To not understand why people get married?

[Mummyto4WM]

Waste of money and merely a show to the world

That's me being flippant but I genuinely don't get it. My partner is desperate to get married. He's already divorced, a divorce following his ex-wife running off with another man. What are the benefits of marriage, when so many end in costly divorce?

No it's not about "it is what is is", but it is about the LAW is what it is.

Of course we should campaign to change the law. But until it is, if you're unmarried you have zero rights and if your partner decides to financially shaft you after children they simply can do so. I don't think blaming women for making a rational choice is the right approach.

I didn't want to get married until after we had children (over a decade). I hadn't realised how much of my financial autonomy I would lose in becoming a mother, just by the responsibility of care giving.

I find it so strange when know-it-alls ask for advice they clearly don’t want, or think they know better than.
Why ask? Oh wait….

@LostittoBostik

Of course we should campaign to change the law. But until it is, if you're unmarried you have zero rights and if your partner decides to financially shaft you after children they simply can do so. I don't think blaming women for making a rational choice is the right approach

I am talking about women who earn more than the partner here. Of course if you are not working or you are a low earner you should get married. Thats a totally different situation.

@Thepeopleversuswork It's not just about earnings though. The main earner could get made redundant, get sick, etc at any time.
A woman is more vulnerable because of the physical impact childbirth and pregnancy. Not to mention being mummy tracked.

Having said that, I agree that marriage isn't automatically better for the woman. It depends on the balance of assets and expectations. And baggage.

I'm a high earner (currently earn 20K more than my husband) but we have the same earning potential. Would I have married an average earner ,older with assets ? Probably not. If I'd not gone on to have kids I'm basically subsidising him.

If I was young, earning a lot but wanted to have kids immediately I would have done. Had I been injured in childbirth or similar my career might have been over, and he'd need to support me.

As it stands I married youngish but no kids, our careers grew together.

Youngish but no kids immediately after is what I meant

@cgauUwahahaha

I completely get this. But I actually think sometimes marriage makes women more likely to get mummy tracked.

Women who are married to a man with a decent income have a financial cushion. But that’s a double edged sword.

That is a bubble I'm afraid.

Being real, most working class men are not taking parental leave from their jobs and continue to internalise the idea that childcare and housework is womens work and tea should be on the table because they are the provider (and many are, even in low paid jobs, because often the woman is a sahm woth kids and on benefits). This reinforces their male partners view that the woman is sat at home "not working" while he os slogging away in a manual job and is therefore more tired than her. The expectation is then that she will cook and clean and look after kids because essentially she has had a "day off" waiting for him to come home.

Many middle class professionals have the same internal narrative as demonstrated by the men who avoid childcare by staying late at work or say that they are on annual leave and need to rest and therefore can't possibly spend time with their kids.

Mummy tracking is about child birth - not marital status. And many woman don't know about the benefits of marriage, scale down with a partner not a husband supporting them anyway.
It's all about individual choice.

There's nothing wrong with stepping back a bit once you have kids, whether you're a man or woman. The problem is people assuming that you're going to do that. And they do it mostly to women not men.

Exactly.

To punish the harder worker

It’s a legally binding contract in the eyes of the law.

Yeah, personally I’d never do it again lol

I don't think that the law 'punishes the woman' insofar as it treats marriage as a sharing of assets.
Even if there were no children involved the lower earner after a long period of marriage would be entitled to an equal share.

There should be more provision IMO for asset sharing agreements within a marriage

Also adding , as a PP pointed out if you're foreign/an internationally mobile couple , being married is a ticket to a lot of shared privileges. Not every country, company etc recognises unmarried partners equally.

Life is short. Then you die. I guess it’s nice to have some frilly bits.

I think it gives dc better security emotionally in some ways to feel that their parents are officially bonded, and sadly ( at least at our DC’s schools) those whose parents aren’t are often slightly pitied.

Then the financial aspect - though I do find on MN there is an auto-assumption that women end up with more than they bring to the marriage which isn’t always the case.

But mostly sentiment I guess, an attempt to imbue life with more meaning than practicalities and paying bills and getting loose body parts as you age.

It gives legal protections which can’t be replicated.

People seem to forget that it is a contract, and one you should go into with your eyes open in terms of the terms of that contract that you’re about to bind yourself to.

I wasn’t keen on getting married, my husband really was. We didn’t have an expensive wedding.

We are very happily married. We started with nothing - I have a good career now and my husband has done extremely well - far, far in excess of anything I could ever achieve financially. We both know, everything is ours jointly. We know where we stand. If I left him tomorrow (I wouldn’t), he knows he would be handing over 50% of various things he has from a business POV. He went into this contract with his eyes open, and they remain open. We both are happy with that. Neither of us has more ‘power’ over the other.

Ironically, if I’d stuck to my preference to be unmarried, the entirety of the lifestyle we all enjoy would be completely within his gift. I certainly wouldn’t enjoy living that way.

I think issues happen when people romanticise marriage and forget above all else it’s a legal and financial contact. They then decide further down the line that they don’t like the terms of it.

Even if there were no children involved the lower earner after a long period of marriage would be entitled to an equal share.

