Without marriage, you don't have a legal framework for breaking up. I know a couple who broke up after 25+ years, a mortgage, and a child together, who had never married. I think the lack of applicable legal precedent made it even messier to negotiate the split. It's been several years now, they're still negotiating details, and the lawyers aren't any cheaper.

If they’re buying a house together and don’t have at least a basic legal contract around that to cover this scenario - yikes.

There is a lot of existing precedent with marriage that can provide some of that, but it’s terrible. It is something though, no question about it.

Kids, child support and custody is handled separately (kinda) anyway, but if they didn’t already have that discussed or worked out, also yikes.

Agreed. You are making the case for why marriage should be a private contract and not a government-sanctioned institution.

Marriage is a private contract. It is just subject to specific rules. Employment is a private contract too as much as employment is a government sanctioned institution.. Really what the institution of marriage gets you is a tax break. But we also had the mortgage deduction in the past too.

> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.

This 100%. Eleven years into our relationship, with now a 7 years old kid. We were raised in non-religious families and we are non-religious, so why get married? Why then bring the "religion of the state" in our lives? We don't need no public servant to officially declare us married. We don't need no state-endorsed paper. We don't need no more administrative burden.

A breakup would, indeed, be bad enough in itself to then add insult to injury by having lawyers on both sides competing to see which of them has the sharpest teeth while they'd be bleeding us dry.

Just screw that entire system.

Just curious, what about medical insurance for the family if only one works? what about the signature thing when you need it most(e.g. in hospital that you need some signature), there are many inconvenience in daily life if you opt to not married but staying as partners with kids? there might be a long list of those things other than the marriage tax penalty.

There are something like 1200 rights that get conferred onto you when you get married. Most you can take care of with signing a power of attorney affidavit. Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.

> Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.

Sure.

Where being married is cheaper for health insurance is when you have kids, at least with employer group plans.

(Premiums for 2-party plans tend to be about, often exactly, double single plans. Family plans, for 3+, tend to be about 2.5 times. If your coparent isn't eligible on the same plan the marginal cost of each of the first two kids is higher.)

if one spouse/partner is taking care of the kids and house(i.e. not working), it's hard to get a plan for single.

some company does provide medical insurance for "partners", but most probably don't, and that's a big headache.

A lot that cover partners cover only registered domestic partnership, which was created as a lesser option to avoid providing same sex marriage, but has generally been retained because it's been adapted to other uses. But it's still a state-defined legal relationship, so if you are against that with marriage...

Also has a tax consequence, unlike 'married' health insurance.

Most people in your situation — if they break up - will still have lawyers involved and spend about the same as a divorce.

It’s the children and fights over custody that cause the greatest drama and attorneys fees.

Yes, that’s correct. But the situation is actually much simpler as it is just about the kids.

You have it backwards.

Custody, possession schedules, who gets to pick the school, who gets to make medical decisions for the kids, who decides if they ought get braces, who decides what extracurricular activities the kids are in and which parent has to take them, which parent can hold the kids passport and what counties can they take them to, geographical restrictions, morality clauses, right of first refusal, and on and on and on...

The vast majority of cases that got to jury trial are custody cases... rarely property issues.

(Indeed, in most states you aren’t even entitled to a jury trial on property issues.)

Well, the simple answer is that marriage is the formal consent that lets you have sex. That's what the "I do" part is all about. (No, it's not just a pretty tradition.)

Consent was very important in the middle ages, and it's making a huge comeback in the 21st century.

(The monetary issues can be settled with standard contracts, but the sex part is what requires a special and distinct form of agreement.)

Holy shit what did I just read? I think it was justification for marital rape, but… what?

wow. just.... wow.

I wish that governments didn’t do so much to try to force people to get married. I can’t bring my foreign partner to my home country unless we’re married, I pay more taxes if we’re not married, healthcare in the US is more complicated if we’re not married. People should be able to pick and choose how they want to live their lives, and marriage is a pretty much one size fits all solution.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me. You have these minimal commitment relationships that are only incrementally extended. What happens when the commitment ends after you've had kids? The mother and kids are screwed since they have no legal recourse to get you to support them ("sucks to be you, we never got married so I don't owe you anything")?

A healthy society is predicated on strong families and minimal commitment relationships sound like a recipe for weak families.

This is a complete bullshit argument. If you hate the person you are married to, the marriage certificate will not prevent you from leaving. If you love the person who you are with but are not married to you don’t need a marriage certificate to stay. Most jurisdictions will absolutely enforce child support regardless of marital status. The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women. There is zero reason to follow that logic today.

> The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women.

So, a legal system - namely marriage - that guarantees a woman a large portion of the property earned by the man during the marriage is “designed to oppress women”?

How is that?

What legal rights is a woman deprived of in a marriage that she would otherwise have being single?

The entire point of marriage is to give the ‘weaker’ member of the relationship rights to the property and earnings of the ‘stronger’ member.

This made a lot more sense imo when rights were less equal and the expectation was for the wife to stay at home. I think as thinks become more equal the more irrelevant an doutdated the current legal expectations are around marriage. Especially because the state will enforce child support regardless of martial status.

