You mention similar treatment while they endure and when they break down. Could you go on about that, especially the break down part and de facto relationships?
You may be thinking of child support but that would apply even after a one night stand.
Perhaps you were thinking of the cases where one person takes care of the kids while the other person concentrates on career without being married. Doesn’t that come under the unjust enrichment doctrine though, which is much more broad than marriage?
I think they just came to the realization, that even without the paperwork and formalities, pair bonded couples sharing mortgages and children, end up evading ONLY the paperwork and formalities, being de facto married in every other possible sense, including all its downsides.
So, “Ha! We don’t need your stinking ‘marriage rituals’!”, easily becomes, “Dammit! Look at that! We’re freaking ‘married’ for all our non conformist efforts!”
Obviously this varies from place to place, and it’s still a developing trend. But here in Australia, and also in Ireland, and I don’t doubt in other countries, on the breakdown of a de facto relationship the courts have, by statute, pretty much the same powers as they would have on the breakdown of a marriage to assess the parties’ respective means and needs, and to order division of assets, payment of maintenance, etc, etc.
As far as I can see, there’s a shift going on away from formalism (marriage is constituted by a ceremony) towards substantialism (marriage is constituted by the reality of the conjugal relationship between the couple). If you “live as man and wife”, to borrow an outdated phrase, then increasingly the legal and administrative consequences are the same as if you had gone through a marriage ceremony. Usually there’ll be some kind of threshold for this treatment - you have to live together for two years, for example, unless you have a a child together, in which case living together for any period will get you across the threshold. This may not be referred to, legally, as “marriage”. But in terms of how the law treats your relationship, it’s increasingly indistinguishable from marriage.
This doesn’t just apply on marriage breakdown. For immigration purposes, for example, the treatment of a citizen’s de facto partner is increasingly assimilated to that of his spouse.
If two people who have set up house keeping together cannot decide on an equitable distribution of the furniture they bought together, one of them will take refuge in the courts; roommates have been doing that for at half a century.
Interesting. I wonder what effect anti-gay marriage laws in many US states would have on that. For example, Ohio’s constitution bans any “legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage.” Maybe it’s not severable from the preceding sentence which banned same-sex marriage, but I don’t think it’s been tested.
Well, of the top of my head, I don’t think it can be completely severed. An injuctionion against [legal status for relationships approximating marriage] most depend on some understanding of what marriage is. And, low, the prior sentence tells us; it’s “Only a union between one man and one woman”. Leaving aside the obvious anti-gay marriage intent, what marriage requires is a “union” between two people; it doesn’t appear to require a ceremony.
So the Ohio legislature wants to pass a law that says, in effect, that marriage is constituted by the publicly-manifested conjugal union of two not-already-married individuals, I don’t see that the Ohio Constitution would necessarily stop them.
After all, what we’re talking about is not a thousand miles from the concept of common-law marriage. Has anybody suggested that the Ohio Constitution forbids recognition of common-law marriages? (Yes, I know that Ohio doesn’t currently recognise common-law marriages formed after 1991; that’s not the point. They do recognise pre-1991 common-law marriages and could in principle legislate to recognise future common-law marriages - unless the Constitution overrides all that.)
BTW, it’s ironic that not wanting the intrusion of the state in recognising “marriage” has, in Aus and NZ, resulted in a much more intrusive system where the state examinies your life to decide how your property will be treated, instead of using the simple system of certification.
No idea. But the people who brought forward the amendment to the Ohio Constitution presumably thought it recognised something.
And it probably does. Most legal systems do treat people differently if they are married in a variety of ways - inheritance on intestacy, for example. Adoption or fostering. Tenancy rights. Etc, etc, etc. My guess would be that there’s quite a range of Ohio laws that apply differently to you depending on your marital status.
Well, these things go in fashions. Normally we register actual real facts because we need to know about the underlying reality - births, deaths, for example. But it would never occur to us to deny that a birth or death had happened at all merely because it had not been registered.
And this was the original motivation behind marriage records - they were created because, if you were married, society needed to know about it. It would not initially have occurred to anyone to say that, if you failed to register your marriage, you weren’t married at all.
At some point, thinking flipped. Instead of a marriage certificate recording a reality, it came to be seen as creating a reality that hadn’t existed before. And, while I don’t think we can put a precise date on when this flip happened - it was a process more than an event - but it’s fairly recent. Maybe the nineteenth century?