Why should somebody be entitled to half of someone else's money just because they've been in a romantic relationship? The presumption that this "fair" or should be expected is bizarre to me. People don't expect this from friends or family so why from a romantic partner? Why does being intimate with someone make it reasonable for them to be entitled to half of your assets?

When children are involved clearly it is more complex depending on circumstances. I would favour instead of marriage having a system whereby all parents are required to provide 50% of the costs of the upbringing of their child regardless of whether they are in a relationship or married, unless the other party consents to waive this (e.g. in a couple where they have mutually decided that one will focus on care and one on work). This would protect children, with proper enforcement.

But I find the idea that an adult feels entitled to live off the proceeds of the work of another adult quite repellent.

If the prevalence of marriage were playing into those wider social and cultural factors, we'd expect to see unmarried women be less affected. That evidence isn't there. Unmarried mothers on a societal level don't behave significantly differently to married mothers. They just do it with less of the legal protection, as a cohort.

It's always valid to talk about the influence of patriarchy. But that applies in cohabiting relationships too. With the increasing rate of cohabitation, part of that picture is how much patriarchy adores it when women do all the things women usually do, but in a way that makes fewer legal and financial demands of men. It's one of the ways in which we can end up fucked by modernity and tradition simultaneously: being the higher earner and doing a disproportionate share of household stuff is another.

Marriage is one of a suite of tools, that may or may not be appropriate. The same is true of cohabitation.

@MidnightLibraryCard

When children are involved clearly it is more complex depending on circumstances. I would favour instead of marriage having a system whereby all parents are required to provide 50% of the costs of the upbringing of their child regardless of whether they are in a relationship or married, unless the other party consents to waive this (e.g. in a couple where they have mutually decided that one will focus on care and one on work). This would protect children, with proper enforcement.

I agree. Current divorce law is exacerbating this but I find the whole idea of marriage really problematic around this. It incentivises people to treat their romantic relationships like a business proposition. Historically mainly women but increasingly also men.

i do think there ought to be legally enshrined protections for women who are forced to take time being economically unproductive due to raising children. It’s justified if you can’t work. But the idea that you take a sexual or romantic relationship and convert it into a lifelong annuity stream is a bit repellent to me.

This is why I have always found weddings and all their trappings a bit gross. Fundamentally they are about women going “kerching: I am sorted now,” and wrapping a veneer of “romance” around them. Marriage has never been about romance. It is purely about money and I hate the collective social dishonesty about this.

This is something which I can understand if you want to have and raise children. But I suppose when men start getting in on the act for no reason other than because they see a source of cash it lays bare what a cynical affair it all is.

@PregnantWithHorrors

If the prevalence of marriage were playing into those wider social and cultural factors, we'd expect to see unmarried women be less affected

At the highest levels of the income distribution unmarried women probably are less affected. A rich unmarried woman is not going to get rinsed in a divorce. A married one will.

I accept that this is currently a minority of women and I certainly agree about patriarchy loving it when it persuades women to do more of everything.

Look I certainly think for most women most of the time marriage is probably the most practical way to safeguard their financial interests.

But it troubles me that it is still being “sold” to women as some sort of financial panacea/utopia.

There are lots of benefits to marriage and civil partnerships.
There are few benefits to a wedding imo

We got a civil partnership with 2 friends as witnesses treated them to lunch as a thank you. No rings no fuss. Most people don't know we have done it.

That’s how I would do it if I ever did it again (which I almost certainly won’t). I find the thought of a full fat wedding exhausting.

This is the whole point of it - it is a contract, and both parties should go into it willing to abide by it, or not enter it in the first place.

As with any contract, you can choose not to sign.

If something is only applicable to a small percentage of women, that cannot then be generalised to a whole. It's valid to say there's a group of women who buck the trend and this is why/how, but it's not the same thing.

All the generalisations that are made about marriage vs not getting married trouble me. On the numbers, though, I'm not at all sure that women thinking marriage gives them more protection than it does is the biggest problem relating to those generalisations. Not when there are so many who aren't aware of the legal and financial implications.

I'd particularly highlight what happens when the first partner dies, too. Of course, with the demographic of this forum we're more focused on the childbearing years, and on relationships that end with separation rather than death. Because most of us will have seen more divorcing than widowing. That changes later. Because of the changes in marriage and cohabitation rates over the last half century, we've not really seen a critical mass of unmarried cohabitees in that position yet.

We eloped. Just us, registry office and honeymoon. Best date night/week ever!

Getting married was for us to formalise our little family. I don't work jobs without contracts, buy house without contracts, and I don't spend my life/invest money/tie my future to anyone without a contract. I love DH but am a pragmatist and like knowing we both have skin in the game. Any relationship requires some paperwork - a will, mortgage, title deeds etc - marriage gives me all of it in one bit of paper with a nice little ceremony to celebrate the boring paperwork. Win win and efficient.

I was divorced before but exH and I didn't work out, getting married had nothing to do with it. If anything it probably helped us realise sooner we weren't compatible. Psychologically marriage adds a sense of urgency/level of lifetime commitment you can avoid thinking about when not married - focuses the mind.

I hear this!
My view always has been I wouldn't have children, unless I was independent & financially stable! I needed the security of my own income - that if my partner died or left me, I could give my child (now children) the same quality of life