I’m 36 and have been with my current girlfriend for almost 5 years now - my longest relationship yet. We live together & everything else couply, just not married. I see marriage as unnecessary pressure that has a tendency to put strain on the relationship. Right now if we’re happy together we stay, if we’re not we split. Simple. Marriage complicates it.
Marriage is a big ceremony where you declare that this person is now your family in front of the people most important to you. From that angle I’m on board.
Where I’m out is that you have to register that with the govt. I HATE that. I’m in a het relationship, and gay marriage is legal here, so I have no idea why that irks me so much, but it’s like, who the fuck are they to tell me my marriage isn’t real because it’s not registered with them?
Here there aren’t even any good tax benefits, so I really don’t see the point.
We’ll probably have a ceremony, but it won’t be a legal marriage.
It’s important for handling estate at death, and making the rules for hard separations clear so someone just doesn’t take the house and leave the other homeless.
Not only that, but if you are ever destroyed by a car or something, being married gives you the ability to see them in the hospital and make life decisions for them. I think the default is family, which might be risky in some relationships.
Side note, it’s a very good idea for you to get your will and medical powers written up while you are young. You might not be conscious if you get injured, and you may or may not want to be on a ventilator and artificial food for 30 years.
Ye, the medical thing concerns me. NZ has a national health record system that let’s you register a primary emergency contact. From everything I’ve read, that, coupled with the fact that we’re in a defacto relationship should be enough to prevent that being an issue. I hope that stays untested
Estate can be managed by having a good will drawn up, and in NZ there is no distinction between a married couple and a defacto relationship (living together for >2 years) when it comes to separations and property.
Not sure where you are, but where I am at in the US there are a ton of legal benefits beyond taxes. Being married means being involved in medical emergencies if she can’t make her own decisions, we both have legal rights involving our child, possessions, can usually take care of things for each other that have exemptions for spouses, etc. It basically makes emergencies and coordinated stuff easier to take care of. The cost of those benefits through marriage is super cheap and easy, with the downside that splitting up is a huge deal.
So it isn’t worth it for everyone, and to be honest most people shouldn’t jump into it as quickly as they do. It also does not require a ceremony beyond the person who makes it official, basically the same steps as getting something notarized.
If you want a ceremony without the legal part that’s cool too!
I’m in NZ. Theoretically we’re listed as each other’s primary emergency contacts, so that shouldn’t be an issue. I just hope we never have to find out.
As for children, property etc. NZ has this idea of a defacto relationship, which you can enter into either by living together for 2 years, or by having a child together. It offers the same protections that marriage does. I think it gets a bit greyer if you just have a child together, but living together for 2 years is as good as a marriage in this regard.
Where it matters the most is if one of us passes away, but that can be negated through a will.
It could matter if we ever decided to move out of the country, but I don’t see us doing that in a hurry. We’ll cross that bridge if we ever get to it
Yeah, that sounds like a much better system.