Letters to the Editor
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You can have the same expense
breaking up a "committed relationship" as a marriage if you own property together or have kids together. My divorce was as easy as pie and cost less than 2 grand because we had neither a house nor kids. At the same time, I know people who have split up after years together, never having been married, but they own houses and other things together and have kids together, and the lawyer's bills were pretty much comparable to what I assume people who have that "piece of paper" have to endure.
I guess I don't see what you get out of not being married if you've decided to be in a "committed relationship". I mean, if you own a house together or something, it's not like you can get out of it more easily. And as others have pointed out, the signing of that legal contract (which is what it is at bottom) confers special protections and privileges on you. I also don't know what the big deal is about the number of divorces. I mean, so what if half of all marriages end in dissolution of the contract rather than the death of a partner? I don't think the notion that NOT getting married confers some special magical staying power on your relationship holds water, any more than the notion which suggests that that piece of paper is any guarantee of splitting up. It would be interesting to know what the split-rate of long term relationships are, but you'd have to define what "long term" means and so forth, so I guess it'd be hard. If you counted all the people who have lived with each other, I expect the break-up rate is much higher than 50%. You know why? It's hard to live with someone else for a long time, period, regardless of marriage or not. Marriage is just a way of describing who you are legally in relation to one another and what happens with your stuff when you live together, if you split up, or if one of you dies.
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Oh and one more thing
Whether you get married or not, I can't express enough how important it is to say please, thank you and that was great, I really appreciate it, for everything your partner does for you that you could do yourself, even if it's something you think they are supposed to do.
Like say it's their chore to vaccum, it's still nice to hear the thanks for vaccuming hon. It lets them know their efforts aren't going unnoticed.
This goes for kids too, thank them when they do their chores, thank them when they go out of their way to be nice to you.
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it can and should be possible for ANY two people to form a domestic partnership and pool their property, decision making and any other resources currently addressed by marriage law
without ANY involvement of sexual questions and connotations. In fact this should be the govts. ONLY role in ANY of this. (It has to be limited to two people so there is never any question of who is speaking for the "non speaking" partner).
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I think there's a difference between a wedding and a marriage
I will never have a wedding. But it's possible I could get married.
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a pet peeve
Please stop using that faulty statistic "One in two marriages ends in divorce." It's inaccurate and sloppy:
http://www.divorcereform.org/nyt05.html
"The figure is based on a simple - and flawed - calculation: the annual
marriage rate per 1,000 people compared with the annual divorce rate. In
2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there
were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the
National Center for Health Statistics.
"But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are
divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and
that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In
fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has
never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that,
with rates now declining, it probably never will.
"The method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is
to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced.
Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers
say. Although sharply rising rates in the 1970's led some to project that
the number would keep increasing, the rate has instead begun to inch
downward.
.....
"At this point, unless there's some kind of turnaround, I wouldn't expect
any cohort to reach 50 percent, since none already has," said Dr. Rose M.
Kreider, a demographer in the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch of the
Census Bureau.
What all experts do agree on is that, after more than a century of rising
divorce rates in the United States, the rates abruptly stopped going up
around 1980."
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Why be offended?
I really just don't understand why people would be offended. Maybe the author really DOES think that her choice is superior to everybody else's. Does that affect your own relationship with your partner? Does it shake your own views on marriage and its role in society? The author hasn't made the same choices that I made, but that's fine. And if she wants to feel superior about it, then that's her prerogative to do so. It doesn't affect me one whit.
And in light of the larger argument on marriage, I think that we should respect everybody's decisions to get married (or not) for whatever reason they choose. I recently got married, not to make a commitment, as my now-husband and I were already completely committed to each other for life, but just to reaffirm and celebrate that commitment. So, we took off to New York for a week, found a Justice of the Peace and a photographer, and in my $100 dress from Ebay, we got married on a beautiful October day on Bow Bridge in Central Park. We did it for our own reasons, our own way, and it was perfect for us. Was it better than anybody else's choice? Of course not -- it was just better for us.
Why be offended if someone feels superior to you, unless you somehow have doubts about your own choices?
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You Gotta Get Married
Several times in my life I have been told, by male friends or avuncular acquaintances, "Whatever you do, don't get married."
Never once, not a single time, has someone said to me, "Man, you gotta get married. It's awesome."
-- savetigerstadium
Okay, I'll step up and say it: "Man, if you want to be there for your kids, you gotta get married."
She can still kick you out of your kids lives, it'll just cost more and take more time. Without that piece of paper you're not just a second class parent, you're a parent-at-her-whim.