At some point the narrative has to change when things are more equal. I think there is a lot of data supporting that they have in many ways changed already. Women are more educated on average and more are completing higher education degrees than men and have been for the last few years.

No offense, but your advice sounds like it's coming from one who doesn't have kids, let alone someone in a long term (10 year+) relationship.

There are far more benefits to marriage than merely child support. There's alimony, spousal support, survivorship, power of attorney, the list goes on.

You can do all of this without being married, of course, but at at that point you might as well be married anyway.

So basically your point is that the government takes your money, and when they return something to you obviously not all that has been taken from you you are grateful.

The gov should be out of your relationship, there is NO valid reason for it to be in there.

What? That's not my point at all.

I have two kids, had a 14 year marriage and many relationships after that :)

Just my opinion of course, but I don't think it's BS. The piece of paper has nothing to do with it. It's the attitude of the two people going into the relationship.

If both people go in prepared for full life commitment through thick and thin you'll get a different outcome on average than two people going in with one foot out the door ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. The latter is a recipe for weak relationships and families - kids deserve to have stable parents who are fully committed to each other, not volatile parents who re-evaluate their commitment every year and break up if either isn't "feeling it".

Marriage is not a chemistry coin toss where the marriage automatically fails due to "irreconcilable differences" if you get bad RNG. That's an excuse. Stable marriages aren't chance, they are hard work. It's like building a house, or software. You have to constantly pour work into it to fix issues, strengthen the foundation, etc, or it will fail under load later. IMO if people looked for partners with the right attitude and committed to each other with the right attitude and put in in the work to back up their commitments, divorce rate would be a tiny fraction of what it is. I argue the divorce rate is so high because the people getting married are doing so with flimsy commitment, unwilling to put in the work required to build a solid foundation. Your solution does not help the commitment problem at all, but exacerbates it by making it even easier for relationships to have flimsy commitment levels ("let's not go all in, let's just commit to each other for one year, and then we'll break up after the honeymoon stage is over").

You can have the attitude without the piece of paper, no? Your point about people getting married without it proves my point: don’t get married. At best all you need is the long vault attitude. At worst it is much easier to end a relationship.

The children are legally entitled to financial support from both parents regardless of custody or marital status. If the mother has custody then she can sue the father for child support in family court even if they were never married. In many states if that mother were to seek public assistance then the government would also initiate a child support case.

> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.

Lawyers (except maybe divorce specialist) love that, at least from a driving business point of view. It’s kind of like avoiding the problems that can arise with the a fallout between business partners by not creating a formal legal arrangement at the outset (except every US jurisdiction backstops that with what amounts to “common law partnership” [0], while marriage coverage is more spotty.) Marriage is, for people in a committed relationship of the type it is designed for, a shortcut to things you would need lots of legal documents drawn up to kinda sorta approximate without it.

Including, messy as divorce can be, the relatively easy, straightforward, and predictable unwinding of the partnership compared with one that isn't a marriage but involves the same kind of long term mutual support and resource sharing that marriage is designed to deal with.

[0] mostly, though, for the benefit of predictability for people who might want to sue you.

Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage : https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-to... and only one of them, texas, is a top 5 state as far as population goes.

So it's definitely a minority.

> Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage

10/51 States (including D.C. as a state) per your source.

Terrible advice. Most western countries would treat what you mentioned as a "common-law relationship", which entitles the partners to the same rights as a marriage. Check you local legislation. In Canada if you live with someone for more than 2 years, it's equivalent to a marriage in almost every case.

In my experience proving common-law relationship is tricky because it’s very undefined, and you may think you meet the requirements but the documents authorities will demand (because they do, they don’t just take your word for it) aren’t something most couples think of setting up until the time/need comes. Much easier to just show a marriage certificate.

There are only seven states in the USA that recognize common law marriage (out of 50).

There may be only seven states that recognize the creation of common law marriages, but all the other states will recognize the existence of a common- law marriage created in one of those seven states.

Honestly, that’s for lawyers to decide. I suspect you’re right but have no idea, and unless you’re a lawyer neither do you.

So… get married because the government has made it inconvenient not to? Aside from the fact that this is factually wrong (see other replies to your comment) this is also an awful reason to marry someone.

How do you get that conclusion from my comment? Lol. If anything, my comment suggested that don't even live together with someone, let alone get married. Because living together is legally the same as getting married in many jurisdictions. I might have been mistaken about the amount of places with such laws, but it's always a good idea to check your local legislation or talk to a family lawyer.

most western countries are not common law

In hospital, or death, there are benefits a spouse gets that a partner doesn't. Visitation, property transfers, etc. It's possible to get contracts a power-of-attorney things but the marriage license has some special legal power (in USA)

If that is your concern then yes get PoA set up. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper than a divorce and infinitely more customizable. The biggest benefit in the US is that you don’t pay estate tax on inheritance. That you can’t contract away. So either get married much later in life or have so much or so little money that it doesn’t matter.

