Marriage - whats actually the point then?!

[applecharlotte]

My parents divorced when I was six.

Most of my friends parents and a couple of friends themselves are also separated/divorced (we're in our late twenties).

I'm in a lovely long term relationship with a fantastic man and marriage is talked about every now and then, though usually after a bottle or two of wine.

We have no doubts (at the moment!) that we want to be together forever but reading the heartache on these boards, seeing so many people unhappily married or going through divorces in RL, I'm starting to wonder why get married at all? The odds are certainly against you!

What do people think? Just interested in peoples views really..

grace I would do none of it. Ever again. Ever. I suppose lovely men are out there. Good luck to them and their partners. My ex shithead has made me know I have to skip a generation and let my ds find someone he loves and make a new family for the next.

If your assets are valuable enough you can't cover everything with contracts and a will, Grace - if one of you dies there will be inheritance tax to pay on your estate. It's an important consideration. There's no tax on property passing between married couples.

I've been married for over 20 years and now am getting divorced. And though I am trying hard to enjoy the freedom and the novelty, actually if I'm honest I really want to be married again. Not cohabiting, married.

Thing is, quite a lot of people get married because, well, they've been dating/shagging/living with this person for a while now, and all their friends are getting married, or already married, and, well, it's what you do isn't it? Usually one partner in the couple is actually quite keen and considers the other The One, whereas the other partner is thinking more along the lines of 'not really sure but maybe this is as agood as it gets.' Or one partner is desperate to Be Married as proof of being grown-up/not repulsive/heterosexual. Longterm happily unmarried couples are usually the ones who have thought the whole business through and discussed it at some length and both have the same viewpoint, more or less. The same is of course true of longerm happy married couples.
But the ongoing problem is the cult of heteromonogamy which regards all other ways of conducting one's life as inferior, hence all the people doing the Get Married bit for not good enough reasons and wondering how come it's no fun and all going horribly wrong.

SGB brilliantly put

Dont get hitched unless you want to its that simple...I wanted to...I didn't actually want to get married...but as I got older I realised actually marriage wasn't the scary thing people did and then broke after 20 years...its up to you.. you want and love the man..you want to make a declaration to all..then get married..

thanks all for contributing.. its really interesting how contrasting peoples experience and views on marriage are. It's really highlighted the fact that I don't have a strong view and thats maybe why I asked the question in the first place!

Marriage has a point from a legal point of view. And while you don't have to marry your partner to show your commitment in the eyes of the law it certainly makes things more straightforward.

Everyone in the world is only ever succesful in a rleationship once, if thT. The breakdown of relationships has noithng to do with marriage really. The odds aren't against you just f you marry, the odds are against you anyway!

Great post from SGB

Totally agree with SGB.

Also, I don't accept that marriage is a protection against splitting up, regardless of statistics. Surely people who get married are a self selecting bunch who have particular reasons to want to stay together (religious, moral, financial, social etc) and who have already demonstrated their desire to stick together.

It's like the statistics that say the best parents are married ones - I don't think that's true at all, it's just that people who make crap parents are more likely to come from the same pool as people who don't stay long in relationships.

One doesn't cause the other. So people who can make relationships last a long time will often tend to be people who want to get married. The marriage itself doesn't suddenly change the people or their relationship.

Message withdrawn

I love being married. If Op is questioning it , maybe it isn't that important to her. It is to me. I take it very seriously. Or do I ? Actually i take commitment very seriously and don't need a piece of papaer/day/dress to prove it.
1 in 3 fair ? I think thtas becasue people are so ...... well stupid really. Naieve. As to the fact that any relationship has ups and downs. ANd have you ever questioned why people are together ? friends of ours are so unsuitable. how can they not see this. did they not 'truely know themselves', before they got into this relationship. maybe they gave little thought as to what kind of person they really were. what they really needed in a person/relationship rather than what they normally did/thought they needed.
I think people should give more thought to these kind of things before they get married. then our divorce rates might be a bit better.
Op , maybe you also need to give some of this some thought.

morriszapp next time some idiot politician goes on about tax breaks for marrieds because marriage is better for children I am going to copy paste and forward your post if that's ok

jasper I think it's partially true that marriage is better for children but only in the sense that it is better for children to be born to parents who have ALREADY made the commitment to stay together for life, as opposed to a couple who cohabit where there is no intention to stay together for life.

I'd have to say that it is probably best for a child to have been born to a couple who are committed than not (of course, there ARE cohabiting couples who are committed to one another- but it's just seems realistic that a couple who have declared their relationship to be a committed one is more likely to survive than a couple who are just living together for "the now".)

Where a cohabiting couple/married couple are EQUALLY devoted, I don't see it makes any difference at all.

Obviously, nobody knows what lies ahead when they marry/decide to stay together for life in a long-term committed cohabitation, but it's better to start out with the intention to be in it for life BEFORE the decision is made to reproduce. I think so, anyway.

The trouble with cohabitation is that the female usually thinks that living together is a committment in itself but the male doesn't.
Whereas with marriage, neither party can say that they DIDN'T realise they were making a long-term committment to each other.

That is why I can see why cohabiting causes confusion and misunderstandings.

Just because I can see this, doesn't mean to say I am on a moral high horse, BTW.

It doesn't interest me. I was asked by a twat and said no. IMO you're all in love then one person turns into a twat and cheats or something and the richer one has to give money to someone they now hate. Who wants to give money to someone who cheated on them?

junglist, brilliant.

Or as someone once said

about marriage, divorce, lawyer's fees :

Cut out the middle man. Buy someone you hate a house

you're a cynical lot

apple I'm the wrong person to ask because I love being married, love weddings, love all that... quite separately from loving my dh, which I also do. So I was a disaster waiting to happen... which it duly did, in my first marriage.

What I would say is that it's really important to talk about what your parents were like in marriage and what that means to you. I tried to be my mother in my first marriage as that was what I thought married women should be like, which made things awful because my xh didn't want to live with my mother, also because I wasn't very good at being my mother, also because my mother is divorced anyway!

I hope that I have been able to let go of that now and be my own sort of married woman, or to let go of the feeling that being a married woman was somehow massively different from being me.

choosyfloozy

begorrah, you said " If we weren't married I think it might have walked away."

That's only good if you come through the bad stuff (soonish) to better stuff.

It is very bad if it keeps you in a bad relationship forever. Life is short