to wonder why so many people don't get married before having DCs?

[EveWasFramed]

I promise, this isn't meant to be judgemental!! But, my DH and I grew up in pretty traditional families, where you got married first BEFORE having kids...it was kind of a negative thing to do otherwise.

I wanted to get married before my DCs just because I thought there should be some kind of (legal) committment to make it more difficult for one of us to bugger off if we got fed up...if kind of 'makes' us work things out if we ever run into any problems.

Don't know...thoughts, please? I am curious...

You're right in that because it was just the legal stuff for me, I really didn't feel compelled to do it - which is probably why we had children first (which we did feel very compelled to do!).

TBH, unless you have religious reasons, I just can't see the point of marriage.

But I accept that we are all different and some people see marriage/weddings as the manifestation of their love in a way that I don't(for example, see the other thread on how much should be spent on an engagement ring!).

Each to their own.

Eve, your posts strike a chord with me. I am very much of your mindset. I want dh and I to have a commitment over and above children. My happiest thoughts are of enjoying our retirement after the children have grown up and flown the coop.

I demand the legal protection of marriage and the public statement of commitment before I commit to raising children with dh. Having children would make me vulnerable (like get off the fast track career) - I would not take the risk for myself or my children unless I am sure the father of my children is bonded to our futures.

If my dh were not prepared to marry me, it would have been a dealbreaker. Not everyone values marriage, but I do and he does. No one in my or his immediate family have had children out of marriage.

FWIW, I don't have many friends who have children outside of marriage either. It is common on mn, I guess. But not in RL in my case.

Wow usualsuspect I wonder if anyone can beat that! Only 26 years here I think. (My memory's gone at the moment - it's late )

dp and i are totally committed to one another
no matter whether or not we had children we would and hopefully will always be together

ours is a life long relationship and i really do believe that

no need to 'prove' it

Marantha - I disagree, a registry office marriage is still a marriage, it still has all the cultural/patriarchal baggage that I think puts a lot of people off.

I don't have a particular objection to marriage though - I think if it became financially or legally worthwhile for me and DP to get married we would consider it.

DP and I aren't married. Being married won't make us any more committed to each other.

We will get married, because it's nice to have that day and that party and please the relatives, but god knows when that will be because if you would like anything a bit more fancy (even if not much more so) than the registry office + pub it costs a freaking fortune.

I think the cost of an 'average' wedding being 20k + is a perfectly rational thing to put people off! Even if you only(!) spend a few thousand on a nice party, why should you have to spend so much money to prove your commitment to other people, if as a couple you feel secure in your relationship?

I would not bite his hand off. I'd cry.

I'd cry that someone who professes to love me doesn't seem to know me at all.

Just because you are entirely vacuous and incapable of functioning without a Big Strong Man (tm) does not mean that nobody else without a penis is capable of functioning alone.

If I had believed that dh was capable of thinking there could be a commitment "over and above" that of having children together, then I would have refused to marry him.

'I think the cost of an 'average' wedding being 20k + is a perfectly rational thing to put people off!'

It only costs £75 to legally marry.

Again, for many, it's a legal decision.

Marriage isn't required to obtain the same legal ramifications, but then you'd have to pay a solicitor to get the same as unmarried partners and it would cost more than £75, so for people like us, it was cheaper and easier to marry.

We also found it kind of romantic, to elope.

I think a lot of folks connect 'marriage' to 'wedding' and put too much emphasis on the connection between the two.

Or to some it's just not important.

Meh.

To each his own!

I think the committment thing is a bit of a red herring, tbh.
Marriage is- and always has been- about making a couple's relationship explicit to the outside world.
So that there is no misunderstanding because, believe me, I have seen too many cohabiting couples who find out that having lived together and had children they are still not entitled to anything in the event of a break-up. Some would say this is unfair, but the alternative is making people married by default- like it or not.

expat dp and i looked into getting married a year or so ago and it was going to cost more than £75 just to do the basic thing at the registry office and no more.

apparently we have to have seperate interviews at the registry office, for which there was a charge and then the wedding license? or whatever was over £100.

we had our wills etc sorted out with a solicitor for £100 when we were sorting our mortgage so that was the cheapest option for us.

it may depend on where you live?

ok i just googled and i am guessing prices vary at diff registry offices?

but my local one the costs are £30 EACH to give notice to marry.

and non refundable deposit of £50

then a £60 fee

and depending on the day and the time you choose to get married it costs from £100-£225 it seems to cost more for an afternoon wedding and the highest cost is for a saturday wedding, but this is still just the basic registry office civil ceremony.

our legal fees for sorting will were less than that!

