can I please shout. Do NOT HAVE CHILDREN WITHOUT GETTING MARRIED FIRST ..

[Patchworkpatty]

Feel so sad to have just read another really sad thread about a lovely woman who is trying to escape a horrendously awful relationship, 3 small children, he earns big bucks, she is SAHM and has NO funds to get out and get a new home. If she was married she could have gone to a lawyer, explained situation and have had a guarantee of a lump sum to restart her life, she may even have got an interim payment to help her. I feel strongly that women do not know the value (legally amongst many other reasons) of marriage. So many women these days agree to having children and accept the ' not ready for marriage ' or 'it's just a piece of paper' lie as acceptable. Imo if you are ready for children, have decided you are both parent material and want babies, then what reasons can there be not to ? unless your OH doesn't feel the same. (with the exception of course of very high earning women who don't take more than a few weeks maternity leave and don't care about state pensions and being next of kin).

Yikes on that table from Joysmum's link it says you can't even register your partner's death.

We are not married.
I earn more money than DP.
I have more valuable assets than DP.
He took more unpaid paternity leave then I did with DS and will do the same with bump. ( I have offered to compensate so he is not at a disadvantage).
We share all costs 50/50 (again despite me offering pro rata)
We have mirror wills.

Neither of us has any great wish to be married. Why should we?

I agree OP. What gets me is some people seem to think marriage is a bigger commitment than having a child and don't do it. How can a child be less, it's an actual person!

But if, like I was, you are with a bloke who prefers to be looked after while he indulges his artistic or other talents rather than go to work, don't marry him. Cost me a fortune getting shot of that waste of space. He's still wingeing that he got a rough deal...

The only item on Joysmum's list that affects me personally is the registering of death. But tbh if my DP died I wouldn't give a stuff that his parents or siblings would need to register it. Which of course they would.

No you cannot shout OP. I'm sure most of us are more intelligent than you give us credit for.
I earn more than DP, could easily survive without his financial input and am saving for next maternity leave. We do not NEED to get married at all.
Your message should be to be financially independent. Not to force marriage on everyone.

Well said, talking. A lot of people will be in that situation. It sounds like ours - financially we are equal, with everything owned jointly, so if we split I would never feel that DP owed me support, just our DC. Which we don't need to be married for him to owe.

You can tie up most of the legal issues through other ways and means - cohabitation agreements, powers of attorney, wills and trusts for your property etc. It is more expensive, so for most couples I imagine marriage is the far simpler decision to make.

I agree that not reviewing your changing circumstances would be foolish. If you were to emigrate it would be foolish to do that without seeing how your relationship would stand in that country and whether you need to get married. If one of you was to give up work to the degree that your potential future earnings were affected that it would equally be foolish not to revisit your situation.

But it's really not a blanket don't have kids without being married. It's about making sure that woman who, sadly, are more likely to earn less and more likely to damage their future earnings through being the sahp, understand the legal and financial implications of being married v being unmarried so that they can make an educated decision.

Agree with Justusemyname. A truly "independent spirit" probably shouldn't be having a children as that shackles you to another person far more than marriage!

It's easier to escape an unhappy marriage without children than an unhappy relationship with.

Oh piss off. I am an I married mum, I earn my own wage and keep my bank accounts seperate.

I took a years maternity leave. I have no intentions of my relationship ending but in the case that it did,
I am smart enough to look after myself/my family.

Don't make posts of patronising claptrap. We are not all incapable of looking after our own interests

Actually the gov.uk website contradicts what the previous link says about registering a death:

www.gov.uk/register-a-death/y/england_wales/at_home_hospital/no

There are a fair number of threads on here that make the OP's point very effectively, in spite of people moaning about it. Great for you if you've escaped that trap, but a lot of women don't and this would be a simple way of improving their lot, without being foolproof of course.

Maybe I need to have phrased it all a lot better. Read a sad thread on mn about a woman whose options were limited due to circumstances . Had she been married she would have had more and better options. Best friend got royally shafted last year. 20 yrs as a SAHM . 4 dcs . 'd'p had 4 properties, all in his name. She always wanted marriage but he didn't believe in it. Left her for 22 yr old (he is wealthy 44 yr old) . Married in 2 months. Friend gets maintenance far less than she should have got as he owns his business and pays himself minimum wage and takes a dividend.of £kkk . She gets to rent her former home from the bastard. When we went to the lawyers when it all kicked off the legalities of marriage were all explained spelt out. Along with all the other stuff she explained clearly that there is No cohabitation agreement that provides the same protection. Pension and property rights being the big ones. In friends case had she been married she would have had a minimum of 450k and share of business and half pension. To all those who say it's a sexist view point , I agree it is. but the reality is the the VAST majority of SAH parents are women, the VAST majority of parents who interrupt their careers are women. The VAST majority left trying to juggle work and children are women. Until the law is changed marriage is still the best protec tion. However, also have to agree with the poster who said that taking a good time to make sure that the person you decide to have a baby with is a good choice, wouldn't go amiss either.

culture I was going to say I registered the death of a close friend who had no living relatives, this was because I arranged the funeral and paid. Same would be for DP I'd arrange the funeral.

