Pro and Cons for marriage/living together

ChrissieI

tinateaspoon wrote:

My partner and I have been living happily together for 28 years and have no desires to get wed.:

I'm interested in why you would not want to get married. It is down to personal choice but you have given 28 years of your life to this person. So why not marry him.

donna-j_2

Or why should you marry him if you have spent 28 years together? You should have the same 'standing' as any other couple.

I have been with my OH 10 years, and we have a 9-month-old baby. We have not got married because we don't see it as necessary, not because there are any particular downsides that we want to avoid.

We are not two separate units, with our own agendas. That comment has really annoyed me. We have a substantial mortgage and a child together, so marriage would not make that any more 'real' or our commitment any stronger.

Bogof_Babe

That's fine, so long as you are on board with the fact that certain privileges apply to married couples, that cohabiting couples are not eligible for.

That's just the way it works in this country. It's the law. It is meant to promote family stability, not that it always does but at least that is the general intention.

If your partner wants you to inherit his wealth, he can arrange this via his Will, but as regards ongoing pension entitlements, there obviously have to be some constraints, or everyone who had ever lived with someone could make a claim, which would be an administrative and legal nightmare for the pension provider.

Marriage just tidies things up, legally speaking, so everyone knows where they stand. I am flummoxed as to why seriously committed couples with (or without) children are so against it.

mountainofdebt

how do you decide that a person has shown 'committment' to another person if you co-habit?

Take the situation we're in at the mo......a relative meets someone and they shortly afterwards moves in with the relative.

Four years on the relative dies.

So who should get the pension entitlement? The children or the partner?

Trouble is if you merely state that living together shows committment then would it be fair for the partner (in my particular case) to benefit from the pension my relative built up for the last 30 years? At what point do you say yes the relationship was on par to a marriage?

Personally if you go down the route of saying that co-habiting couples are on par to married couples what is the point of getting married at all?

Bogof_Babe

However you feel in yourselves about your relationship, choosing to live together without formalising it does smack of wanting to keep your options open.

That is perfectly legit, but then don't be upset when the negatives (i.e. pension rights) work against you.

margaretclare

I agree with Bogof_Babe.

I said in my post above that there are certain words which are essential in any marriage ceremony - the declaration that you're free to marry and the declaration calling on people present to witness....

We had a lot more words than the bare minimum as part of our wedding ceremony and we included, as well as modern words, the very old words 'for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health'.

In my view what the most important words of all were what came when we exchanged rings (as has been said already, rings are not essential). But our words on exchanging rings included 'All that I am I give you, all that I have I share with you, within the love of God....'

It's that commitment to share everything that feels the most important to me. We've both been married before and have other families, but our primary commitment is, and has to be, to each other.

Margaret Clare

Dora_the_Explorer_5

Blimey, give the OP a break. They've been living together for 28 years - a darn sight longer than most marriages last. If that's not committment I don't know what is, and they haven't needed the formal crowd control of a marriage ceremony.

Bogof_Babe

Dora, I take it that you think the OP should be entitled to receive her partner's pension after his demise.

Maybe there is a case for this, in this particular instance, but it would still need formalising by some sort of deed of agreement while he is alive. In which case, how different is that from going through a 10-minute marriage process in a register office? Quite possibly seeing a solicitor and drawing up such a formal document, getting witnesses to sign it etc., might work out far more costly and time consuming than a quickie wedding.

I keep coming back to the "why ever not?" thought process. Surely that would lay to rest all their worries on the subject.

Dora_the_Explorer_5

Dora, I take it that you think the OP should be entitled to receive her partner's pension after his demise[/QUOTE

If you check you will see I posted

Look on it as a straightforward business transaction, after all - you can always divorce if things don't work out. If you don't get his pension, his company will profit - does he think they deserve it?

The reason I suggested marriage is that I believe the majority of occupational pensions allow the pensioner to nominate only members of family - spouse, kids, to inherit part of their pension when they die. Which is one of the reasons, if not the main one, for the recent legislation for civil partnership ceremonies for same sex couples.

Bogof_Babe

Sorry, I overlooked the fact that the earlier post was by you too - I was responding to your later one.