 months and then what? In that time I might be working on the assumption that we were together forever and act accordingly, I could have put myself in a very difficult situation. As I've said marriage does give protection. I would never set up home with a man unless we got married. I did take time to google BTW, and de facto just seems to be too complicated . No, I won't ever marry or set up home with a man again. I have my kids to think of,but that is a different story.

Because I don’t only care about me.😉

I know others who feel like me. And I would like my children to have rights without marriage if they don’t want to get married but do want a committed relationship.

This, with bells on. Marriage is not protection against a man who knows how to get around the legalities.

If you did too much education about what marriage means in legal and financial terms I’m not sure many higher earning men would want to do it. Divorce in the UK is relatively very generous to the lower earner / non- earner. Clearly people should understand the contract they are entering into and their financial position but not sure there would be a lot more marriages if you increased education about it.

From the man’s point of view, let’s say they come into the relationship earning £50k and owning a house. Woman earns (say) £30k. They move in together and get married. After having kids woman gives up work or goes part time as it’s not worth working due to childcare costs.

They divorce. Woman stays in home or gets most of the equity and has the children most of the time as she’s been their main carer.

Man ends up in a flat with children EOW paying maintenance.

The man might not see that as an attractive prospect or risk worth taking. I say this as someone getting divorced who has benefited from these laws.

There are clearly many variations on this and alternatives whereby the man ends up with children half the time etc. But in honesty how many women want to share the parenting of their children 50/50 either when married or when divorced.

I have a great career and still didn’t want to give up too much time with my children when they’re young. I don’t see going part time in my career and taking long maternity leaves to enable that as a sacrifice so much as a privilege.

People who say that children should have a full time parent at home need to remember that in the past, families and society were a lot more close knit. People were more likely to live in small towns and villages where everyone knew everyone else's business. You would have been regarded as a social pariah for leaving your wife and children if you were a man with any kind of reputation. There is no such moral code anymore; your partner's friends would probably not shun him if he decided to leave his unmarried partner and children and they went without food as a result. Marriage has some protection but it is also limited esp in this day and age where many men would not own property and may not have such large savings in their early 30s. And its not easy to force them to pay child benefit. I am a home owner but as we only bought three years ago, we have around 120k equity in our flat? or maybe even a bit less. I don't think it would be massively useful for me if my DH decided to leave me and we had a child and I didn't have a job, it isn't enough to buy a new place where i live but yet whatever I get would mean that I don't qualify for benefits (if i didn't have a job). On the other hand, if i had a ok paid job, that would mean that I can pay for rent at a new place and continue saving to buy a new place even as a single mum.

Well, yes. Of course, if we women are going to be equal, we are going to have to accept that equality is a two way street. If a woman won’t marry someone who earns less than her because she thinks her husband might be entitled to half their property , how is that different from men who use that as an excuse not to marry?

I’ve been on both sides. There was a time when I supported the entire household because my OH was setting up a business. Not only did he earn nothing, we had to put funds into the start up. When I inherited a house, we both lived in it. OTOH, when I wanted to do another degree( for pleasure not professional enhancement) he supported me not just financially, but emotionally and practically as well.
Of course, we could have done this without being married, of course that was how we lived together before marriage. But I think the commitment and legal protection of marriage going both ways was a very useful underpinning, even if at different times it was more ‘risky’ for one or the other partner.

@Fenella123 , I am actually agreeing with you, we had the 10-minute job donkeys years ago. We booked well in advance as it was Easter Saturday . But, yes, I would have been OK with getting married at 8 a.m on a Thursday if it came to it.

Yes true, that's the flip side of it. But as I said, it's pretty well understood and so in fact it has helped in some ways avoid the 'drifting', people are aware that living with someone will very soon give the partner the same financial rights as marriage, for good or bad. Not a perfect system of course and I'm sure some come out on the wrong side of it through no fault of their own. I'd like to know if someone feels their country does have a perfect system

Being financially taken care of is something that will forever be appealing to people though. The idea of not have to work or to worry about money because someone else is "taking care of it" is great on paper and as such there will always be people who end up vulnerable.

But in the UK everyone now has access to those protections in the form of basic, cheap civil marriages.

Why create a a paralell opt out rather than an opt in system? If someone wants the full rights and responsibilities marriage confers then .... they should get married no?

Arguments about "should we tell young women to get married OR should we tell them to maintain financial independence" are silly. Belt and braces. Tell women to do both.

"Get married" is not enough, because without an income of your own you are still vulnerable.
"Maintain financial independence" is not enough, because you can be driven out of the workforce for reasons not under your control, like having a severely disabled child.

Belt and braces, people. Do both things.

The trouble is that the world is increasingly divided into the women who do have the belt and braces, and the women who don't have either. Marriage has increasingly become a question of education divide; better educated women are more likely to have and maintain careers AND get married; women with little education very often do neither of these things.

The whole point of this thread as far as I can see is that system in the UK isn’t well understood. If it were, we wouldn’t have a problem, but there are all kinds of misunderstandings, misinterpretations etc. and seeing marriage as a romantic dream rather than as a practical contract. I don’t see why the Australian system would be any better understood if imposed here than the current status quo.

Just for the record, I also always worked and paid into a pension. We split the bills according to our income and retained some for our personal use. I probably learnt a lot from being a housing officer in local government and the appalling situations people, mostly women, found themselves in.

Its easy to see why they don't maintain financial independence or get married though.

Expensive childcare- women gives up job.

Husband has no assets- no point marrying as you wouldn't get anything either. many men also don't pay maintenance. my DH's father not only did not pay maintenance for his 4 children but my MIL had to pay 100k to him for his share of the house (even though he didn't work for much of the marriage). She would be better off not married to him.

Instead of pushing it onto women to change their behaviour/ tinges of victim blaming upthread why don't we focus on the actual problem: men.

Shame the men we know who refuse to marry.

Shame the men we know who abuse their partners.

Shame the men we know who don't pay maintenance and abandon their dcs to poverty.

Blame the perpetrators not the survivors.

@loislovesstewie that's correct unless you had a child in that relationship which automatically makes it defacto. If you wanted the rights and responsibilities before 2 years with no child you'd have to get married.

Its not really possible in a post urban industrial society where its easy to move around.Even if the man lived in a small village where everyone knew everyone and worked at the local shop, he could up and move relatively easily to a place where he knows no one.

There was a woman in my MIL's orthodox jewish community whose ex refused to grant her a religious divorce (separate from the civil divorce) and this would have meant that she couldn't be married again in the faith and her subsequent children would have been considered illegitimate. The community organized a boycott of his father's restaurant. After one day of boycott, the man granted the divorce. but that only worked because he had a business. In Israel, its illegal to not grant the religious divorce and there are still men who would rather sit in jail than grant their wives the religious divorce.