Now, it seems to me, we’re moving back in the other direction. You talk about the state being intrusive, examining your life, deciding how your property will be dealt with, etc. But if you talk to de facto couples and ask them why they’re not cermonially married, at least some of the time you will get a response to the effect that they don’t need a bit of paper to validate their relationship. In other words, they’re of the “marriage is a social reality, not a legal fiction” school of thought. And if they are treated as unmarried when, e.g. they seek to obtain a visa for their partner, they tend to get quite shirty.
So I think this cuts both ways. Someone who thinks that he can, or should be able to, avoid enduring financial obligations to a conjugal partner by not marrying gets upset when he finds this isn’t so. But someone who reckons that his relationship with his conjugal partner will or should be recognised for immigration, inheritance, pension or other purposes gets quite upset if he finds it isn’t.
Okay, but in retrospect it is kind of surprising that there wasn’t more opposition to marriage back then. However most of the “revolutionaries” were male chauvinist pigs of the first order, so that might have had something to do with it.
What happened was that all those cynical Gen-Xers you went to college with in the 80s and 90s got older and all their friends got married.
I think what it really comes down to is that many, if not most people ultimately like some stability and companionship in their life. Sure, they think it doesn’t matter in their 20s and even their 30s when they are surrounded by peers around the same age who are all single and into the same scene. But I think what happens as you get older is gradually your friends get married, have kids or just move away. You start to find yourself in the upper age range of the crowd that hangs out where unmarried people hang out. And that’s assuming you live in a big city. I can’t imagine what it’s like being single in Ohio or some other area of the country where half the people seem to marry at 25.
I am still here as a representative. I was married for 10 year and partnered for 17 and do not miss it in the least. I am strongly anti-marriage on an individual level mostly because I have only known vanishingly few people that are not obviously unhappy with the circumstances (even the few that remain could be really good actors). It is none of my business and I don’t care what type of arrangement that you manage to pull off at your own expense but I firmly believe that most marriages are more business partnerships at best rather than romantic at least in the long-term. There is nothing wrong with that either (that is actually what marriage has been historically) but becomes delusional bordering on mass hysteria and deception when most of society buys into the lie and expects the type of lasting relationship that very rarely happens from most couples.
I was reading the Ashley-Madison breach details in which 30+ million hopeful cheaters may be exposed and some people pretend to be surprised. That isn’t shocking at all to me. The majority people I know including friends, family and especially coworkers have cheated or are actively cheating. I have even helped some of them do it. Again it is none of my business. The sad thing to me is that they feel caught in an artificial expectation that isn’t reasonable for them to fulfill as advertised. Maybe they would have chosen differently if there were other options available or they possibly are just general scumbags that fulfill any promise but marriage as an institution hasn’t always existed like it does in 1st world countries today. It is much more restrictive and demanding especially as the gender role changes have rapidly unbalanced the cost-benefit equation.
I am thankful that I can do anything with my friends or coworkers and they get more wild than I do by far because they have a curfew and have to make up an excuse when they get home just like they are 16 again. I have no restrictions whatsoever and can’t get in trouble with anyone at all as long as I have some reasonable sense. I am a fully functional adult with my own kids, house, professional job and everything else. Most people get married so that they can have those things but, in my view, marriage is more of a burden than anything including financially, if you are a someone that makes reasonable money and has a solid grounding in reality.
My personal choice wasn’t to legalize gay marriage (although they are entitled to be suckered into it as anyone else). My ideal is to abolish all state sponsored marriage in favor of very intricate and customized legal contracts with any religious ceremonies being superfluous and non-binding legally. That approach has the advantages of acknowledging an infinite number of variations of the common idea, forcing people to really work through what they are agreeing to at a detailed level and separating the church(es) and state from their separate missions.
You heard it here in 2015 - I am against marriage mainly because I believe most of them are shams that do not benefit one or both of the parties involved at least as popularly portrayed. The people involved could generally avoid most common problems if they simply ran their own life as a true adults without being forced to constantly consult a person that you gave a piece of jewelry to years prior about every little thing.
I never want to hear anyone bitch about having a ‘honey-do list’, being exposed on Ashley Madison or getting in trouble for going out to eat with coworkers on a whim. I have sympathy for people that were suckered into it because that charade is what is expected but I do not respect people that get whipped (metaphorically) once they find out once the real deal is. The solution is in The Book - The Yellow Pages (look under Lawyers, Divorce and most of your problems will be gone in a couple of years just like a surgeon that removed a huge tumor from your brain).
