I agree that some people may wonder why the couple described in #3 don’t get married, but I don’t see a particularly negative attitude about such people. The thought process seems to be more along the lines of “why would two people who are for all intents and purposes married choose to remain unmarried”. A lot of that, for right or wrong, has to do with perceived legal advantages of a wedding.
None that I can think of got pregnant the first time on purpose. At least, that’s the information I was given.
This has all been very interesting, thanks for all the responses.
There have been a fair few people who have said things along the lines of ‘why wouldn’t you get married?’. This is a fair point, and I think my answer of ‘why should I?’ is fair, but doesn’t really cover it. So let me try to explain our thinking (and believe me this is a very mutual and talked about decision).
Firstly it’s a money thing. We don’t have the cash for a big party, and would not want our respective parents to pay for it.
Secondly, if it was a big event, there are all sorts of people who would want to come - relatives, long lost friends etc etc. It’s maybe a bad thing, but we’re fairly insular and are not interested in ‘declaring our love’ in front of a bunch of (in our eyes) fairly random people.
So we could do a quick civil service. Sure, but why? It wouldn’t make our commitment to each other any more real. On top of that we’d have upset people wondering why they weren’t invited to the wedding.
It sounds like there are more legal reasons to get wed in the States. That would be a compelling argument for me, but in reality it’s a wrong one. I shouldn’t want to get married because it makes my tax returns easier.
We basically come down to the ‘why should we’ point, I guess. I think we have shown our commitment to each other in far more meaningful ways than a ceremony could do.
Much more important to us than thoughts of getting married was the birth of our daughter. This we did celebrate with a humanist naming day on a beach in Suffolk. (Christ I sound like a hippy).
Last thing - I’m not against marriage at all, and I don’t rule it out at some stage for us.
In my experience, though, people don’t even think of it as a “moral lapse” anymore…they just think it’s strange, and that there has to be more to it than what is on the surface. For instance, I have two cousins who both lived with their husbands for a long (in one case, QUITE long) time before they eventually married them. Neither ever had kids, so that wasn’t an issue, but I think people wondered why they didn’t get married. They seemed to be in it for the long haul, so no one (except, maybe the grandparents) was too worked up about it from a moral POV, they just thought there had to be some reason they didn’t do it.
And strange is not even universal.
My mother in law married the man she’d been living with for twenty years about six years ago. No one really thought it was strange they weren’t married. They thought it a little strange when they did (she had become unemployed and needed health insurance - he had health insurance).
I’m American and I don’t think it’s at all unusual or noteworthy to have children without marriage
The only thing I have to add to this thread is that my cousin and his “girlfriend” have been together for about 20 years now with a house and 3 kids, and they say that the “unmarried with kids” thing isn’t as big of a deal as it used to be (in the somewhat conservative wilds of upstate NJ, at least). My grandparents and my cousin’s parents were less than pleased when Rick and Patti announced the first pregnancy, but ultimately family was more important than legalities. We consider Patti to be Rick’s wife, we just never call her that.
I’ll add to the list of those requesting a cite for this. I don’t buy it.
I’m American, and live, committed but unmarried, with the father of my two youngest kids. I didn’t know so many people out there were still freaked out by this kind of living arrangement. It seems more and more common here in the U.S.
Maybe because we’re middle-aged, stable, and dull, no one has ever said anything to us about it. Even the very conservative people who know. So we’re actually perverse and degenerate? How funny.
Various durable and healthcare-related powers of attorney and simple wills are very cheap and quick, and should cover legal issues. Health insurance family plans do cover children, no matter the parents’ marital status. In our case, it also covers the domestic partner. When children are born here and the parents are not married, the father is given a special paper to sign recognizing his paternity, if he wishes to.
As for why we don’t get a license to wed, it just seems irrelevant to me. Belief in the mystique of marriage is much like religious belief. Not all of us have it. That doesn’t make us any less committed or decent.
Someone asked for a cite about married/unmarried relationship stability. I did a quick google, and this is the first one I found. It’s an abstract, but states that unmarried couples are five times more likely to split up when there are children involved. The rest of the page looked like it had a lot of similar studies, so more information is out there if someone wants it.
I had commented on unmarried fathers not providing insurance, having visitation, etc., and several people challenged that, providing counterexamples. This suggests to me that it probably varies by state, which further suggests it is worth looking into.
My SO and I have been together for 16 years now, no kids.
I do know several people who have kids and aren’t married. It’s a total non-issue, although if the parents are living together, the general assumption will be that they are married, and if they aren’t together, it will probably be assumed that there was a marriage and divorce or death ended it.
