The long-term romantic relationship without marriage / kids

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this thread Are young singles relationship-averse? the topic came up regarding relationships that last a long time (decades even) without progressing into marriage and/or kids. Sometimes they do. I myself was with my SO a very long time before we eventually settled down, got married, and had some kids. Recently my cousin just got engaged to her boyfriend of ten years.

In Hollywood and television, this scenario seems to be played out almost as much as the “relationship-averse single”:
Diane and Sam on Cheers
Ross and Rachel on Friends
Carrie and Big on Sex And The City
Ted and Robin (also Barney and Robin) on How I Met Your Mother
I’m sure one of those dorks eventually hit it with Penny in Big Bang Theory

Movies like When Harry Met Sally, Forget Paris, Definitely Maybe, The Adjustment Bureau, The Family Man, The Five Year Engagement, Serendipity.

The premise is usually something along the line of

  1. Boy meets girl
  2. Something something, profit $
  3. 10-20 years later they get married

Now in television it may be done to create romantic tension between two characters over multiple seasons. But generally the conceit is that two people are destined for each other. Whether they know it or not, believe it or not, or all evidence to the contrary, they WILL eventually be together.

In real life, I’m not so sure. I think it can be a form of “settling” where someone is “good enough” but for whatever reason you either don’t want to move forward or your lifestyle is such that it’s impractical.

Then again, even if I had broken up with what would be my future wife, at least twice we would have been working in the same Manhattan office building and likely encountered each other.

So the question is this - Is it a good idea to stay in a long-term (say more than a year or so) romantic relationship if you are not planning on getting married* and having kids.

  • For argument’s sake, I will define “marriage” to include an expressly exclusive relationship even if one does not enter into the legal or religious aspects. Not just “we’ve been dating / living together a long time.”
2

I’m not sure what you mean by this - I’m old and might not be up to date on a lot of things but is it common for people to live together for a long time without it being exclusive? I don’t even know anyone who’s been in a year-long relationship that wasn’t exclusive even if they don’t live together.

3

Marriage is mainly for the benefit of the kids. Given the crime statistics related to bad fathering, and entire library sections devoted to “my crazy mom” autobiographies, precious little benefit at that, but at least the best that can be.

In my own seven years of “shacking up,” as Dr. Laura used to call such an arrangement, I’ve yet to see the need for all the other stuff: hospitals barring the door, tax breaks, really anything besides an opening for debt collectors to take if one of us should die in penury. Please tell me if I’m missing something.

It’s just a matter of being good to and for each other all day every day, between two people with personalities more disposed to that than being single and self-involved. (Despite the fact that when I was single, it had its own perks which I appreciated; but the transition was still an upgrade overall)

Marriage is the tomb of love.
Giacomo Casanova

4

I can see not wanting to get married if you don’t want to lock in being with someone for the rest of your life. But I guess the question is when do you decide it’s been long enough?

5

I don’t know that I would have gotten married if we hadn’t been planning to have kids. But I probably would have done a lot of things differently if we hadn’t gotten legally married . For example, I wouldn’t have bought property jointly. Not because I’m afraid of what would happen if we split up , but because the way we own our house means that no one can force us to sell the house to pay a debt that only one of us owes. I might have saved for retirement differently.

Some of that stuff doesn’t affect you until it does - I am 100% sure that if I was in a vegetative state and was not married, my mother would be fighting court to make decisions regardless of what documents I signed * and she would not make the decision I want. But that doesn’t matter until I’m in that condition and hospitals barring the door to my not-husband visiting me doesn’t happen until I am hospitalized and can’t speak for myself.

* Many years ago , she saw a police car on her block and thought they were there to notify her that something happened to me. When she told me, I told her that no one would be notifying her, as my husband was my next of kin. She thought it was absolutely ridiculous that he could be my next of kin - and she was serious.

6

@msmith537 you’re asking when do we make it legal? I our case our don’t expect to ever. We don’t see a need, emotionally or financially. And looking back on a long life of being on the weaker side of the social power dynamic, I can’t remember ever having signed any document that benefited me more than the other party. (In this case the other party isn’t my SO: it’s those other institutions that find their own advantages in marriage. Marriage may be lovely for some, but it’s also a consumer product, and I’ve always found consumerism alienating)

@doreen I see your situation as perfectly valid.

7

The long term relationship I was thinking about in the other thread involved at the least living together. That kind of relationship gets you financially entangled to some extent (if only in sharing the cost of groceries) which a long term dating relationship doesn’t.
If one person needs to move, will the other move with them?

As for the question, it depends on the person. It worked fine for my kids. For me, my wife and I had an intense one year long relationship in college, though we were 600 miles apart, then broke up and talked frequently and saw each other a few times before we got engaged 5 1/2 years after we met? Was that a romantic relationship? There was certainly no expectation of exclusivity.

8

I guess more like when do you decide “this is good enough without having to actually get married”? Typically most couples get to a point where one of them (typically, but not always the woman) wants the other to “shit or get off the pot”.

