Spouse-shopping isn’t pleasant behavior, and I don’t imagine many people would like it if their partners said, when they moved in together, “This will be a good test to see if we should get married.”

Uh, we said it.  In fact, we discussed it beforehand and agreed that we were essentially entering a trial marriage and, if things worked out, we would get married.  And we did.  That’s what most of my friends who cohabited did, too.  I’m not sure why you think it’s bizarre for adults to discuss next steps in their relationship when needed.

The problem comes in when one partner thinks they’re starting a trial marriage and the other thinks they’re getting a roommate-with-benefits.  This is why adults should, you know, discuss expectations before signing legal agreements like leases.

It’s Quitcher Humpin And Get To Marryin Week: http://www.livescience.com/culture/090714-cohabit-couples.html

Hell, we “slipped into” marriage after ten years of cohabitation—it was never a goal, but my job offered health care benefits to spouses (but not heterosexual domestic partners), he was in a PhD program that offered almost nothing, and it made sense to do it. That was over ten years ago, so it’s been twenty years total now. But those steps were never planned, and life after visiting the justice of the peace has not been any different than life before it—nor did we expect it to be.

I would say that more than one societal expectation is slipping back to a pre-feminist era: People once again think it’s unusual that my wife and I have different last names.

I’ve always enjoyed telling people that my parents consider living together to be mandatory before getting married because it’s so scandalous in my parts. (Not that cohabiting necessitates getting married, but for sure the other way around.) My sister-in-law’s father *still* doesn’t know she lived with my brother-in-law before they got married and that was a million years ago. Her mom and everybody else knew, but they had to pretend (aka lie) for the dad. He probably had religious objections, but many of my friends’ parents discourage it because it’s in bad taste, whatever that means. And then that’s when I explain to them that being tacky is required in my family and they sputter and I laugh.

One of the LiveScience commenters had a good point:  why are they asking married couples these questions but not divorced couples?  Particularly since the study is supposed to show that living together before marriage means a higher risk of divorce.  It doesn’t seem to be a longitudinal study where they followed couples through a decade or so.

Not to mention our old friend self-reporting is raising its ugly head here.  Because people who, for example, feel they have to stay together for moral or religious reasons are totally going to tell you that they regret getting married and would leave in a heartbeat if they could.  People who are married never, ever misremember or reinterpret the way the ended up together so that one person remembers moving in spontaneously and the other remembers having long conversations about it.

There were 2 very simple factors that led my now-wife and I to live together “in sin” for a whole year before the wedding: 1) I couldn’t afford my own place and 2) we decided we didn’t want to be apart. Why should she or I go home at the end of the night when a mutual commute to the same bedroom was way shorter and saved us money (for, you know, the wedding)?

Or, as I explained it to my mother, who was disappointed to hear we had moved in together, “Either we live together or I live on the street, because I’m too poor to have high morals.”

Oh, and another commenter had the same observation I’ve had:

Best harbinger of divorce=really expensive wedding!

The notion of a trial marriage of course never entered into the heads of either of us when we met back in ‘91—gays weren’t allowed to marry; still aren’t, around here.  I don’t ever remember making any conscious decision about it—we just spent more and more time together until we reached the point at which it was apparent, in hindsight, that we had been living together for quite some time.

Maybe the key point was when he rearranged my furniture . . .

Here we are, 18 years later, with a hoard of grandchildren clustered around our knees.

I think sliding into something is as good a reason as any.  Like many good life decisions, things like living together may just “feel right” after a while.

Also, I’d be surprised if lots of married people didn’t also say they slid into the decision of getting married.  In fact, a friend of ours said that he and his partner were walking by a jewelry store one day and were like, “hey let’s go in,” and then somehow bought wedding rings and just decided right there to get married. No talking, just the lure of the store. Come to think of it, jewelry is a way sketchier reason to get hitched than “wanting to spend more time together.” The latter just makes so much sense: it’s annoying to have two toothbrushes, and to have to plan on spending the entire night hanging out with a SO just because the buses back to your house are so infrequent.