Personally, I would wonder why someone would decide to have a child while single, but it would be more from the standpoint of how much work it is to raise a child while single, rather then any kind of morale judgement. Together but unmarried wouldn’t raise an eyebrow for me.
I’ve had the “why aren’t you married” conversation several times with co-workers, neighbors, new friends. It’s always asked in a “Gee, I never thought of doing that, what’s the reason?” kind of way, not in a judgemental way.
And for us it keeps coming back to “Why should we?” After 16 years, we’ve outlasted about half of our friends’ marriages. They refer to us as the longest married couple in the group. Our insurances name each other a beneficiaries. Our mortgages have all been right of survivor. If something happened to my SO, I’d just follow him into the hospital and start making decisions. If anyone asked, I’d declare myself his wife. Legally, I shouldn’t, but I would. It’s not like they are going to ask to see a license.
We’ve talked, and the thing most likely to get us to marry would be if one of us got laid off work and didn’t find a job right away. We’d get married, and as a change of life event, the other person’s insurance would allow them to change the coverage mid-year, and the unemployed one would get added to the health insurance
I don’t think it’s so much that people are freaked out, just that you’re still very much in the minority. Most folks probably assume that you’re married. In the US, if you’re planning to spend the rest of your life with someone, it seems like more of a pain not to marry them then to make a quick trip to the courthouse. Not getting married seems like more of an ideological statement than anything else (which is no skin off my nose).
Of course, but I’ve met plenty of people who refer to their spouses as their partners too. Maybe your general experience is different to mine.
Interesting. Thanks for the input.
Well, it is, but the reason it causes such flared tempers is that marriage is extremely important in our society and we feel that straight people’s denial of same to us is cruel and malicious. The end-of-life-decisions thing is particularly heartbreaking; if the parents are scornful or in denial about their child’s orientation, they can and do lock his/her long-term partner (who often knows him/her much better than the parents do, since the parents often have cut off or disowned their child) out of the process entirely, and can easily keep the partner from seeing his/her dying mate. It’s a big problem.
Because of the things we’ve listed: hospital visitation rights, decision-making, recognition of the partners in all sorts of contexts. In case you didn’t notice, CrazyCatLady said, “Given all that, I can’t really fathom why anyone would live together long-term in this country and not get married.”
Lots of people get married without believing that having sex before marriage is a sin. I would say the vast majority of people who get married have probably had sex before marriage.
I doubt it. Even the most devout Christians I know do not. Orthodox Jews do, although the only ones I’ve met who seemed totally serious about it lived in Jerusalem.
OK, but last I checked, Wisconsin != the United States.
And would also entail the considerable benefit to the father of not getting him kicked out of the military.
Just in case this is aimed at me, I want to clarify that I make no value judgment against anyone’s choice of how to conduct their relationships. It’s none of my business, and, in fact, I think it’s a good thing for people to come up with their own ways to make it work. Again, I’m a bisexual swinger, so I’d be the last person to tell other people how to run their romantic and sexual lives.
You shouldn’t want to, but it’s not unreasonable to do it for that purpose. If, as you said, a marriage ceremony wouldn’t feel like an extra commitment to you (beyond what you’ve already committed), then it could make sense.
I have a number of friends who legally got married before their “wedding” for economic reasons. Sure, it’d be nice if the tax/health-care/inheritance rules weren’t all tied up in marriage, but since they are, it might not be a big deal to make the decision based on that.
Food for thought, UK edition:
From 1986 to 2004, the percentage of non-married people under 60 who cohabited rose from 11% to 24% among men, and from 13% to 25% for women.
Food for thought, US edition:
Source: Living Arrangements of Children: 2004, U.S. Census Bureau, 2008, p .7.
Attitudes about marriage differ in Canada, where in the 2006 Census, over 50% of adults (15 or over for this purpose) were not and had never been formally married. 66% of children 14 and under are in married families, 15% are in common-law families, and 18% are in single-parent families. Note that there are fewer legal issues for unmarried couples in Canada, where common-law marriages are legally recognized for most cases (including for military family benefits) after 1 year, and where health insurance is not a significant issue.
Social attitudes are apparently much more accepting of unmarried couples in long-term relationships here as well. My wife and I lived common-law for 10 years before we decided we might as well get married, with no special comment made about it by anyone. A number of my friends are in long-term unmarried relationships. Both my immediate supervisor and my manager at work are currently on maternity leave - neither is married or has made any mention of plans to get married. This varies from region to region - the two women mentioned above are both Québecoise, where the percentage of common-law relationships is the highest in Canada.