9

No pressure from either of us on the other. We’re in our sixties, which may have something to do with it. Compare that to those ill-conceived, immature high school romances where it’s all “we’re you and me against the world, so it’s now or never!”

10

We just celebrated 39yrs together, no wedding. We were/are afraid of commitment. We had no kids together, but did a lot of adventurous travelling. We were having a blast. Lots of, ‘ready to wed’, people told us, it wouldn’t/couldn’t last.

We were travelling in places where it was often wise to allow people to assume, and easily referred to each other as husband/wife. Something I strictly avoided when back home. I NEVER let it slide when someone said ‘husband’, always making the distinction. Eventually it became so obvious even I could see it was stupid, and slowly we became, husband and wife comfortably, (but still didn’t need/want the paperwork.)

In the beginning I was, from time to time, given a lot of well intended advice. From people who sincerely cared and worried. There was a couple of seasons when we went to a lot of weddings, where we were, often pointedly, questioned on, ‘what exactly are you two doing here?’, when will you take the plunge? Etc, ugh. We just smiled and shrugged.

Time passes, we were still having a blast, travelling, having fun, y’know. Then, a lot of those weddings we attended, ended up in divorce court.

If you wait long enough everybody gets it. We started to hear, ‘Y’know you’re more ‘married’ than most of the married people I know!’ And other such nonsense. It’s been so long now, we often hear, ‘I knew from the start…you guys would go the distance!’

(If you see bad enough marriages from the inside, it’s easy to think that’s your destiny if you’re not, very, very careful. All three of my siblings ended up in awful marriages followed by traumatizing divorces, and difficult child/parent issues ending in estrangement. My fears were not ungrounded.)

There’s a lot of ways to be in the world, shrug. People gotta do what they can handle.

One of the most amusing parts is watch society shift from ‘how long have you been married?’ To ‘how long have you been together?’ Along with married people now feeling the need to point out they’ve been married ten years but have been together for 15, because they met in high school. (Unless you took up keeping house at the time, I don’t think it’s quite the same thing, but whatever.) Are the married people are feeling insecure, or what.

Life’s weird, people are weird.
Then you get older and it’s weirder still.
…Shrug…

11

The only thing is that when you are young, there is a biological window. If one person thinks they may want to eventually have kids (particularly the woman), spending 10 years with someone who is ambivalent about it may not be the best plan.

12

That’s sort of what happened to us. We just sort of became this de facto “married couple” that had better marriages than half our friends.

Although we did end up having the big ceremony and kids.

13

My present wife and I got married 30 years ago out of convenience. We were both State Department employees, but would not be eligible for tandem assignments unless we were married. So we did the deed. We don’t have any children together.

14

Before I met my gf, I was “serially monogamous” for some time. I’d meet a woman, we’d date, we’d date some more. I was always open with the fact that I wasn’t interested in marriage, and they’d agree. For a while. Then they’d change their mind and I’d end the relationship rather than marrying.

I’ve been living with my gf for 18(?) years. We are both monogamous by choice. We will be together until one of us dies. Many of our friends treat us as married and we do not correct people who use “husband” or “wife” to refer to us.

15

Hmm, what is the take on common-law marriages? Quick check shows that 7 states recognize them as such, plus DC.

16

Getting married AND having kids? There’s tons of people who get married and don’t have kids. And the opposite. One does not require the other.

Anyway, I’m kinda in the same boat as @kayaker (ha! pun!) except my guy and I don’t live together. We were together tumultuously for a few years 15 years ago, split up, found ourselves, and got back together about 7 years ago. We don’t live together (but I wish he would move in), aren’t particularly interested in being married (I just can’t take on his financial situation) and are definitely not interested in kids. But we’re totally monogamous, he’s my person, I’m his person.

People have different ways of living and being partnered up. What works for them is what works for them.

17

It isn’t the biological window that matters so much in that case because it’s not really about kids- it’s about goals. My sister in-law had a long-term relationship, they lived together, even bought a co-op together. I was a bit worried and asked her early on if they had ever talked about whether he wanted kids and so on - she had a kid from a prior relationship but he didn’t. She started talking about how she could have another one but apparently never had any conversation with him about long-term plans. Fast forward 12 years- she finally decided to bring marriage up to only to find out that he didn’t want to get married ( at least not to her). She ended it - but I do not understand why she waited so long if it was a deal-breaker.

18

At some level she maybe suspected he’d be shy to marry when it came down to it. She just wanted to believe he’d come round. If she never pushes for marriage she’ll never have to face that he’s ultimately not willing.

19

Yeah. Whole lotta people live their life by the rule “Don’t ask the question if you can’t stand one of the answers”.

But they’re only fooling themselves because circumstances will eventually reveal the answer even if the question is never verbalized.

20

I know two people who were in fact married, but it turned out that one partner wanted kids and the other didn’t. So they got divorced, natch, but the whole thing took much less than 12 years to play out. I also know a couple who are married and have no kids and are still married after 20 years, so apparently that was not an issue for those two.

As for being about kids, I know more than one single mother—it’s not like you need to be in a relationship to have a kid.