Not living with Grolby had allowed my mom, recovering Catholic that she is, to stick her fingers in her ears, say “lalalalala, I can’t hear you,” and pretend I don’t have sex.  I’m sure it works that way for other folks as well.  Now that we live together, it’s an inescapable reality. 

I did notice that after we started living together, we were allowed to sleep on the same floor of the house when visiting her.  It’s almost like in made us real live adults or something. 

And we did actually sit down and have a serious talk about moving in together. Cause it was emphatically not in the original plan.  So when it happened, we hashed things out very thoroughly.  But, it is definitely not a prelude to marriage, as neither of us think highly of the institution.  It was something of a mix of economic necessity/no roommate situation, so count us as normal on that.

[Why] buy the cow if they can get the milk for free.

“Hey, did you just call my girlfriend a cow?”
“No dude, I think he called her a slut!”

I will confess here, I do have one major, major regret about getting married.

When G. wanted to play “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC as our first dance song at the reception, I said no, and I’ve regretted it ever since.

(I can’t even remember what we did use, and it was only 3 years ago.  It was either Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole.)

In my experience there are at least three kinds of cohabitation without benefit of state/clergy: because it’s easier/cheaper/whatever, because you’re thinking about getting married and want the trial run, because you’re partnered and don’t really care to ask anyone’s permission. Any given relationship may be in one or more of those categories over the course of time.

For us, fer example, now-spouse moved to NYC, where it is darned difficult to find an apartment, and even moreso if you’re not already living there. So I offered half of mine until she got settled and had a sense of where to go next. After a few months she said, “I really like living together. If you want, I’ll find an apartment, but I’d really rather not.” At some point after that we went from living together to considering ourselves more or less permanently partnered. Some point after that (including a move and house purchase) we thought about offspring and brought in the sozzled lame-duck JP. At no point did we really think about it as “trial marriage”, much less “living in sin”.

Although I don’t think it’s as common now, one of the big causes of divorce for people who cohabited before getting marriage used to be the changes—both external and internal—in relationship expectations and behavior after marriage. A couple of female friends who married in the mid-80s reported disastrous pressures to reproduce, to become “proper” wives blah blah blah, not only from family and friends but even from themselves and their partners. A couple thousand years of tradition and marketing die hard.

Although I don’t think it’s as common now, one of the big causes of divorce for people who cohabited before getting marriage used to be the changes—both external and internal—in relationship expectations and behavior after marriage.

There’s less of it but, yes, I’ve seen people’s relationships implode because one of them decides that there’s a proper way to be a Wife or a Husband and, by God, they’re going to do it that way.  Or, worse, decides it’s their spouse who’s not filling the role properly.

My in-laws divorced over 20 years ago and neither of them re-married.  One of the big reasons for getting divorced was that my father-in-law felt that the role of “Husband” was not one he wanted to be in, ever again.  Now, ironically, they’ve managed to overcome the bitterness and be very good platonic friends—they’ve been driving each other to surgeries and procedures.  (Ironic because G. and his siblings still have very unpleasant memories of the nasty divorce that got dragged out over almost 10 years, so it may be Alanis-ironic and not really ironic.)

I have always thought they should play funeral music at weddings.  A dirge for any chance at worldly happiness.

I just don’t get this sentiment.

People who think like the above . . . just shouldn’t get married. And shouldn’t stay married - that attitude must be a drain on the relationship, and clearly is unfair to the other person in the marriage who deserves to be happy and wanted and appreciated.

Almost 17 years along, I couldn’t be happier with my girlfriend/CU spouse/DP partner/wife. It just isn’t that much of a drag on either one of us to be legally entangled (and moreso than any opposite couple can ever be). We support each other emotionally, professionally, financially - and we enjoy doing so. I gave up nothing that I miss (or can even remember) to spend my life with her.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we each have teh ghey, or something.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we each have teh ghey, or something.

For some reason, that made me think of one of my favorite lines from “Six Feet Under,” when David and Keith are in couples therapy:

“I thought by being gay I could avoid marrying my mother.  I guess not.”

