Opinions on marriage/enagements

[irnbru22]

OK so I'm of the opinion that getting married after youve been together 8+ years/have already had kids is pointless as you have already shown commitment to each other. When I see people with a baby/infant getting married I always think theyre doing it to kind of make things look more 'proper' IYKWIM, rather than the desire to get married.

I also dislike long engagements. I think once your engaged you should be married within a year. I would rather be BF/GF for 4 years and engaged for one than in a relationship for 2 years an 'engaged' for 3. I feel sometimes people just put the engaged label on the relationship to make it appear more serious but never have any intention to go through with it.

I wouldn't ever say this to any couple BTW. I was just wondering if my thoughts were extremely old fashioned or other people feel the same?

Marriage is not "pointless" because of the legal protections it confers. You can decide to do without those, or mitigate the absence of some of them, but the romantic/family feelings of 'commitment' are not he same as marriage. This isn't just looking "proper", it's a set of legal underpinnings that do make a difference.

Length of engagement is a personal matter. I think it means that you are setting the date, and so find long engagements with no sign of a wedding a bit odd. But that's simply my attitude and pretty irrelevant to other people's lives.

I think it's almost pointless to have "views" on things like this, as so much will depend on circumstances.

I think on your first paragraph, people are actually pretty foolhardy not to get married in those circumstances. Yes, marriage is a demonstration of your commitment towards your partner, but that's only once facet of it. The other part is legal protection. Simply living together with children gives you pretty much fuck all legal protection if the relationship breaks down. There is no "common law" marriage, so if one person takes time out of work to look after the children (not even on a permanent basis, but say 18 months per child - that's still 3 years), then that goes completely unrecognised in the eventuality of a split.

Whether or not you're married, that person has still spent three years total out of the work force. That's three years less experience, three years less promotional opportunities, etc etc. It gets a thousand times worse if one person is a stay at home parent.

I can understand why people might not want to have religious ceremonies, or a "traditional" wedding, or a big song and dance. However, to skip marriage entirely, and all the protection it brings (not to mention tax breaks in some countries) is pretty incomprehensible to me.

With long engagements...as I said, so much depends on circumstances. People might get engaged with the intention of marrying the year after, but then discover that the venue they set their heart on is booked up that year. Or that they need a little more time to save money - there's nothing wrong with wanting to wait a little longer so you can afford to invite everyone you want to. Or to have whatever niceties the couple have set their heart on.

Or perhaps people get engaged and then personal circumstances mean it's difficult to focus on a wedding (death in the family, job loss, etc). Or maybe they get engaged, then the bride gets pregnant and they decide to have the baby first so they can both drink at the wedding/the bride can wear whatever dress she wants/insert a million other reasons here. There's nothing wrong with any of those choices.

I do agree though that there are some people (mainly men, but I guess some women too), who get engaged as a way to keep the relationship "on hold". They don't want to get married, but aren't sure if they actually want to break up either. So they get engaged and then drag it out for as long as possible.

In those situations I think it's extremely manipulative and unfair.

I also find it confusing when people get engaged, and just stay engaged for five years without ever planning anything more (for no apparent reason but you never know what's happening behind closed doors). In those cases I think it's partly a matter of wanting the social status of "being engaged" without the annoyance of actually planning a wedding, or having to sign up to the legal reality of marriage.

qz.com/252546/have-a-big-wedding-youre-more-likely-to-be-in-a-happy-marriage/

www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/11048595/Bigger-weddings-lead-to-happier-marriages.html

Not necessarily my view. Plus cprrelation does not necessarily mean causation. Would be good to know what sort of control testing was done in this analysis....probably contained in the report if you are bothered to dig into it.

We had a long engagement because we were both students but we did want to show our commitment.

I wouldn't have ad children without being married. I spent many years making sure I wasn't pregnant.

Meh! We had a small wedding and have been to 2 of Cousin1, both HUGE, both failed.

Also, we lived together for 5 years before we got engaged. But we did get married within a year - I too can't see the point of getting engaged if you don't actually get married.

But there will be as many points of view as there are responses

Note that the size of the. Wedding cannot be the only factor that affects it's success so sold not use this research as a predictor

I'm still amazed people think there is such a thing as 'common law wife' there isn't.
Marriage gives you so much legal protection, not only in the case of divorce but when it comes to serious illness and being next of kin.

Personally I wouldn't have had children before getting married, it didn't feel like the next step for us. We got engaged after being together for two years and we got my married more than three years after that. It wasn't a long engagement where there was no sign of a wedding, we had set a date, booked a venue etc but needed that length of time to save up for the day that we wanted. The only couple I know who got married within a year of getting engaged had very wealthy parents to pay for everything and they were Christians who didn't believe in sex before marriage

We got married after having children because ds was unplanned and it as something we had wanted to do before having him. Feelings didn't change and we didn't mess around with a long engagement. Also, I moved into dh's house and then went back to work part time. Financially I would have been in a really bad situation if we had stayed unmarried and then split up.

My DP and I are getting married next September, and we will have been engaged for two and a half years and will have been together almost 4 years.

We wanted to wait until we'd moved house and also until we had saved enough to pay for our wedding. We're looking forward to a fabulous day with our favourite people. So while we've not got married within the year, that's because we wanted to make sure we weren't putting ourselves in debt.

We are also TTC and (fingers crossed) it's likely that we will have our dc at our wedding or that I will be pregnant. We are certainly not getting married to make it seem "proper".

