We didn’t even consider that, but it turns out my wife’s benefits will almost double when I retire.
Ditto here. We pulled the my going on her benefits until I turned 70 and then she going on mine. Her benefit more than doubled.
Maybe, but I’d like to see a cite. My son-in-law wanted to get married a lot before my daughter did. He followed her around the country and they only got married - her choice - when he got into law school and she found a grad school she liked so they felt more settled.
In the old days I’d buy women wanting it more. Today, not so sure.
I don’t have a cite. Just personal observation. Certainly there are some men who want to get married more than some women, but overall it seems like women are more marriage minded and have marriage as a life goal than men.
With your son-in-law, I might view it as he wanted to marry her more than she wanted to marry him. That is, he wasn’t trying to get married just because he wanted to be in a state of being married. He feel in love with a specific person and wanted to get married to her specifically. Women seem to think about marriage as a concept and what their wedding will be like even if they aren’t in a relationship. Perhaps some men do that, but I would guess that women spend much more time thinking about getting married as a specific goal they want to achieve.
But in this thread we’re just dealing with two specific people. It should be easy to see who’s more marriage minded in the relationship based on who brings it up more often.
Take to an accountant. It might cost you a ton in annual taxes if your get married. Or maybe you are close enough to SS that you care more about the benefits there. I dunno. But the financial implications of marriage can be huge, and can go in either direction, and you should know what you are getting into.
There are a lot of benefits to marriage if you want to be each other’s health proxy, leave you money too each other, etc.
But make sure you know what is going to mean legally and financially.
Do you travel? If something happens to one, or the both of you, in a jurisdiction that doesn’t recognize your cohabitation, then what?
This is why my coworker got married. He and his (now) wife both like to climb rock walls. Which is a risky activity on its own. So they got married to make sure that they would have all the necessary rights, automatically, in jurisdictions other their own (Switzerland).
Switzerland has a lot of couples who chose not to get married, even thought they have children together, etc. All the legal paperwork doesn’t do anything for them outside of Switzerland.
Another coworker got married when he started working here. Otherwise his girlfriend couldn’t move to this country, as her skills are not unique enough for her to immigrate on her own.
You know, I’ve been female my whole life, and I’ve only aware of one woman even remotely close to my age I know who thought like that- my cousin, whose father literally stopped at the bank on the way home from hospital following her birth to open a bank account ‘to save for her wedding’.
If you’ve been brought up with the idea that a wedding is a big special party all about you that was saved for since your birth, obviously you’d want to experience that, but I’ve seen no evidence that it’s any more ‘innate’ than the desire for a big 21st party is.
I wasn’t talking about the actual wedding. I was talking about the desire to have a relationship be in the state of marriage versus just living together. I’m pretty sure that most people desire to have a long-term relationship, but I think that women want marriage to be part of that relationship more than men do. I think men, in general, are more indifferent if the long-term relationship actually includes marriage. Women, in general, seem to want long-term relationships to lead to being married more than men do. So nothing to do with the actual wedding party or anything to do with that. More that if you were in a life-long relationship, how important is it that relationship be a married relationship? Would you be disappointed if that life-long relationship never included marriage? That’s what I think is generally different in the attitudes of men and women around marriage.
The OP struck me as the stereotypical case of a man being happy with the co-habitating relationship and looking at marriage strictly from a pragmatic sense, while the woman wants to be married because it’s something she’s always wanted. Of course, there’s a lot of reading between the lines and injecting my own biases, but I figured it’s worth throwing it out there in case it provides some possible insights. But it could be totally off base for these two people.
@kayaker, I seem to recall you writing that the property where you live is/was your girlfriend’s? (Unless it’s now in both your names.) Are there different implications to being married or not if anything should happen to her as far as her property goes?
Yeah, that reads like 100% your bias.
Women have historically been far more heavily judged for being in a serious relationship that isn’t accompanied by a document. Men were expected to ‘sow their wild oats’, but women were ruined. It’s not surprising that such attitudes have left a shadow, but when that fear is removed, it’s pretty obviously not the case that women have an innate desire for a specific legal contract. My friends are, for the most part, younger, not religious, and more-or-less indifferent to the concept of marriage. Worth doing for a specific goal, such as paperwork, but otherwise you’re just paying the government to confirm what you already know. I have -female- friends who were genuinely annoyed about having to marry their long-term partners for a specific legal benefit, and would willingly say so to anyone offering congratulations.
Speaking for myself, I absolutely would not give a crap if a long-term relationship wound up in marriage or not; it’s a legal convenience, usually in combination with an expensive party, that is all.
This. 100%. Not that marriage was any guarantee of safety either. Throughout history life has been especially precarious for women.
Their relationship was fine, and they were equally stuck on each other. It was just marriage.
I wonder about the demographics. Let’s just say the women I knew at MIT 50 years ago did not have marriage even close to the top of their do-do list. The women I know may have a different take on it than the women you know.
My daughter got a tenure track academic job at the same time she had her first child. She said that she would much rather get congratulated on the job since any idiot can have a kid. I see her point.
fwiw, I know more men who wanted to “upgrade” their LT relationship to marriage than women. My brother would like his partner to marry him but she doesn’t want to – they have been together for more than a decade, and have no plans to split up. A couple I know finally got married several years after the guy first asked the girl. I can think of a couple of other examples.
I’m sure it goes both ways. But my experience is the opposite of yours.
As someone who was happily married for 30 years, at this point in my life I don’t expect to ever be married again, even if I do wind up in another long-term relationship. I won’t say never, but marriage was never an end-goal for me. In the case of my marriage, being married was actually more important to my husband than to me, although towards the end being married had some distinct advantages I don’t think even a thoroughly legally documented cohabitation would have had. That has to do with medical decision making and inheritance, which is probably not foremost on the minds of people getting married.
At this point, getting married would seriously impact my retirement planing and finances. The other party would not only have to have some serious financial assets for me to consider marriage (and a lack of debt) but I’d probably want a pre-nup and wills involved to avoid conflict with other family members should the other party die before me.
Getting married when you’re young and have few assets is very different than getting married later in life.
Yeah…but generally people assume that a person finds starting a family at least as important as their job.
Long time tenants in one of my rental houses, have been a couple for ? years and were together when they started renting 8 years ago. Both had been married/divorced before and apparently committed to each other as a couple and didn’t feel they needed a piece of paper to prove it.
A few years ago he tried adding her to his health insurance as a domestic partner. They asked for copies of the rental application and lease and had to provide other papers to prove they were a couple. A copy of their marriage license if they had one would have saved them a lot of hassle.
Now on that I agree. A lot of people assume it. We haven’t really come a long way, baby. 
Interesting. My wife was added to mine, and we never had to prove we were married. If I needed a copy of my marriage license, I don’t know what I’d do. Go to the county courthouse I guess and hope they had a record.
If you say you’re married for some kind of verification, people will take it as face value because it’s easily proven as fraud if you lie. Either there’s a marriage record or there isn’t. And it’s typically a public record that anyone can look up if someone needs to verify your relationship. But if you are just living together, then there isn’t a similar public record. There’s not a “domestic partner license” they can verify at the courthouse. They have to infer how much your lives are intertwined by how many legal and financial instruments you have in common. If there’s not enough proof (separate addresses, separate bank accounts, separate everything), then they can’t really tell if that person is really your domestic partner or not.
My life experience agrees with filmore’s view.