Of course being married doesn’t guarantee fidelity, but it does guarantee that if you, as a woman, spend your life facilitating your male partner’s career by becoming a SAHM or by taking on certain roles within the family to free his mind/time to put into earning money, that in the event of infidelity and subsequent divorce you’re not disadvantaged.
I’ve been Separated/divorced for 7 years and met my current partner shortly afterwards. I came out of the marriage with a house and short term spousal maintenance on top of child maintenance because I’d facilitated his career at the expense of my own and he had the opportunity to continue earning well after the split.
If I marry DP it will be to legitimise our relationship in the eyes of family/friends/our DCs as a second relationship is somehow considered lesser by many, including his DCs.
I’m often still included in family events by my former in laws which is lovely and my XH and I get on well. His family still include his ex in things too.
I feel like DP’s family still see me as a bit of an added extra, as I’m not a parent to his DCs and we don’t live together, so it’s not their default to invite me along to things.
My own family used to treat DP and his children as family, inviting them to family things, sending them bday gifts and cards etc and treating them the same as mine at Xmas, but in recent years they’ve stopped doing this as it became one sided and unequal. I think if we’d been married and all lived together full time, the lines would have been clearer to wider family.
As it stands I would lose out financially if I married DP and he’d end up subsidising me where tax credits do now, so until our DCs are all grown up, we’ll remain slightly detached. I’ll be honest it makes it easier to consider packing it all in when we argue. If we were married it wouldn’t be a case of “fuck this, I don’t have to put up with being spoken to like that” but more of a “we need to work on communication if this marriage is going to work”.
When we’ve talked about issues we have, DP is upset that I’m not more invested in our relationship long term and can happily throw in the towel whenever I choose to, but I’ve pointed out that I can literally do that because we are NOT committed, not even engaged, have no financial ties and nothing to keep us together other than goodwill.