I have to agree with Mnemosyne, trial living seems to be pretty common.  Talking about plans of the future are things adults should do.

Heck, I lived with my SO before we signed a paper, it wasn’t planned, but she insisted upon dating me after I moved in with her to be her roomie.  It’s now eleven years later… The piece of paper does give a few benefits, and I think for the legal reasons alone it’s important.  Beyond that, not much, and probably should come after people realize they can live together and have planned this.

And the piece of paper has held an important part of holding use together.  “I signed a piece of paper that says I will give a damn about you!” to remind each other that in our darkest hour, we did promise to be there for each other, no matter how mad we got.  I dunno if that’s healthy, but it does remind that we have happier times, too ^-^

Teac, I agree. I understand there is social pressure to get married, but on the other hand, if it’s that bad, don’t get married,ok?

No kidding, right?

I always wonder if some of the supposed correlation between cohabitation and higher rates of divorce, especially when it was considered risque, was that people who did live together didn’t have the same sort of religious pressure on them not to “live in sin”, and thus didn’t have that same pressure on them to remain married when things got miserable.  In contrast to their married peers, who had more weight of conventionality pressuring them to stay in bad marriages.

Mr. A. and I didn’t really talk much about moving in.  My roommate situation changed abruptly after college, and I would have been stuck with a flake I didn’t like and another friend I did like, but who was very unstable financially.  So, since I couldn’t afford a place of my own, I asked (well, sort of told) Mr. A. that I was moving in, and he was kind enough to agree.

The only down side of living together is that you may not get to have the really wonderful party my parents had to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

No, people can have a party to celebrate being together for 50 years, you just can’t call it a 50th wedding anniversary party.

If any of my friends successfully cohabited for 50 years, I can’t imagine not wanting to thrown them an awesome party.

I moved in with my husband because I wanted a house with a yard and couldn’t afford it by myself and didn’t want a roommate I wasn’t sleeping with.

AvOgadro has the right idea.  The best kind of roommate is the one you’re sleeping with because hopefully when you start to fight over crap like whose dish is in the sink one of you will say “fuck it let’s have sex.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see much of a problem with the article. The ‘trial marriage’ idea is one that I’ve certainly heard fairly often, and probably had mental guestimates that about 50% of cohabitants were explicitly testing out marriage. So I at least learned something =).

For the studies showing cohabitation leads to higher divorce rates, follow-up studies found that being engaged prior to getting married eliminated the effect (I forget if it reversed the effect). The hypothesis was that the higher divorce rate came from people who never really wanted to get married, but after living together for a while, tied the knot anyway (probably from pressure from outside the relationship or one partner). Whether this hypothesis was tested is not something I recall.

Which all suggests that a frank discussion of what the moving-in signifies is probably a good idea, and that you shouldn’t get married if you don’t want to.

I’m sympathetic with the myth that people live together as trial marriage.  I hear a lot of people say, “I wouldn’t ever marry someone without having lived with them first.”  So it makes some sense to assume people living together do it deliberately as a trial for marriage.

But, on the other hand, I think in reality most people just fall into living together.  Way before you’re ready to talk about being married, you find you’re paying rent on an apartment that’s sitting empty all the time.  Or, like other people have described, you find yourself in some other situation where you have to decide whether to pay rent on a separate place when you know you’re going to be sleeping together every night anyway.

Amy puts it this way about our relationship and I concur completely. She says that by not being married, she’s able to wake up every morning, look at me beside her, and say “I choose you.” There’s no legal binding document that takes that choice away from us and makes it a hassle should we decide one day that we’re no longer right for each other. We’re working on 9 years now, which is longer than our first marriages combined, so it’s working for us.

And while I appreciate that Mnem and others may have talked it out, et cetera, before moving in and later getting married, my experience with my co-habitating friends (and they are numerous) is more like my own and the one Amanda describes. The whole idea of “trying out marriage” gives me the heebie-jeebies for some reason I can’t explain.

