My (F34) partner (M35) have been together for almost 10 years and we have 2 little girls aged 6&3. We both grew up in London but to Irish parents so both had a Catholic upbringing. We do try and take our daughters to mass now but admittedly less so than when we were younger.
Marriage has always felt very important to me and when we did discuss this at the start of our relationship he was in agreement. As I fell pregnant with our first daughter rather unexpectedly about 2.5 years into the relationship, talk about marriage was somewhat shelved. We did give both of our daughters his surname as I was under the impression it would one day be our ‘family name’. However, in the past few years whenever I’ve tried to bring up the topic of getting married, he has brushed it off without a real answer/swiftly changed the conversation topic. In summer 2022, he sent me an email saying he’d booked us a trip to Bruges that Christmas for the weekend and I’ll admit I really got my hopes up that we’d be getting engaged. We didn’t and I felt like perhaps I wasn’t being clear enough about how much marriage meant to me. Since then I’ve tried to have serious conversations about it and it’s always the same brush off response which is hugely frustrating, particularly since we’ve been to quite a few weddings together recently. Last year (after we’d travelled to Ireland for his colleague’s wedding) I brought up the topic again; his response was “I don’t want to talk about this right now” and so I asked well when do you want to talk about it? He said a year and so, a year later, I have raised the topic again. Still the same non-answer - he’s almost laughing at me?!
I know weddings are expensive but I have stated that I’d be happy with a simple day. It’s not so much about the day for me (as much as I would love a big wedding, that isn’t my priority now we have a young family) but for the life afterwards. I know that probably sounds silly since nothing in our lives would really change except my name, but it feels really important to me, particularly given our shared religious upbringing.
We have a mortgage together, the monthly cost of which I wouldn’t be able to afford on my own - I work part time (4 days a week from 9-3) in a much lower paid job than he does, to facilitate childcare. He earns around 4 times the amount I do and so I have added up the cost of our mortgage, bills and nursery fees etc and I pay 25% of these, he pays the rest. We do not share finances otherwise, we have no joint account (but he did get me a credit card which he pays off and I buy the majority of our food shops and essentials for our daughters on). I’m happy to keep our finances this way but I suppose being married would give me that extra layer of financial security. However when I used ‘financial security’ as a reason for us to get married he accused me of trying to divorce him later down the line for “all his money”.
So, my question is AIBU to want to get married? And is it that unreasonable to ask that after almost 10 years we could at least have an open conversation about the reasons why I want to get married, as well as the reasons why he doesn’t?