Well I think “marriage wasn’t for me” is a very different thing than “marriage shouldn’t be for anyone”. Everyone is different. Although people do tend to hang out with like minded people, so it can sometimes seem as if everyone is just like you marriage-wise.
I think maybe they might get more wild than you because you’re old as fuck.
Seriously though. IIRC, we’re about the same age (early 40s). Not really that old (for Earth), but a bit old to still be getting fired up for booze, sex and drug benders like you’re in your early 20s. But I know a number of guys that age (or older) who just never grow out of it. And marriage for these guys is a problem.
I do agree that this is the problem with most marriages. People seem to enter marriages not for a partnership but rather to replace a parent, or to be a replacement for a parent. I’m getting married in December, and I flat out told my fiancee at the very beginning of the relationship that neither of us were each other’s parents. If she wants to go out with friends or stay out late or go to some event or purchase something with her own money, she does not need my permission to do it. Some things should be discussed, such as where it brings in other already established plans or huge purchases (like a car, or a boat, etc) that has the potential to financially impact us both, but it’s not about ‘permission’ and ‘punishment’. I’m not going to make her get rid of any friends, not going to tell her she can’t buy this game she wants or go out on a friday evening somewhere she wants to go, or get a tattoo she wants, and I expect the same in return. I am not her mother, nor is she mine.
We are a partnership. That means we discuss things as equals, not as ‘boss’ and ‘subservient’ or ‘parent’ and ‘child’. Sometimes that will mean that one commiserates to the other or vice versa but it’s not ‘it’s my way or the highway’. If that makes sense.
However I disagree with you on most of the rest of what you said.
One specific thing that stood out to me was this:
So, to break it down…you want to get rid of one state-sponsered contract for a indeterminate number of state-sponsered contracts, making getting married harder so people will have to really think it through, overcomplicating the system in order to force them to really think it through?
So, basically, what we have now, only with more than one state-sponsered contract and far more complicated to suss out, with…one assumes…more contracts that could be combined in a thousand ways and more laws to cover every contingency and possible combination of contracts that could be permutated?
Am I understanding that correctly? If not, please help me to. If so…why? Seems to me it’s merely making things a lot harder and more expensive on everyone for very little, if any, benefit.
The percent of people who never marry has continued to go up. The percent of people who marry later has continued to go up. The proportion of married people peaked in 1960. Both trends are rather slow:
The argument in the OP is terrible. The fact that fewer people are trying to push the idea that marriage is a dying institution proves nothing whatsoever about whether the percentage of people who get married is increasing or decreasing. As a general rule, if you want to discover whether something is changing in overall amount or in percentage, don’t use what you hear people say when they advocate some change or some resistance to change. That only shows what people talk about, not what they actually do. Look up statistics when you want to know what they actually do.
(Incidentally, regarding a similar statistic, the proportion of marriages that end in divorce peaked in 1981 and has gone down somewhat since then.)
I did not advocate what you are saying here. I was asking a question.
All you show is that people have de facto marriages instead of traditional ones. To me they are all the same anyway.
Whatever you mean by the term “de facto marriage,” it has nothing to do with the websites with statistics that I linked to. The statistics in the links I give refer to the numbers of legal marriages. They are ones that are entered into by getting a marriage license and then a marriage ceremony. I have no idea what distinction you are making between “de facto marriage” and “traditional marriage.”
I didn’t say that you were advocating more or less marriages (or anything else). I said that you got your information from the number of people that you heard advocating the end of marriage. The fact that you hear less people today advocating the extinction of marriage has nothing to do with the actual number of people getting married. To know anything about the actual number, you have to look up actual statistics.
de facto marriage is when two people are living together effectively as a married couple but just have not had a wedding or marriage licence. To me these people are married. That is why all those stats are meaningless in this discussion.
Polyamory, open marriages, and the like never really caught on because most humans are, by nature, inherently inclined to monogamy. Our marriage customs are a recognition of that, not a cause. Now, there are some people who don’t have this natural monogamous inclination, and I wish them joy, but they’re a minority, and probably always will be.
You’ll note that modern relationships, even when they lack the label of “marriage”, still typically follow the same monogamous pattern. We might see some changes in the details, but not in the fundamentals.