I don't actually want commmitment from my partner. Except to our children. I like the way that if you're cohabiting, you stay together if and only if you both want to (though it's a bit more complicated with children), not because of a grim determination to keep a promise made long ago (not that I'm saying all marriage is like that but I know various ones that are).

I know there are sensible legal reasons to get married but to me that's like a tactical vote for the libdems in a marginal seat when really you'd prefer to vote for labour, I might do it but it's not where my conviction lies. To me cohabitation fits my ideal of how relationships should be far better than marriage does, even if circumstances might make marriage the sensible choice.

The legal status and problems if a break up happens is a red herring too. It's not a married/non-married thing - it's a "women who have made sensible provision for themselves and their children in the event of finding themselves alone"/"women who have not" thing.

We got married on a Tuesday afternoon, DH's day off.

There were different costs for different venues in Edinburgh, too! The ones up the town cost more than Leith.

i am married - though not to the father of two of my children!
got married because really love DH and we wanted a big party to show that off after having bit of a whirlwind romance - got married 9 months after set eyes on him. was a very good decision! think it is totally [ersonal choice, it is an absolutely irrelevant piece of paper and we could just as easily have not got married, but we just fancied a nice 'we really love each other' party and a wedding seemed a cool way to do it - also people don't want to miss a wedding do they, so everyone came!

think it is a bit odd to think it is a prerequisite to having children and definitely OP think it is an odd mind set to enter a realtionship in = that you need something lgealy binding you together to makeit more difficult to run off! If you're worried about running off - maybe it is not such a great relationship? or maybe you are just over cautious! I don't know

I think I'd want to be married before having DCs and I understand the OP's reasoning that it makes it harder to run off (!).

I think however I'm influeneced by my mother's situation (and that of many women of her generation). She wasn't married when she had me and my father - despite having been in a relationship with her for almost a decade before I arrived - buggered off and never paid a penny towards my keep. Subsequently she was financially very disadvantaged. I would hope that for all its sins, the CSA (or at least the principle of the CSA) would make that situation less likely these days but I would still like the committment from a partner that marriage signifies before giving him children. Committment and security might not be quite the same thing, but it helps.

Having said that, I conceieved ds over a decade ago and we're still not married

Commitment not committment. conceived not conceieved. And I'm still not married to my DP, not to my DS.

As you were

From another point of view - if you get married first then you don't have to worry about taking the DCs on honeymoon...

(Not judging anyone - just thinking about practicalities...!)

Some of us, OP, make decisions on a different basis than traditions that were built up in a different age, different circumstances. When women couldn't / didn't inherit property, didn't earn, were subject to religious regimes.

DP and I are committed to each other, and legally entangled by responsibility for DCs and a mortgage. That is why we TRY - we don't just flounce off into different sunsets every time we row. I find it deeply patronising that married people presume that committed partnerships flounder because of some sort of flaky shallow outlook on life.

And Seeker is right - women are now protected by having made a provision for themselves which makes them self-sufficient. Partnerships in which one partner earns the mony while the other does everything else are all well and good, but god forbid I should ever have to yoke myself to a man I didn't love because I couldn't afford to do otherwise.

I happen to earn more than my DP. The house was mine before we got together. He scraped by with a tiny cheap batchelor flat and expensive batchelor habits, while I spent my single days spending all I could on a mortgage. Now we have a great partnership, but if it went wrong (and I hope it won't - we look after each other very well), I'm damned if a marriage certificate would oblige me to give him half of everything I built up in those years, beyond everything I would do financially to ensure the stability and welfare of the DC.

well, i think the current registry office ceremony is pretty much of the form 'these two people want to share their lives & all their stuff, you lot at the back better help them do it' in gist anyway. Whatever the derivation of marriage, i didn't sign up to being my husbands chattel (he may wonder the other way round at times)

What i did do, was stand up in front of my nearest and dearest an say 'this ones my man, like him or not, you've got to lump him'

though we already had DD.... if he hadn't been willing to make that committment, I'd have been very far from impresed (and from him) because i would feel that if he didn't feel sure enough to marry me, he oughtn't be wasting any more of my time whilst I'm all lovely and youngish...

so, we didn't get married before having baby, but in a way, the way round didn't matter, the underlying committment was already there, and that is the important thing.
I think when people stay together and choose not to get married, it does call into question whether it is because the underlying committment isn't there, or for one of the reasons positted by the 9 pages of posters above....

My dp and I have been together for 23 years and are still not married for many and varied reasons.

We have 2 dcs, and consider ourselves completely committed.

Each to their own.

My registry office wedding cost £60 (four years ago in London) - no separate interviews or anything like that. I'm shocked at the costs cited below!