We have other reasons for not getting married—at our current income and individual student loan indebtedness levels, we’d actually take a pretty serious hit financially if we married, and what’s more, we really don’t want to take part in a ceremony that is denied to a large proportion of our friends and co-workers. We’re in Florida, which has banned same-sex marriage 4 different times just in case it didn’t take. We’ve talked about getting married if there was some pressing outside reason to do so—one of us lost our job and we needed the insurance or we joined the Peace Corps and wanted to make sure we wound up in the same country, et cetera—but outside that, I doubt it happens.

What I don’t get now is why marriage is a goal for anyone outside of those rights and privileges conferred by the state and some employers. I mean, when I went through it, I was a fundie Christian who believed sex before marriage was a sin, and given that I had/have a pretty potent sex drive, marriage was an imperative, but pretty much anyone will tell you that that’s a recipe for disaster. Outside that, though, I really don’t understand why marriage is any better than cohabitation, and why seemingly so many people hold it in higher regard.

[Why] buy the cow if they can get the milk for free.

“Hey, did you just call my girlfriend a cow?”
“No dude, I think he called her a slut!”

Of course, as Amanda pointed out, the part that the people who ask this question just can’t get their minds around is: what if the cow doesn’t want to be bought, and really, really likes being milked?

The last time I heard a (Catholic) relative complain about people “living in sin,” I asked if he waswilling to refuse to shop in stores which did not pay their workers enough to be able to afford their own apartments.  To his credit, he really did think about it. Retail workers, secretaries, etc. used to be able to afford their own place.  Maybe not at first, but usually after sharing for a lease or two.

One of my best professors told us that underneath every moral panic is a technology shift.  His immediate point was that the sexual revolution was caused by the car, not the pill, and probably would have happened in the 30s not the 60s if the Depression, WWII, and their aftermath, the 50s hadn’t happened.

If a marriage of two particular people was destined by their particular chemistry to be a long or, assuming they have the gumption to change a losing game, a short miserable situation then cohabiting MIGHT give them a clue.  But some of us are quite resistant to absorbing clues.  The most I think one can claim is that cohabiting has prevented more bad marriages than good.

There are good marriages…I think.  I just happen to hang out with people who make it look like its working.  Most of them made it legal fairly early on in their history together.

The ones who end their marriages in some awful explosion are /usually/ less surprising…people so straight laced they would never live in sin or would carry a useless load of guilt if they got into each others pants…but then had a very up-tight, trying-to-be-perfect hell of a relationship while church and expectations kept a lid on seething animosities.  But not all Catholics are doomed to that fate;)

It is a tall order to trust discovery and resolution to the accident of a trial relation ship: when a couple are trying to [SHOULD BE trying to] gage prospects of bearable satisfaction with myriad personality foibles that have to mesh, how can they not be distracted by all the other factors:

1.  please mom, dad, holy father etc
2.  get their fill of sex from just one person
3.  make ends meet with tax breaks and two spending agendas
4.  salve basic human loneliness or the fear of same
5.  avoid unknown potentials for a love live at the cost of a compromised but certain one
6.  keep up the happiness myth long enough to finish a procreation cycle
7.  ...how many other burdens on this institution have I forgotten?...

When “just” living together works OK, English and American legal tradition is content to label it “common law marriage” and work it into the laws, albeit at some disadvantage to the kind of marriage that needs a pair of lawyers to be dissolved.  Why can’t other institutions beside the law give such arrangements a better status?  Because they have a vested interest in only one form of relationship.  I cannot say with any authority how these more casual domestic arrangements are viewed in other cultures.  I hear at least the French cut some slack for people who augment marriage with a mistress…do they view with equal acceptance the extramarital activities of both men and women (or is it only their national politicians who get a free pass from scandal;?)

Me and my husband really bucked the trend - officially, we didn’t live together until about 5 months AFTER we got married.  I was in my own flat, and he was sharing a house with two friends (of us both).  We were already splitting time roughly half between both places, he didn’t want to bail on his friends before the lease was up, their house was a really fun place to be, and the fact of us being married didn’t seem like it had to be a the “magic moment” when we both had to give up what we’d so far been reall enjoying.  A lot of people found this odd.

