The Ultimate Incentive to have an amazing 2010.

Flower08

Cinny - your wedding plans sound very sweet OH and i are the same, there is no official engagement etc, but we know that one day we will get married and have kids. OH has got very broody recently (thought it was supposed to be the women that got broody) and keeps telling me he wants kid now!

Im getting very fed up of our spare room at the minute, it is still full of boxes and no furniture, so have been hitting ebay trying to find some furniture to put in there - being inspired by Dinahs bargains!

clearmydebts

I also think your wedding sounds lovely Cinny

Cinny91

Flower08 wrote: »

OH has got very broody recently (thought it was supposed to be the women that got broody) and keeps telling me he wants kid now!

Phew, thought it was just my OH being a weird male getting broody! I think it's because all his friends have kids, he's feeling left out. I want kids when I'm 22 though, 3 years isn't that long to wait!

Hope the repairs won't be anything major Dinah, the inner and outer skin comment made me think of a watermelon for some reason. I think the heat is making my brain melt!

Has anyone else done the £13 glasses deal from the email? Need to figure out how to get my prescription online so it's all ready when the voucher goes 'live' tomorrow. Anyone have any clue how I do it? A quick scan of the page seems very confusing!! Hope everyone has a nice evening though, just finished work so I'm off to drive myself in my own car on my own to my Grandparents. All by myself! :cool: (the novelty of being able to drive still hasn't worn off yet! )

Flower08

Cinny91 wrote: »

Phew, thought it was just my OH being a weird male getting broody! I think it's because all his friends have kids, he's feeling left out. I want kids when I'm 22 though, 3 years isn't that long to wait!

Nope defintely not just your OH thats getting broody. OH has even gone so far as to look into what child tax credits etc we would be entitled to. I'm torn really, sometimes think i would love to get married first, then other times i think what does that matter?
Its not something we can really consider now though until i have got myself sorted out and off these anti-depressants.

Dinah93

If you want to get married I'd wait until you are to have kids, the phrase about buying livestock and milk is around for a reason. Most men need a reason to get married rather than it just being an abstract 'yeah I'd like to someday' type thing.

Its taken me 6 months, but I've finally convinced NIM its good to wait to have kids, for me this is mostly financially driven really, I want to be a lot more comfortable before we have kids.

Flower08

Dinah93 wrote: »

If you want to get married I'd wait until you are to have kids,

I have days when i think i would really love to get married before we have kids, but then i think the type of wedding we would want we would need at least £5,000 and then i think that could have all gone towards a family home and baby thing. Anyway its not something that we will need to think about until im sorted i guess!

Dinah93

Aye but if you're wanting to get married children cost money, so you wouldn't really get the wedding later either. Besides aren't you just out of uni, plenty of time to get yourself sorted and established before bringing a baby into it all.

Diet going badly today, very sore throat has meant I've had two ice creams.

Cinny91

Dinah93 wrote: »

If you want to get married I'd wait until you are to have kids, the phrase about buying livestock and milk is around for a reason. Most men need a reason to get married rather than it just being an abstract 'yeah I'd like to someday' type thing.

I don't see how that works at all? Surely a baby is a reason to get married so you'd be a proper family? And I'm sure that saying is about sex anyways, like 'why buy the pie when you can have a slice for free?' I don't see the problem in kids before marriage though - a bit of paper saying you're married won't mean you're any more stable than 2 people living together.

Flower - Hope the tablets are going well for you, and that it isn't too long until you can start coming off them

Dinah93

Statistically (my first dissertation was on family structure in the UK, the second on gendered spatial use of the city - I think I may be a closet feminist) you're a lot less likely to get married to children after having children with them than before. Obviously some men see the line turn blue and get down on one knee there and then, but the vast majority (like many on here) don't see the need to be married to have a baby - and if you don't see the point when you concieve a baby why should that change later? The arguement about getting the milk for free was originally about mothers advising their daughters they'll only get married if they stay pure, giving men a purpose behind getting married, but nowadays it holds just as true as often one member of the couple needs a reason to get married. When asked to give their reasons for getting married over 4/5 of couples under the age of 35 give 'to start a family' within their top three reasons (romantically over half still thought there were tax benefits to be had at the time the survey was done, while an automatically given reason of almost every couple was 'to celebrate our love' or similar words which is cute but statistically irrelevant, fascinating book 'Who will mind the baby'). And I'm definately one of those people, and to me my reasons to get married is to form a family unit where the man automatically has the same legal rights to his child as the woman. Things are a lot better in UK law than they were even 10 years ago as regards rights for fathers, but its still overpoweringly in favour of women. So the who will buy the cow phrase (which I try to avoid using, as I dislike the idea of comparing women to cattle!) still holds true simply as 'there often needs to be a reason to get married other than just love', but its true in other areas such as I'm thinking of marketing - being careful not to give away so much in a promotion that people no longer need or want to purchase the product, only give away enough to pique their interest.

