To think that marriage is an outdated concept?

[YourAgileUmberPoet]

In today’s world, marriage just seems like a piece of paper that doesn’t mean anything anymore. AIBU to think that marriage is outdated and unnecessary?

It's a legal contract that gives you a set of rights. It's very important if you are going to sacrifice or reduce your earning potential and future pension to raise children. I don't think it's wise to 100% trust anyone to always have your back. I am not romantic and I wasn't willing to have the children without the contract in place first. You want to one day piss off? Fine. Goody's getting half your pension.

If you have lots of money and assets and aren't going to be left up shit creek in a concrete canoe if your partner fucks off one day then yes, it's just a romantic piece of paper and a party.

Which is fine too by the way. Who doesn't love a party?

There are a lot of people assuming here that women will give up work to look after kids. Can anyone afford to do that these days? I couldn’t. Yes, I did go part time to support them later but I still earned more than my DH so that also went unrecognised in divorce.

the reality is that it is women who take the hit much more often than it is men.
Be that having a few years off until the child is in nursery or school.
Or working part time for many years.
Or being the one who always has to take time off if the kids are sick.
etc etc etc
Most women are not the high earner high flying lawyer, broker, CEO type who can have the children without having to make the career sacrifices. Having children affects mothers' jobs, career progression and pension contributions much more than it does fathers.
no, that's not always the case but it is often the case and if it will be the case then those women need to think with their heads not their hearts.

Yes, many women in non-British cultures do. And not only to look after DC either
Sometimes to look after the elderly.
That contribution needs to be recognised.

I loved being married to my late DH. And, like it or not, marriage does give certain legal protections, not available for those just living together. 🙂

Yes, but what they should be thinking about is how to ensure they don’t take a career hit in the first place. Delay having children till you’re senior enough to have a lot of flexibility, and make it clear well in advance to your partner that if he wants children, he’ll be the one taking the hit. I told DH I would only contemplate having a child if he realised he would be the one working shorter days because of childcare, and that he would be the one taking time off for illness. I wasn’t up for being the default parent. If he wanted a child with me, he needed to think of the cost.

Yes shouldn’t need to be a CEO or lawyer!

The truth is of course that men are not pulling their weight. They should be encouraged to take longer paternity leave (not be too macho to even ask), do school runs and ask to go part time. Some do. Most don’t. That would even the playing field a lot.

Most working women end up doing much more than their husbands.

Most jobs are low paid jobs.
Not every woman is ever going to have a job they can ever become senior enough in to have flexibility.
Most jobs are call centres, shop assistant, etc low paid, low flexibility. If everyone's doing the senior flexible jobs, who's doing the millions of basic jobs society needs doing?

While it might be the ideal (is the ideal!), what it's not, is realistic. it's just not realistic that the majority of people can wait and build up a career and be important with lots of flexibility and cover all the costs of everything.

And fuck yes the biggest problem is men expecting women to do all the domestic and child related stuff!!!

Women aren’t obliged to be unambitious or settle for minimum-wage jobs just because they ‘need doing’ as a general thing in society, though. And there’s a lot of middle ground between minimum-wage and global CEO of AstraZeneca.

It’s legal, nothing else.

And very outdated. Women are opting out, not sacrificing their lives for children and caring for a man. I hope we see a big change now. Can you imagine the progress we could make when women stop being carers? After they’re done with the children and their husbands, elderly care is put upon them too.

However you cut it, women never reach their potential because they spend their lives as carers. We do not live up to our potential in the patriarchy.

I await the sniping, which will be ignored. These are dangerous words and many women will fight for their enslavement.

Didn't you know that 'pieces of paper' are incredibly important? Stocks & shares certificates, house deeds, birth certificates, degree certificates, £20 notes, wills.......the list just goes on.

Your marriage certificate is a legally binding contract and yes, it is very important.

@PaperGloves yet most women I know seem to earn less than their male partners. If you read any thread on SAHP's, and on here there are many, 99% of them say that it made sense for them to go part time after children because they were the lower earner. Why were they the lower earner pre children?

I think it is the value we put on women in relationships, straight from when they are teens. So much of many teenage girl's self worth comes from their relationship status. I see it all the time when working with Y.A's.
It's all girls. Clever ones, rich ones, poor ones- 'have you got a boyfriend?' is a constant topic of conversation. Relationship talk and boy talk dominate their lives.
This goes right on until the mid twenties.