Slightly off topic - but I’ve noticed a lot of you Americans saying that you got married for the health benefits provided by your spouse’s employer.  This doesn’t happen in the UK, seeing as we’ve got the NHS.  Do you think it’ll affect the getting-married figures when you lot finally get universal coverage?

Katherine, re health benefits:
yes its a huge deal here in the US.  And its becomes as heavy as any manacle, ball and chain when one contemplates the end of a marriage.  It definitely is one item I should not have left off my list of distractions for those who think they cohabit as a beta-testing phase prior to going public with a marriage.

Wow, Mnem.  I don’t see where I said I oppose communication or discussing your relationship. 

I just said that most people date for pleasure, and living together and marriage are outgrowths of their love for each other. And that I have no problem with that, because going the other way about it—-deciding to marry and then taking applicants—-is creepy.  No one likes to feel that a date is a job interview, and I’m sure that they don’t like feeling like moving in together is a test to see if you’re getting promoted instead of a fun new adventure with your lover. 

If being an adult, as I’ve said before, means turning fun things like love into jobs and putting institutions before people, then I want nothing to do with it.

Who cares whether people who live together before marriage get divorced more often or less often.  People have a right to structure their lives as they see fit.

We do know one thing that is heavily correlated with divorce: getting married quite young. 

This whole thing is nothing but a stupid trap, anyway: the presumption that Marrige is a Good Thing Always (unless you are gay) has never been fully validated, either.  Besides, if people who would have lived together got married instead, I bet there would be no difference in the ultimate outcome of the relationship anyway.  Getting married doesn’t save a relationship any more than having a child can save a marriage that isn’t working to start with.

Do you think it’ll affect the getting-married figures when you lot finally get universal coverage?

A small amount, but only on the margins.  Feminists and progressives claim to marry for health care, because they’re attuned to how unromantic marriage kind of is when you compare it to bohemian and naughty pleasures like cohabitation. 

But most Americans marry because they think that’s just what you do when you’re in love.

“Uh, we said it.  In fact, we discussed it beforehand and agreed that we were essentially entering a trial marriage and, if things worked out, we would get married.  And we did.  That’s what most of my friends who cohabited did, too.  I’m not sure why you think it’s bizarre for adults to discuss next steps in their relationship when needed.”

In most places, it seems like there’s been a really rapid evolution in the way cohabiting as a couple is viewed.  When I was kicking around college, it was something you really only did once you were pretty serious about someone and could see yourself either getting engaged or at least still being with them in five years.  I don’t know anyone amongst my social circle who moved in together without being either engaged or de-facto engaged.  There was a fair amount of social hand-wringing about it that had the straight-faced expectation of being taken seriously, “cohabitation” was a vaguely obscure technical term for “living in sin,” and it was Serious Business.  Now, it’s pretty much just what you do after a while in all but a fairly casual or fraught relationship.  It’s like the cohabiters hit critical mass, the world didn’t end, and everybody had to either relax about it or double down.  Personally, I blame abstinence-only sex-ed.

Or to make it more clear, what I’m saying:

A relative was recently telling me about how she was counseling a friend who has a long history of relationship disasters.  She finally asked her friend, “So why do you date exactly?” 

And her friend said, “I’m looking for my next husband.”

And my relative said, “Well, that’s your problem right there.  You should be dating because it’s fun and to get to know people.  And if something develops out of that, good!  But it can’t be why you date.”

She’s right, of course.  People who want to get married and are just looking for someone to fill the tux/dress give off a stench of desperation that attracts the worst element.  That’s why I cringe when I see conservative dating manuals and articles chastising women to approach dating as a way to get a commitment ASAP.  All these scare stories about hook-ups, books like “The Rules”, some of your more disturbing segments on dating on “The Today Show”—-all geared to this idea that you have a tux in your closet, and you’re looking for guys who fit into it and will consent to wear it.  It makes you desperate.  There’s a reason that they had Liz Lemon buy a wedding dress without having a fiance on “30 Rock”, to establish a whiff of desperation around her character that runs good men off.