In France civil partnerships are now more popular than marriage. You get most of the benefits and it's much easier to dissolve one.

Breaking up without being married is even more work, this is a shortsighted outlook. A partition sale for jointly owned real estate can be more expensive and time consuming than a divorce. And what happens if your non spouse partner dies is a bigger problem

>Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so?

For same-sex couples, the legal ability to complicate their financial situation was hard won. Recall: Only 10 years ago it took an executive order by the President of the United States to prevent hospitals that receive government funding from denying a same-sex partner visitation.

Legal marriage is a cultural legitimizer that has value to some.

I argue that instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in. There is zero reason for the government to treat a couple as a couple rather than as two individuals. In the past it might have made sense, when the expectation was that the man worked and the woman didn’t and gay people didn’t exist. That is not reality. Why are we pretending like there is some kind of virtue in throwing a $30k party and then falling out of love five years later but staying together because divorce is expensive?

>...Instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in.

No, it would not have been better. We were concerned about whether we'd be able to visit our loved ones in the hospital, or make decisions about their critical care when they were incapacitated, or whether we'd be able to legally pass on property. We did not have equal dignity before the law, those of us whose relationships were considered illegitimate. We weren't really concerned, and still aren't concerned, with creating the most libertarian expression of legal coupling. We are still fighting to be treated like everyone else.

Is this something you've done yourself (either cohabing or getting married is fine), or is this more theoretical / speculative?

Something I am currently doing and have been for the past 5+ years after getting divorced.

Ah okay thanks for replying. That's great to hear you're speaking from experience then. Did you need to convince your spouse of it or was your spouse for it all along? Sometime I think having these conversations is hard. Also do you act as if you're married or is the relationship "looser" in many ways (like living apart)? I'm genuinely curious because I do think the institution of marriage is a little dated in many ways.

It is operationally the same as being married, the relationships are not looser in any sense. Unless a longtime couple tells you about it, you often don't know. People assume you are married because you "look" and act how people expect married people to. Anecdotally, this is most common among people who were previously married, and therefore often have pragmatic and non-idealistic views of marriage, and both professionals; they already did it once and don't see the purpose or benefit. I know several couples that I discovered have been in this state for decades.

I do think this selects for relatively affluent couples who gain limited leverage by combining assets. For people with few assets, the benefits of combined economics are much higher.

Probably the biggest difference is that assets are not commingled by default and asset transactions do not require the signatures of both parties. Finances aren't just practically separate but also literally separate. Joint purchases are explicitly contracted as such. However, many well-off professional married couples also keep their finances approximately independent in practice, so this isn't unique though messier if they split up.

My situation is somewhat more interesting than most, but no I didn’t need to convince my partner(s) of any of this and everyone thinks of it the same way. That was one of the things that attracted me to the person with whom I have been living for the past several years.

For me it was around 8-15% extra take home pay from preferable tax rates.

That’s great! Especially if you put all of that into savings to pay the lawyers if you decide to get divorced since 50% of marriages do end that way.

People like to throw that number out there but mostly I think they’re just innumerate or justifying their own marital failures. Sure, 50% of marriages end in divorce. But that’s just one dumb average, and when you look at the underlying factors that affect divorce rates you’ll find they’re not that surprising.

Getting married very young, getting married due to a kid, getting married after dating for a short period, working in shitty jobs, living in certain states, marrying someone who has ever been unfaithful, marrying someone who has ever experienced a divorce before.

Not trying suggest one should not necessarily avoid anyone who falls into the above. But, while I cannot find any raw datasets to try and estimate this for myself, most of this have independent effects of double digit drops. Assuming a practical amount of multicollinearity, I would wager my best predicted probability of divorce is lower than 10% without considering any personal beliefs on our relationship.

Heck just looking at single variable analyses from various studies I see reason to believe my predicted divorce rate is 30-60% lower than baseline.

Right. Everyone thinks they can beat the odds/that their relationship is stronger than average. Yet most people are average.

Nope. That is the opposite of what I just said. I said ignoring the state of my relationship, the odds are vastly in my favor. Average is not your friend.

First marriages have an average divorce rate that is 20% lower than the average rate. Marriages in my state have an average divorce rate that is half the US average.

You can do much better than the top level average.

Do note that the chance of a first marriage ending in divorce is a good chunk lower than the average marriage.

But if you save up an entire year's salary after a few years, that should be more than enough for some lawyers...

Some people divorce several times, so 50% of marriages ending with divorce may correspond to much smaller part of the population.

40% of first marriages end in divorce on a quick google. 60% of second marriages and 70% of third marriages.

Edit: not clear if a once-wed person marrying a newbie counts as a first or second though. I’d imagine that could be significant.

Depends on the lawyers haha

But more seriously… if you aren’t willing to take a guaranteed decently large pay increase (which scales with future income growth) with the added chance of losing more to legal fees and arbitration later on… you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re probably correct that for a middle class family the pure fiscal return will likely be positive if your marriage lasts just a handful of years.