My wife and I had lived together for about 8 years before we got officially married. We finally did it so that she could get on my health insurance. We really didn’t want to, mostly because it seemed to bug my family that we weren’t officially married. Now that she has health insurance, we joke about getting officially divorced, but leaving everything else exactly the same. That would drive my family up a tree.
She didn’t change her last name to mine, so that still bugs them.
Being married keeps the money in the family when your spouse pimps you out.
My wife was married by Elvis in a ten-dollar dress in the lobby of the Howard Johnson’s.
Marriage is and isn’t the end of the world as you knew it as a single man.
On one hand, you do lose the freedom to screw whoever you want. I suppose there are some exceptions with swingers and stuff, but that’s a huge exception to the rule.
On the other hand, you have someone who’s stood up in front of God and everyone to say that they have your back, financially, emotionally and socially. It’s a surprisingly nice feeling, and this is coming from a very independent man. Eureka is basically saying the same thing that I tried to say here.
I didn’t ever have to deal with drastic income disparity, so I guess I’m lucky. I don’t think that would have gone well at all if I’d made significantly more than my wife did.
My inclination would have been to split the bills down the middle, and she could have whatever she had left over from her salary after the bills are paid as spending cash, and if she didn’t make enough, well, she should get a better job. I don’t know how well that would have gone.
The lack of sex part hasn’t happened to me yet- although she seems to think it has. Women apparently think that when you’re “newlyweds” that you want to fuck 24-7, even though you may be in your mid-30s and have jobs. And honestly, it’s not as much of a priority because well… you have years of it ahead, and that’s all you’re going to get, so why go overly out of your way now? On the other hand, the sex is better than it was when you were dating, mostly because unless she’s particularly liberated, she doesn’t feel guilty about it, and the two of you have been at it longer, so you know what you’re doing better.
Tax-wise… no idea. I let my wife do the taxes, because she has some investments that I don’t.
What does suck absolutely about marriage is the “couples” shit you have to do. There’s a lot of crap that you have to do because you’re a married couple, that you as a man have absolutely no interest in doing. Your wife’s girlfriend is having a couples baby shower… you have to go. Her professional group is doing a family event… you have to go. So what you end up doing is huddling with the other husbands and drinking beer and talking about sports, which is what you’d be doing anyway, just with a different set of guys, so it doesn’t end up being nearly as bad as it sounds.
The privacy issue is just something you’d have to work out. I’m not particularly embarrassed about nudity or anything, so I mostly don’t give a shit.
What does suck is contention about scarce resources, i.e. the TV remote. I’ve all but quit watching television because my wife and I can hardly agree on TV shows. She watches absolute crap like “Millionaire Matchmaker” and the various “Real Housewives” shows, along with stuff like the Bachelor. I tend toward BSG and other sci-fi shows, along with history documentaries and food/drink shows.
All in all, marriage is a good deal, but it’s not what you expect at all. Things that you didn’t consider will be really wonderful, and things you thought would be good, will suck.
A transvestite Elvis?
In marriage, I’ve found my life to be even happier than when I was single. And when the kids came along, it just got better.
The OP seems to be suggesting that any commitment is a drag…what about contracts? What about work agreements? etc.?
It turns out that planning our lives together has only made things better. I don’t know why some people seem to look at it as such a bad thing.
I’ve been married for two and a half years now, have never once regretted it, and can’t imagine I ever will.
Let me go through your pros and cons one by one:
Religious reasons? Nope, not religious.
Tax benefits? Sure it lowered my taxes, but that’s not why I did it.
Gold digger? Nope, we’re young and don’t have much money.
Humans not pair maters? BS, some of us are. I look forward to being “mated” to my wife for the rest of my life.
Wedding expensive? Well, her parents were more than happy to pay for it, so that wasn’t a problem.
Lose privacy? First, I don’t really care about having privacy from my wife, and second we had already moved in together so the privacy ship had sailed.
Commitment? Not a negative to me, actually a huge positive.
Cost of divorce? I think it highly unlikely we’ll ever get divorced. Yes, lots of people think that and then get divorced anyway, but frankly I think we’re more aware of the strengths and weakness of our relationship than the average couple, and thus a lot less likely to be blindsided. Plus, we’re a lot more willing to work on it when there are problems than some couples seem to be. Even so, there are no guarantees . . . but to me not getting married for fear of divorce is like not buying a car for fear it could break down. Most things that are worth anything come with risks.
Sex dissappears? Well, it waxes and wanes (e.g., not much sex when our baby was waking us up multiple times per night) but it hasn’t disappeared yet. Plus being in a committed relationship with someone who lives with you makes it a lot less work to get it. It’s not like whether you have sex is contingent on the whims of whoever is at the bar that night.
Greater obligation to put up with partner? Sure, and greater obligation for her to put up with me. But we like putting up with each other.
Things you didn’t mention:
Makes the whole having kids thing a bit more convenient.
Wedding presents. Because no one gives you free stuff just for staying single.
Companionship. Someone to wake up with you in the morning and fall asleep with you each night. Someone you can talk to about whatever is on your mind.
Someone you can count on to be there for you when life gets tough.