We are getting married because we want to. I love the bones of my man, I thank my lucky stars every day because he is just an amazing man. He feels the same about me which is good really

When it comes to relationships and marriage what it is important is not the views and opinions of others byt just what makes the two of you happy.

I went to school with a lad who was born to unmarried parents, everyone locally knew this & it was no big deal.
Now this lad was well able to look after himself, was built like Mike Tyson & nobody messed with him.
Young lads were always calling each other names as they do, but if anybody called him a bastard just in a bit of banter he went off on one, saying his parents were married when he was born & they had a marriage certificate to prove it. Seen it happen twice & it seemed to really affect him...it's something that stays with me all these years later.

There are huge legal and financial advantages to being married when you own property or have children together. Formal marriage is a great deal more than "just a piece of paper". Unfortunately the advantages of being married sometimes only become clear once the relationship comes to an end.

How long other people decide to be engaged for before the marry is up to them. I have no opinion either way

It does make me a bit when people have long engagements. IMO being engaged is when you're planning to marry someone in the near future.

When I hear people haven't set a date 6 months after the engagement I'm a bit , same with people who say "we're getting married on 10th September 2019".

Also "we need to save for the wedding" doesn't wash with me. It should be the marriage that is important not the wedding so spend what you can afford.

Engagement is not a commitment in itself.

Marriage affords legal status and protections that are very expensive and complicated to recreate through individual contracts. Particularly when property, savings and pensions are involved - which comes to the top of people's minds quickly when a child is born. So it's no surprise that long-term unmarrieds often marry after having a child.

There is no such thing as a common-law wife or husband.

I hear you on the long engagements thing though. we were engaged for only a few months, well under a year, and people assumed I was pregnant and "rushing into it" - when in fact, we had been together four years and only got engaged as a prelude to marriage.

I don't think it's wise to have children before you are married. But in the end it's up to everyone to do what they think is best. Whether or not you get married there is simply no truth in the statement marriage is just a piece of paper.

Dd and her fiance have been engaged for a year having been in a relationship for 4 years. They will be getting married in July 2016 so will have had a three year engagement.

They want to get married as soon as possible but as dd was studying until June she has not yet started work (starts next week) and they want to save up money to enable them to buy a house before they move in together.

Some people don't get married immediately after getting engaged because of what is going on in their life,

We bought a house and lived together for almost 10 years before getting married. We knew we would get married one day, but were 'officially' engaged for one year. I was 19 when we met (obviously years before buying the house!); we felt we had plenty of time and we wanted to have a house, car, money in the bank, careers well established and savings for a wedding before we got married. We didn't want children before marriage though.

Sure, we could have just 'got married' but actually we felt it really important to be able to invite as many family and friends as possible. And to make them welcome. I'm bloody glad we did; it was only seven years ago but in that time we've lost one grandparent, one parent, four uncles and two close family friends. The photos from our wedding are so precious to so many people that they alone were worth saving up for.

The only regret I have - totally outweighed by the fact that we could afford to invite 250 close family and friends - is that if we'd got married and had children earlier, I wouldn't be feeling so old and so very tired now.

I don't see the point in announcing your engagement. Or having a party. Just get married when the time is right for you both. As for marriage, everyone does it differently. I'd rather get married than have children, so I'll be doing that first. If children follow, then great. If not, c'est la vie. For others, having children is their priority, so having them, married or not, makes sense. I think the most important thing about getting married is doing it at the right time in your life.

I never see the point of long engagements, those I've known turn out to be huge bridezillas.

I view marriage as taking vows and sticking to them. I didn't do it for the legal protection and wouldn't ever do it for that reason.

I'm another that wanted marriage before children. It's a far bigger commitment than having children.

I think it's super unreasonable to lay down 'rules' about these things. You do what's right for you, when it's right. My engagement was two and a half years long because we wanted to get married abroad (for family reasons - we both have foreign born parents and strong ties to another country) but in order to ensure that the children in the extended family could come we needed to get married during the summer holidays. We thought six months was a bit tight for everyone to make plans to get to another continent (our families live in Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Germany and Italy and we were getting married in Sri Lanka) so we made it a year and a half to plan. Then I got unwell and we put it off for a year for practical reasons. And that was right for us.

We also took 11 years to get married (no DC but joint mortgage, savings and pension by the time we did) and that was OK too. We just weren't in the right place before then, and for us having the right wedding was a part of that. We could have had a quiet registry office wedding for £ instead of spending ££££ on the wedding we had, but I wanted it to be special and I wanted our families to be involved and for it to give us lots of good memories which will last a lifetime. And we did that, no debt, lots of fun and the exact wedding we wanted. We didn't hurt anyone doing it our way and I've got no regrets.

We got married after 18 years, purely for legal protection. It didn't make any difference to our commitment, but it has made a big difference to the security of both of us should one of us die or we split up.

Had there been another around getting the same sort of protection in case of separation and death we would have done it. But at the time certain things would have died if he had died which would have left me in a bit of pickle to say the least.

Some people don't get married immediately after getting engaged because of what is going on in their life,

But why get engaged then? Why not wait until you're actually planning/booking the wedding.

Fair enough if you get engaged with the intention of booking things but then one of you gets ill etc. but to get engaged and then make no concrete plans to marry seems silly .

DP and I could have been engaged 2 years ago when we both agreed "ah we should get married in three years", but realistically us getting engaged was like saying "right let's actually do this then and start booking things."