There is something about marriage – particularly those that last around 7 years or more and those where there are children that makes people behave horribly. Any solicitor will tell you that!

I prefer to deal with non-marriage separations because I know if I pick up a file where the parties were married, I can pretty much guarantee that most of my time will be spent reading their arguments that last on average 3 years!
Most other splits take around 12 – 18 months to resolve even with property and children involved.

Don’t get me started on the morons who fought for 8 years over the pet hamsters, horses and dogs! 8 years of public funds wasted imo. That was one hell of a file to deal with.

The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony

I guess I am a romantic really – I hate the idea of pre-nuptial agreements too. I am not giddy enough to not realise that relationships do break up and can get horribly sticky and painful particularly when trying to seperate assets and split all the sundries that go with a relationship, but I suppose never having been through a divorce, and hoping I never do I don’t give much headspace to the practicalities of one and whether society should put procedures in place to make disolutions of relationships more straightforward.

They would just have no legal force at all (same as now really). The legal contract would be something different and separate.

Ady and I were together, with a shared mortgage for over six years before we got married. We had a variety of reasons for doing so but the key thing was that every single word we said in our vows was from the heart – said with meaning and abided by ever since. We both intend to forsake all others, to remain together in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer (particularly pertinant currently! ) til death do us part. I’m not saying I do so because I am marrried, I am saying I married because that’s what I intend to do. It was wonderful to have those thoughts witnessed by others at our wedding, to have family and friends celebrate the fact we loved each other deeply enough to make those vows afterwards and I personally frequently recall the words of the man who married us (he told us to never let our wedding rings only mean we were married, to every time we look at them to remember how much we loved each other on our wedding day, to always be best friends) and take great comfort, pleasure and enjoyment from being married. I wanted to take Ady’s name, I wanted our future children to have the same name as the two of us – I happily moved from being part of my parents family to being the beginning of my own but more than anything else saying those words to Ady and having him say them back will always be one of the most important things I ever did.

72 comments. Is this an Otherwise record?

If everyone who got married stayed married, then I don’t think there would be much of an issue to discuss as any problems would be resolved, for good or ill between the parties. So in the end, I suppose my problem is not with marrriage at all, it is with divorce. But that is what happens, a lot of the time.

If you want some suggestions. First, I think the State and the Church elements need to be decoupled. We have an established Church and the current legal status of marriage is tied in with the current Anglican view of marriage. I think that in a multicultural, multi-faith society that is inappropriate.

I think that legal marriage should be nothing more than a contract between the two parties, and it seems to me that there is no reason why there could not be more than one legal form of marriage available for people to choose from. If people then wanted to make religious commitments as well, then that would be up to them, but they would have no legal effect. I can see no particular reason why the legal contract forms need require that parties be of different gender, nor any particular reason why there could not be more than two, it would after all be just a matter of law, not of morals.

The State would have plenty of scope to intervene by Statute, for example, by restricting tax breaks to contracts which complied with specific statutory guidelines. The State might well have things to say about age limits for contracting parties, rules on consanguinity and so on. But I see no reason why individuals should not be permitted to draw up contracts which suited them and their circumstances rather than having the current one size fits all approach.

At the same time, as with any other contract, you could write in terms specifying how the parties would behave in the event the contract be terminated. Notice periods, division of assets and so forth. Maybe you could include annual holidays and bonuses.

The tough bit, of course, is how you deal with children, what rights they have and what responsibilities adults who are their biological or legal parents have toward them.

Re the reamrks about ‘critical comments and caring’. If the critical coments I read about marriage were offering constructive ways of chnaging it then it would be fine (though not sure what thosw would be, as opposed to just not having the status of marriage). But that isn’t what I see. Generally criticisms are more along Jax’s line in her post – not just criticisng marriage, but criticizing those of use who choose to get married – and usualy offending me as well, since there is an assumption that we don’t me the vows we take, when I’ve never meant anything more storngly in my life. So what I really menat was why should people who don’t believe in marriage care about what I do, anymore than I should care about what someonen who decides to cohabit does – with the potential

We didn’t have to get married, we’d been together 9 years when we did, we could have just had a ‘DIY’ ceremony, but there seems to be more to it than that. There is something about standing up and signing up to the social institution of marriage as well that is important to some of us. The same desire is one of the reasons underlying the creation of Civil Partnerships surely?

Fran had to be re-registered after we were married (it took us 5 years and 3 more children to get round to it!) during which time Max had no parental responsibility for her and couldn’t sign her operation consent forms. In fact, had i died, my parents could probably have fought him for custody of her if they had wanted to. Once there were other children who were legally bound to him it would have been less likely they’d have won, but while we just had her, they’d have had a case i believe.

In practice, we are mostly talking about mothers being awarded custody. In practice, if they choose to deny the (married or unmarried) fathers rights there is very little to prevent them succeeding.

Don’t unmarried fathers have less rights (wrongly imo) than married fathers unless there is a ‘Parental Responsibility’ agreement? If partners didn’t have one isn’t there the risk that those lack of rights make things worse and more painful?

I dunno, I’ve not got experience of either with house-ownership and children involved, but given those two I would imagine both situations could be fairly complicated. And I don’t think not getting married because the divorce might be messy is really the logical option I guess a divorce is as nasty as you both want it to be, I don’t remember my parents’ divorce as being a really big deal; all the major stress had been gone through months earlier when they separated.

Merry – talking of terrible times – obviously we didn’t have children then, but when C and I were really going through it just after we were married, I completely believe that if we weren’t married we would have split up. Things were just too difficult to think of anyone else, and I was very relieved that only days earlier C had promised to be there: it gave me a safety net, room to relax. I’m sure (and was sure then) that if we hadn’t been married, I would have asked him to go.

I’d say the same about cohabitation too, btw. At the end of the day, married or partnered, relationships are about honesty, togetherness, mutual trust and responsibility, being able to talk and to listen, having fun, being happy, love, committment, trying to make it work beyond the point where it would be ‘easy’ to just walk away, honouring the other person so that what they want is valued, even if it isn’t so important to the other person and, if you choose to have children together, being committed to them long term and supporting each other as parents until those children are grown and whole, undamaged by whatever your relationship is or has been.

Personally taking the time out in my life to put those things into words, stood looking into one anothers eyes and meaning every word of it, with people who loved me witnessing that committment to one another, having put love and thought into making that day worth it was worth every penny and every ounce of us that it took. And it has never meant so much as it has recently, when we made terrible decisions about our future, ones that neither of us really wanted to have to make, but trusted one another that the love we had committed to was going to be enough. Had i not believed completely that Max was prepared to be with me in sickness and in health, had i not trusted those words and believed in his total determination to be here for us and for me, providing for us, caring for us and being part of whatever life brought for us, i couldn’t have got through it.

But that is us and i think that i have the same feelings about the partnership of marriage that many of my friends do, judging from the comments here – and so long as you and Jax have the same in your relationship then none of us have anything to apologise for or fret about. It isn’t the institution of marriage that damages lives, it’s each other.

We got married because we wanted that whole public declaration bit. And we did it in my old college chapel because it’s a nice place – probably just as shallow a reason in many people’s eyes as wanting a white dress and a party. I’m no apologist for marriage, but I don’t think that insulting your readers is going to bring them round to your point of view

And Merry, lol, I’m Mrs on our Council Tax statements, despite never having referred to myself as Mrs in my life!