If you truly love your partner, does a ring and a ceremony really do anything?
I know there are certain legal situations where an official marriage changes who has certain rights, but aren’t those same rights available if you make other legally-official decisions E.G. a will or trusts, etc?
I’m generally curious why people get married beyond the “because I love them” when it costs so much money.
deleted by creator
So, Suze Orman is a fairly well-known investment advisor. Back when marriage equality was new, she totted up that there were over 1100 benefits to getting married. I don’t know what they all were, and I’m sure some of them are obscure, but still …
Idk I hate it though my former bestfriend thinks of me as nothing more then a line item in her check book and I have to pay for her poor decisions.
It doesn’t HAVE to cost so much. The wedding doesn’t cost a lot.
The ceremony and the party are what cost a lot.
But you can go down to city hall, in plain clothes, pay a small fine, fill out some paperwork, bada bing bada boom, married.
But good luck getting 99% of women to give up their dream wedding for a city hall wedding with 1 city appointed witness, and no guests.
Why the pointless sexist stereotyping?
A small fee rather than a small fine, surely?
Plenty of women don’t care about a “dream wedding”
It’s the symbolism
I want to show the world that I love my woman, and I’ll do it in every way that I can
Are you perhaps asking from a US perspective? Or maybe Indian too. I don’t know of any other countries where marriage is expensive really.
We got married in Vegas as a fun thing to do, since we’re Swedish. Legally the difference is extremely small between being “sambo” (co-living) and being married, and we could just as well kept going without getting married.
I didn’t get married for the love or the religious reasons, it’s just way easier when you buy a house together. Now, if I die, all my stuff automatically belongs to my wife.
We got married on a Tuesday morning at the municipal building at 8:30 making it free. The only thing we spent money on was the rings.
What town is this where everybody gets free Tuesday morning weddings?
Not that I need another one, it just seems to be happening a lot in here
This was Meppel but every municipality in the Netherlands has a free marriage half hour. It varies what day it is but it’ll usually be early morning.
Most municipalities in the Netherlands have one morning per week for free marriages. Not always tuesday though.
Do you need to pay to get married ? I don’t think we paid anything for the administrative side in France.
I seem to recall paying a fee. Looking it up online on the website, it would cost $80 today in the county where we got the license.
That actually depends on the country. In Germany, as an example, it doesn’t automatically go to your wife - you still have to declare that in your will.
We have the option. If you get married you can get married in ‘(beperkte) gemeenschap van goederen’, which means ‘what’s mine is yours’. Caveat is that anything you owned before you got married will not be taken into account.
Then there’s ‘huwelijkse voorwaarden’ which means ‘what’s mine is mine’.
Same here, but for us, it is a common misconception that this also is for when one dies. Crazy system if you ask me because totally unintuitive.
In the Netherlands, if you don’t have a will, it all goes to the spouse.
Some rights can be similar, but you’ll always have to declare the other person as your legal whatever. Marriage says to the state that this person is my default for pretty much everything–power of attorney, medical stuff, property ownership, etc. So if I get in an accident and fall unconscious, my wife doesn’t have to fight the hospital staff to see me.
Depending on your country, there are other bonds that have the same legal binding as marriage.
In addition, if we’re honest, there are some “soft” benefits as well. My wife changed her name when we got married, and having the same last name (and our kids having the same last name) avoids a lot of complexity with things like traveling (especially because our daughter is a different skin color than the rest of us). Marriage didn’t explicitly grant us that privilege, but there are a lot of societal norms that come with it that have proven beneficial.
I’m not trying to claim that any of this is how it should be necessarily, but if you’re asking about practical reasons why, those are some of them. If you want the practical benefits without the cost, it’s (relatively) cheap to go to the courthouse or Vegas. Hell, you can get a friend to perform the ceremony for free, all you pay is for the marriage license. But if you’re otherwise not interested in marriage and those benefits don’t appeal (or whatever other reason), just stay dating.
Thanks for sharing! Concerning logistics when travelling I can also share my experience.
I travel on a Dutch passport and my children, while also having Dutch citizenship, travel on German passports because that is where we live and where my wife is from. They also use my wife’s German last name. Therefore, when travelling, my kids and I have different names and nationalities. For some reason nobody ever questioned any of that. I keep a copy of the birth certificate just in case though.
I married my partner, after being with them for over a decade, and a few years of living together full-time. It was mostly for admin reasons (we just bought our home, and being married made things easier if one of us died). If it wasn’t for that I don’t think we would have bothered. We know we love each other, and had decided a few years before that if we’d get married if we ever needed to, so it wasn’t like we ever ‘proposed’. Just a tiny ceremony with two friends as witness, and we went out to a restaurant for lunch afterwards. I don’t think it cost us anything beyond lunch? Maybe a tiny admin fee?