Until we start teaching girls, really teaching them, that they do not need to be someone's girlfriend, they don't need to be fancied or gawped at, that being brainy, funny, kind or athletic is 'enough' we will not change the gender roles in any seismic way.

Hear hear. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about women being the lower earner, or ‘naturally’ stepping out of the workforce when they have a child any more than the marriage bar was ‘natural’ or the pay gap is all too often viewed as ‘natural’. These things are socially conditioned and can be reconditioned.

@Sunlounger25

I agree with you OP. I'd like to see it completely overhauled and to separate the legal from the emotional. I think too many women sleepwalk into marriage without understanding the legal implications of what they're signing up for.

This is spot on. So many women are brought up not understanding what marriage means and society colludes in this in an infuriating way.

Marriage is not about love or commitment. It’s not about God or hearts and flowers and a big floral table display and a white dress and an expensive holiday.

Its an insurance policy which you may or may not need but for which you need to read the small print.

Our approach to marriage is a hangover from the days when marriage was just something everyone did by default and it was faintly shameful not the do it. Most of the time people only really get married out of FOMO. This needs to change.

And the 'it's only a piece of paper' is trotted out by men who do not want to be anymore committed to their partner than they already are. I have known several men in long term 'committed' relationship who refused to get married. To only then dump their long term partner and happily marry their new girlfriend within a couple of years.

Men are not afraid of the legal commitments of marriage, they just won't allow that commitment with the wrong woman.

It’s basically a financial contract which is great if the DH is the higher earner and wealthier than you but less so if the DW earns/owns more.

Perhaps younger generations will move towards being more financially independent in their own right?

Going by the trend younger generations will be living with parents until they are 35!

It was definitely drummed into me by my otherwise kind and very sensible parents that living with a partner unmarried was not “respectable” or wise. So I eventually followed their usually good advice. For me, that wasn’t the right advice because I was always the main breadwinner and child raiser too. I wasn’t a CEO or lawyer but not was I on minimum wage, there are a multitude of jobs in between! They believed in marriage because it was how it had always been and it worked. And they knew women who had ended up abandoned and destitute because they were unmarried. But times have changed and now it’s not suited to everyone’s circumstances.

And what I am saying is there is the ideal and there is the reality.
It is better to protect yourself as best you can with the reality in mind not the ideal.
That doesn't mean people shouldn't work hard to change the reality, just that they shouldn't leave themselves vulnerable because they believe the ideal should be the reality.

Everyone should coldly and logically look at their own situation and do what is in their long term best interests.

The same is broadly true of not signing it. Nobody ever stands over you and explains the legal and financial implications of not having a marriage contract when having DC, living in partnership, taking maternity leave, dying and all the other things women with male partners tend to do whether married or not. You don't get a written explanation of the implications of either option.

Which suggests we need to be more generally educated on the issue.

Civil partnership isn't the answer, because it lacks the international recognition of marriage. It's fine to have internal alternatives such as a CP or cohabitant rights whether opt in or opt out, but as @Simonjt pointed out, these things often evaporate once you're outside the country in which they were conferred. There isn't anything that provides the same comprehensive acknowledgment of the relationship as marriage. It is without equivalent.

Not everyone travels, of course, so it's not always applicable. I'd think it was quite unusual for a couple to be sure they won't be going outside the country at all though.

The older I get the harder it seems to make what once appeared to be simple decisions. Everyone used to know what marriage was. But then people didn’t divorce and women didn’t have careers. Everything has changed and yet we are left with this ancient unwritten contract - unwritten except for a certificate, like 25m swimming or something! There needs to be a thorough review of marriage and divorce laws. I doubt that will ever happen as it suits so many SAHMs. Of course not many women can afford to be SAHMs any more…

Someone once told me that marriage is just a piece of paper after we’d had a conversation about how I was happy in my relationship with my husband. Just sounded like jealousy to me. That bit of paper is worth everything to me and it affords me protections that just being together wouldn’t.

I agree. You are much more likely to sleepwalk into cohabitating, loose the momentum in your career, then end up without rights. My cousin gave up her job and was a sahm for a decade. She was married and it still took 5 years to settle they divorce and get a fair share of 'their ' money that he was able to earn by her taking the 100% of the childcare etc and giving up her well paid job.
If they weren't married she could have got nothing.

How you get married is down to the individual. You can do it with 100 guests or a random witness. Or you can have a civil partnership. But some legal protection is wise.