Somone to help you deal with life’s little challenges, whatever they may be.
Someone you can cound on to love you no matter what.
Someone you can confess your heinous crimes to without them being compelled to testify in court. (Not that I’ve ever personally taken advantage of this one.)
Happiness. If you found someone whose mere presence in your life makes you feel happier than you’ve ever felt before, and they were willing to make a firm commitment to stay with you and make you happy for the rest of your lives, wouldn’t you want to take them up on it? And if you cared about their happiness wouldn’t you want to try to make them just as happy in return?
Anyway, I’m not saying you should get married. Maybe you don’t have anyone in your life who makes you feel the way my wife makes me feel. And there’s nothing wrong with that – there are lots of paths to happiness, and not all of them involve getting married. But if your happiness was as wrapped up with one particular person as mine is, trust me, you would want it. If you were a fish I wouldn’t tell you you need air, but I’m also not about to stop breathing it just because you don’t see the point.
Many of the benefits of marriage (other than legal stuff like filing taxes jointly and sharing a health plan) would be the same if you’re just in a serious long-term relationship and living together. But if you’re already living like you’re married, then the only benefit of not getting married is to make it easier to get out if you decide you don’t want it any more. So if you’re sure you want it for the rest of your life, then the benefit of not being married is exactly nothing.
I’m sure.
You can say, “How can you possibly be sure of that?” But how can you be sure of anything? Either you trust yourself and your feelings and judgment, or you don’t.
I’m a single woman about to turn 30. I have a house and a car and a very stable job. Completely self-sufficient.
I figure if I get married to a man with at least a job, it will mean almost all profit for me (er, us). All those vacations I can’t afford right now, we’d have the money. The TV. The retirement savings.
Plus I get to live with my best friend (presumably, the man I marry) and have a partner to do fun stuff with and help with all the chores I currently do myself and best of all I’d be LOVED.
I look forward to it.
Bollocks.
I’m not married but have had a 10 year relationship and we have a 3 year old daughter. We have a joint mortgage on a flat back in the UK and currently live abroad. All our income and so forth is joint, much more so than most couples I know, married or otherwise. This relationship would be no more easy to “walk away from” than a married one.
Why the hell should we get married? Neither of us is religious and our commitment as a family is obvious.
I’m not sure if they might be tax or other benefits (unlikely given our present circumstance), but if there were than I think the system would be at fault, not us.
Being married is like forming an infantry square against the world. It is not just you versus the world anymore, its you two versus the world.
I was mostly referring to Inheritance Tax as a tax advantage, which in the UK has a ridiculously low threshold and a 40% marginal rate - yes you can avoid it with a modicum of planning seven years before, but marriage is a quick and dirty way of getting around it 
Most of the reasons folk here are giving in support of marriage are actually reasons in favour of long term relationships. The only thing I hadn’t thought of was the family member reasoning, but surely in such an environment it would only be fair if divorce were prohibited? Otherwise it’s still sub-family.
Think of this in gambling terms. It’s like backing at incredibly short odds when the actual odds of it coming in are (apparently - I’m aware that this divorce statistic might be a bit iffy) around fifty percent. The risk:reward makes no sense.
Nope - we “lived in sin” for years before marriage without guild, my religion certainly doesn’t require it.
Um… not always. Some years being married has helped, some it has hurt
Given that I did not buy high ticket items like a house or fancy car even when we had the money to do so, I’d guess that material gain was not a motivation on my part. Nor on his.
One advantage you missed (assuming a good marriage):
Well, neither of us were virgin on a wedding night, no, but both of us had a prior pattern of, as you put it, serial monogamy. One mate at a time. It appears that we have both reached the end of the series part of that phrase.
My parents were married nearly 60 years and to the best of my knowledge neither ever had an affair. Humans made not be obligated to be monogamous but clearly some couples are.
Mine wasn’t - we eloped. One of my sisters did, too.
We’d been living together for years before we married - what is this “privacy” thing you speak of?
You have failed to consider that your commitment to someone else is (supposed to be) returned by the other partner. It is not supposed to be one-sided in regards to obligations or benefits.
Not universally true - I have two sisters who divorced and they did not “steal” most of their husband’s money. In fact, the elder of the two took nothing from her first husband, not one penny in alimony and not one thing that was his. They split the few joint items, and I think the legal costs were only a couple hundred dollars (this was back in the 1970’s).
As my parents demonstrate, though, divorce is by no means inevitable.
20 years and counting and there’s still sex in my marriage.
If you find “putting up with” your partner that onerous you shouldn’t get married.
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I got married because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with someone I was closer to than the family I was born in to. No, I don’t regret it.
Yeah, you have a point. Why did I want to get married instead of just staying shacked up?
It’s a formal promise. Formal promises mean something to me. They have psychological weight that simple intentions don’t have. They are substantial added incentive to work things out should they get difficult – call it mental relationship insurance.
It’s a formal promise in front of witnesses. Now everybody knows we’re together for good, and (most) friends and family recognize an obligation to support our bond. I no longer have to hear from my fundie uncle about living in sin, and my mom no longer has to suffer his warnings to her about letting us stay in the same guest room when we visit. I don’t care so much about my fundie uncle’s worries, but it is very nice to have everybody assume I’ll be with my husband, that I have a right to be with my husband, and that no one need ask.