But… I’m so happy we did! It’s weird! I never really cared, and rationally, I still think it hasn’t changed anything. But somehow it feels… really nice? I still regularly think (and tell them) “I’m so glad I married you”. I’m sure there are lots of other things that you can do to symbolise your relationship or commitment. If I got a tattoo inspired by my partner I’d probably have the same feeling of looking at it and thinking of them that I do when I play with my wedding ring (2€ piece of silly junk from aliexpress. And we each bought a bunch of spares so that when we inevitably lose them it’s not a problem). But actually a marriage is one of the simplest and cheaper ways (if you don’t choose or feel pressured into turning it into a stupid moneysink).
Tldr: didn’t care about marriage, got married for tax, and weirdly found it deeply satisfying in a completely unexpected way.
I am not married to my husband for legal reasons. This means when he dies, his family could take everything and leave me with nothing as I’m “just the girlfriend”. Now, a will can help, but I dread what would happen because they still could fight it and it sucks. Being legally married basically shuts that down entirely.
Do you have common law marriage where you live? In some places you are considered “common law” married after living together for a certain amount of time, which can help in estate settlement.
Luckily no, because legally we do not want to be married. It would make most stuff more difficult.
My husband is an ‘adult disabled since childhood’. If he marries anyone but another ‘adult disabled since childhood’ he loses all government benefits. Which he’s currently using to you know. Survive.
But given the way the governments going he might lose it anyway so maybe we’ll get married then before dying. Or something.
Marriage wasn’t important to me, either - I was with my now husband for many years before we tied the knot. I’d never been one for the traditional big wedding, wasn’t sure what difference it would make, etc.
What changed? My Mum died - and in all the times at hospital and then dealing with the funeral etc - I realised just how important being “next of kin” actually is. In so many ways. And while you can cover most of your bases with various legal documents - honestly there’s already a super easy way, that is very well understood all over the world, that achieves this.
And while I wasn’t expecting it to feel any different afterwards, it really did - for both of us. More certainty and just really solid.
Glad you mentioned ‘next of kin.’ This is the important answer. If you’re married, you can do all that important legal stuff- make medical decisions if your partner is unconscious or indisposed, get the death certificate if that happens and give it to all the people who will need it.
Say your partner is in a car accident and you go to the hospital. There’s no marriage, no forms, no nothing to indicate you’re at all related to this person. You’re just some dude or lady, showing up at some dude or lady’s bedside. You can’t make the decisions for this person. Even if, say, they have a horrible narcissistic mother they’re estranged from- that mother, just by being the mother, can get all the authority to make decisions your unconscious partner would hate!
(Drawing from my own life. Fuck my mother.)
You can’t even call the hospital and get information on them. If they aren’t awake to indicate a release of information, the hospital can’t let you see them, can’t tell you anything.
This is just the first example that came to mind. The purpose of marriage is, it’s a legal way to indicate that you’re the most important person in the life of the person you marry. (And yes, depending on where you are and laws in your state or country or whatever, domestic partnership and other stuff can grant that, too.)
Depends a lot on your personal situation, and jurisdiction.
-
Doing a ceremony when you publicly say you love each other is already a valid reason
-
In some jurisdiction, you’d get a form of tax benefit for being married, it often comes with downside like having welfare benefit based on the couple revenue rather than on individual ones (hence the tax benefit). Talk with an accountant/Tax-lawyer knowing your local laws for details
-
It gives a legal status to your shared asset. Sure you could create a real-estate-investment company to buy your house and many people do that but being married, with a proper prenup give you a lot of agency regarding your shared asset
-
It protects the weaker partner, usually the one scarifying their carrer for the couple if things goes wrong
-
No need for a big ceremony, you can get a notary to prepare the pre-nup contract, and do a ceremony at the townhall with 2 witnesses and done.
I follow most of these points but I’m not sure I understand point 4?
“sacrificing their career”
Ohh like if the couple is gonna have kids? Makes sense! Thanks for clearing that up!
-
It doesn’t have to cost a lot to officiate a marriage if you have 2 witnesses and use the registry office.
The answer will likely depend on the place in the world and even on the cultural background of individuals getting married. I’ll just share my experience.
We got married out of convenience. While it’s technically possible to arrange the bulk of the legal stuff with various contracts, it is just easier to use the “default contract” that already covers the most common use case. Some legal arrangements, for example cuts to inheritance tax or the right to remain silent when asked about your spouse in legal proceedings, are only available for “real” marriages.
Once we decided to have children we looked into the various arrangements needed to make that work and quickly found out that marriage is the easiest way to sort everything out. In our day to day life nothing really changed. In legal terms quite a lot is now different.
By the way, as others have mentioned, getting married isn’t expensive. All we paid was the administrative fee which was something like 50 Euros.
The point is the legal benefits and publicly declaring your love and commitment, if you care about that.
You can spend as little as you want, if you only care about the legal status. But since you are probably asking about the usual big wedding - it’s really just throwing a party to celebrate the act. It’s not mandatory. Invite people you want to party with and celebrate life in a way you want.
What can suck about it is the peer pressure from parents and other people to do it the way they want, to do it “properly”.