Sadly is is pretty easy to walk away from a child. You can walk away and have more kids with no real consequences. With a marriage you have to get divorced if you want to marry again or just not stay married.

Inheritance Tax: assets pass between married couples without incurring any tax. I would love to have done without marriage: own house, own career and pension. No kids.

Working out the tax i would have to pay, to keep both half's of our current home, in the event of O/H's death. As a house it is on the modest side but its in the south east.

It's the tax wot made me do it, Your Honour.

on whether marriage or having children is a greater commitment: you aren't comparing like with like. Marriage is a huge commitment to your spouse. Having children is a huge commitment to them. You can promise to love your (potential) children for ever and support them materially as long as necessary without necessarily feeling ready to love their father until he dies. Conflating these two things is silly, it's like saying "if you don't want to marry ME why are you marrying HIM?" or "you have a MUM why not have a HUSBAND?" they are different relationships

Too many women on MN in abusive relationships turn out to be SAHM who gave up work because their "D" P's manipulate them into it, don't have their names on the deeds or mortgage, the savings are in his sole name, they are given a pittance to run the house on and expected to fully defray the costs of the children on it as well, treated like a skivvy, and discover that if they left, they'd be homeless and entitled only to child support.

If they were married, they'd have: a right to a share of the home, savings and pension; spousal maintanance while they found appropriate work; very possibly the right to remain in the home while the kids were young and certainly a share of the equity to find somewhere else... and child support.

Of course women should be clever financially and ensure their own security. But many, many women think the law is the same for cohabitees and married couples, and many more drift into parenthood and abuse with men they love and trust, and by the time they work out how bad things are, it's very much too late.

The reality is that the law needs to be altered to reflect modern social norms, so forming a family and remaining within it for a certain qualifying period endows certain protections and rights. But until it is, marriage can protect women (and men, though far more usually women) from the career and financial hit children more often than not represent. And telling women the legal situation is not patronising when the evidence from thread after thread is that most don't have the first clue about it.

I know a married woman with 3 children, terribly unhappy, but claims she can't leave because they wouldn't have the same standard of living and type of house after a divorce. He has a good salary and the house is probably worth around £700k with plenty of equity. So it seems that the 'security' of alimony doesn't provide some women with the confidence to start a new life either.

I under certain circumstances eg woman gives up career to be sahm, dad has all the earnings/assets then yes it's better for her to be married.

And it's true that a lot of women are in this situation without realising the risk they are taking.

However marriage is a patriarchal institution and it has lots of disadvantages for lots of women.

In my situation marriage wouldn't benefit me.

I agree op.

I also believe the law should stay as it is. Men can become fathers accidentally, and indeed through subterfuge, is it right that every time a man has sex he takes a gamble with half his net worth?

Getting married, and effectively agreeing to share your assets is, and IMO should remain, a conscious decision.

As a slight side issue, the public sector's current trend to call every couple, married or not 'partners' is only making this worse. There is a huge difference between the legal status of a spouse and an unmarried partner. It's really irresponsible to pretend there isn't.

I'd be manage financially if DH left. (It wasn't always the case.) So why say I'm OK so never mind about anyone else. Woman are at a huge disadvantage financially. A lot of people on MN are probably far too young to worry about pensions but there will come a day when they wish they had given it more thought.

I think that when you have children you tie yourself to your partner married or not. I personally feel there's a greater stability with marriage. I also feel it's important for us all to share a name. I was with my dh for 12 years before we had our first child (married for 8). We've been together for 20 years now. There's little that would rock our boat now and he's unlikely to suddenly morph into a different sort of man!!

You're probably right Justusemyname. I just can't get my head around someone being enough of an arse to abandon a child just because they have fallen out of love with their spouse or partner!

I know people who did the whole "starter marriage" thing in their early twenties which they were able to walk away from with next to no consequences (other than not being allowed to remarry in certain churches) because there were no children and no real assets involved.

Being married meant that when my DH was terminally ill I was next of kin and that ensured that when he died myself and the children were protected financially. That wasn't why we got married, but it did make things a little easier when in laws were being abusive.

...and all this feminist bullshit about equality is just that, the reality on the ground is that women most likely to be unmarried mothers are indeed the lower earners of a couple and seldom independently wealthy.

Amongst the middle classes, income parity between couples and men taking on the SAHP role become more common, but the proportion of families for whom this is the reality is very, very small.