It’s a **legal promise **that sweepingly takes care of all kinds of boring crap you’d otherwise have to handle through extensive paperwork: all the next of kin stuff, all the shared finances stuff, insurance, etc.
It’s a **celebration **of a promise that makes me very happy. In our wedding, we had an excuse to get all our favorite people together and have a very joyous party. Since we wrote our vows and designed our ceremony, we got to emphasize the parts we really cared about. In our anniversary, we have an day designated to celebrate all that good stuff all over again.
You know, most of the disincentive of “divorce” is also present with “breaking up”. If you’ve legally entangled your finances, you may have to pay a lawyer to disentangle them; you certainly still have to go through all the anguish and arguments and loneliness and figuring out which books are whose and telling everyone you’re no longer together parts. Ask yourself how many of the disadvantages you’ve listed apply to any long-term relationship.
Will tell ya something…
My wife and I were chatting on the phone the other day (I’m away on business) and the subject of divorce came up, specifically, whether it’s true that “50% (or whatever) of all marriages end up in divorce.” So I’m in Analytics Mode and I say something like “It might be true that 50% of all marriages end up in divorce, but that doesn’t mean that 50% of all married people end up divorced, for you have many cases where people are divorced multiple times.”
So we’re talking a bit more and she asks why, imho, the divorce rate seems so high compared to, say, 1860 or sometime in the Distant Past. I reply, feeling smugly about My Smarts, that it’s probably a case of extended lifespans, that “'Til Death Do Us Part” meant a much shorter period where people lived an average of 50 years, as opposed to the current 75 or so. So the increased divorce rate is possibly a result of a pre-industrial societal norm straining against modern changes in lifespan.
Big Brain here then continued, whereupon I expanded on this idea and opined that society would be much better served if we could come up with “marriage contracts” (ala Larry Niven) where people would sign a contract to be married for a specific length… 5 years, 10 years, “until the child turns 18”, whatever. I then go on as to how such a thing (marital contracts) would probably ease a lot of societal pressures, blah blah blah.
Damn I’m smart! I was even impressing myself with the cognizant brilliance of my theses.
So then, the Lovely Laura asks me… “Well, what sort of marriage contract would you offer me? One of the lifetime ones, right?”
:smack: !
Moral of the story: Intelligence is not just what you say, but to whom you say it to. And, failing that, it’s the ability to successfully backpedal and whitewash when you put your foot in your mouth.
[quote=“Angry Lurker, post:1, topic:494273”]
[li]Humans not pair maters. At best serially monogomous, and I doubt that[/li]…
[li]Lose privacy[/li][/QUOTE]
If humans aren’t pair maters, then why has the institution of marriage been such a strong part of human society in so many different times and cultures?
I think humans have a natural desire to mate for life and a natural desire to sleep around. In some people, one of these desires is much stronger than the other, but in many, both of these competing, contradictory instincts are present. Such is life.
What does seem to be humans’ natural state is living in families. Privacy, in the sense of living alone as an autonomous individual, is the exception, not the rule.
Only if you want them to be. And for the people who do want them to be, the big fancy wedding is a reason for, not against, getting married.
Not everyone thinks the way you do. Either you’re not the kind of person who should get married, or your mind has been poisoned by too much exposure to the “dark side” of marriage and too little exposure to the healthy, functional, fulfilling side.
We got married because we realized we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.
A few years later, after trying to start a family, we turned to adoption. Turned out being married has a purpose when it comes to adoption.
Perhaps it is different in the UK, I don’t know, but in the U.S. marriage comes with considerable legal benefits that are a great deal of work to aquire any other way - 316 legal rights according to a recent court case I read.
As other have said, your spouse becomes your default legal next of kin for all medical and financial matters. It is not “subfamily” in fact it is a much more primary legal relationship than any other family relationship before the law. For example, you can disinherit your children but you cannot disinherit your spouse. As well as a legal relationship, next-of-kin is an emotional relationship.
Health insurance is another huge deal in the U.S… If people are kind of “on the fence” about marriage this often pushes them over into going for it. Employers rarely if ever extend benefits to non-married partners. (and some who extend benefits to non-married partners, do not extend benefits to heterosexual non married partners).
Anyway, the 50% number is wrong. It came about by someone noticing that in one particular year there were 2.4 million new marriages, and 1.2 million divorces. But there were 54 million existing marriages as well which were ignored. And not all people are equally likely to divorce. The older you marry, and the more education you have, (and if it is your first marriage) the less likely you are to divorce, ever.
Pros and cons of getting married, I think, depend somewhat on one’s expectations of what marriage is.
My wife and I dated for about 3 years before we agreed to get married and took another year to get it together. After 4 years or so, I think a body knows what he’s getting into and the cons are all a part of the package deal.
By the way, from the Cons list you left out “Dealing with your partner’s medical issues and debt,” as long as we’re being honest.
Using this logic, all parent-child relationships would be considered “sub-family” unless giving kids up for adoption was outlawed.