I have no issue with people having children out of marriage, and the majority of couples who do so are on the same page about their relationship, and I'm certainly not one to ever call a baby anything but a blessing, but it does do my nut in sometimes when some of my friends are whingeing that he won't propose and they're so desperate to be Mrs X and I want to say 'you have a toddler, a morgage together and have lived together 7 years - what reason does he have to propose now when its not going to change anything'. Being logical about it once you have a baby, a house etc, spending even £1000 on a wedding just for kicks doesn't seem like a priority to the more logically minded. What I usually reply with is that he's been there for 8 years, clearly he's commited to her and she doesn't need a ring to show that. Which is all true, just sadly she wants the ring too and it really doesn't look like it's coming, with money as tight as it usually is in your 20s he's much keener to save anything they can spare towards going travelling.

There are always exceptions to this, the couple who get married 20 years after having their first baby and so on, but equally a child born to parents out of wedlock is 72% more likely for those parents to not be together by his/her 5th birthday - this statistic is obviously skewed by accidental pregnancies, teenage mothers and so on, but even taking those into account it is more likely that a couple will break up when its easier to walk away.

I know I'm going to get a huge backlash here that 'statistics can't explain my relationship', and I'm not trying to say that they can or do, but I'm just trying to give the sociological arguement for why men are less likely to marry after having a baby, and I can't really do that without throwing some statistics into the mix.

Tete_en_l'Air

Morning all, just catching up a bit...

Swinstie73 wrote: »

Aw Cinny, your wedding talk sounds exactly like mines, OH promised me a ring before we went on holiday but we weren't sure whether it was commitment or engagement, pleased to say we are off to Edinburgh (where we met) this weekend where he is going to ask me properly - oh and I have my lovely ring! Hoping to get married next year on our cruise or 2012 - registry then fab honeymoon/party back home! Las Vegas came up for us too!

:T Congratulations Swinstie! Really pleased for you! How strane to know that he's going to propose this weekend, I'd be on adge all the time waiting for him to do it! COme back and let us know how it went!

poddle911 wrote: »

Oh no, now I want to go on holidays again, best go have a play with my debts and remember why I can't go again!!

:rotfl: Sorry, that made me giggle!

Flower08 wrote: »

Im getting very fed up of our spare room at the minute, it is still full of boxes and no furniture, so have been hitting ebay trying to find some furniture to put in there - being inspired by Dinahs bargains!

Me too, I'm watching a heck of a lot of things but don't want to buy anything and jinx anything! Still haven't heard about the house, hopefully today. They rang yesterday to see if we'd be able to start our tenancy from 2nd August which is obviously what the LL will want so there's no break in his income, and we've said yes, so hopefully we'll hear today. We were talking last night and OH now says if we don't get this one then he's happy to look at newer properties to expand our options a bit (at last!), so if we don't get this place I'll not be as depressed as I would have been had he not said that!

Have you still got a swimming pool Dinah? Hope not, and as the others have said, hope it won't cost too much to fix! It was an exceptional amount of rain - I had to change my route home from work three times because the roads were impassable, and one of them is still closed!

Shall I wade into the marriage/kids thing? I personally would like to be married before I have kids but I don't necessarily think that having kids first means that a man feels he can 'get away' without marrying you, I just think once you have kids, marriage is something that you put off and off. Surely having kids with someone is a much bigger commitment than marriage?

ETA- Gosh Dinah, how long did that take to compose?! I personally would like to think I was marrying someone who loved me rather thans someone who wanted to get his end away, am I being naive?! I'm not sure why this has turned so heated anyway, I thought everyone on here wanted to be married before children anyway?!