Wanting to let things develop at their own pace and enjoying the moment does not, as suggested, mean you don’t communicate or talk about the future.  You just treat a relationship like it’s enjoyable on its own merits and not a trial to go through to get a pony.

Do you think it’ll affect the getting-married figures when you lot finally get universal coverage?

A small amount, but only on the margins.  Feminists and progressives claim to marry for health care, because they’re attuned to how unromantic marriage kind of is when you compare it to bohemian and naughty pleasures like cohabitation. 

But most Americans marry because they think that’s just what you do when you’re in love.

IMO it will effect the figures, but not much, in part because health coverage is only one benefit one gets when one marries - there are slews of tax breaks, automatice rights, etc.

Most people I know who get married don’t do it because that’s what you do when you’re in love.  They do it because they want to have those benefits that come from being legally considered a family, much like why you adopt a child you want to add to the family rather than just take them in (or even foster them).

Seriously, the idea you promote that those of us who marry are just dupes or sellouts is really offensive.  Marriage is a legal institution that forms a familial bond between people unrelated by blood.  Legally, that is all it is.  Everything else is subjective.  That’s why I think it should be available to anyone who can legally sign a personal contract.

I don’t think you’re dupes or sell-outs.  I just like pointing out that the hegemonic institution is failing people.  That it comes with all these benefits shows you’re not dupes.  Being married is a privilege, so of course people want it. 

But I suspect your immediate circle of friends is good at intellectualizing stuff that most people don’t intellectualize.  Most people get married because:

1) It’s what you do.
2) It’s exciting and romantic to be asked.
3) It gives you the benefit of being treated like a real adult, instead of being called, as I was in this very thread, a child.
4) It seems like it’s a guard against fear of rejection.
5) It’s what you do.
6) Having a giant party where everyone treats you like you won the Nobel Prize because you did something 90% of Americans do is fucking awesome.
7) People think if you don’t get married after dating for awhile, then your significant other plans to leave you. And they may, because they believe #1 and #5.

I get that thinking, intelligent people are embarrassed to admit that these are the primary reasons people get married, and so they lean on all these benefits.  And it’s true—-there are a LOT of unearned privileges for being married that shouldn’t be attached to marriage in an egalitarian society. 

But do I think that’s why people get married?  No.  Do you honestly, in your heart, believe if health insurance, hospital visits, etc. were all unattached from marriage and made rights, not privileges, we would see and end to marriage?  If the main reason people get married is federal benefits, then we should see the practice disappear completely in cultures with a more robust social safety net.  It’s receding, of course, but far from gone.

If a couple co-habit for more than two years, I say they’re married, regardless of how the state classifies them.

And don’t make the mistake of assuming that because I’m hostile to marriage now that I always was, and therefore I’m incapable of understanding so I can be fed a bunch of nonsense I have to accept.  When I was younger, I thought—-like most people—-that I would get married.  I was even engaged for awhile.  And rest assured, no one sees your engagement ring and says, “Oh boy! You get federal marriage benefits!”  Nor have I ever actually heard anything close to that sentiment at a wedding or discussion of one.

Thanks, wapsie, I’m glad you’ve decided to usurp my right to define my own life for myself.

“Do you think it’ll affect the getting-married figures when you lot finally get universal coverage?”

Probably not.  There’ll probably be a blip, like you see the first year or two when a state legalizes gay marriage, with couples who’ve been staying legally married because otherwise one of them will be SOL on the healthcare front finally being able to divorce, and couples who might have gotten married before they really wanted to being able to delay it.  They’ll likely still get married if they stay together (kids, house, inheritance rights, etc.), but a sudden lag in some demographics will probably be enough to screw with statistics a year or so.

Count me as one of the people who lived with their mate for awhile as a “Trial Marriage”. When I was a teenager my mom, suffering through the messy collapse of her second marriage, told my sister and I that we should live with a person before we marry them so we didn’t get any surprises. She also counseled against rushing into marriage and making a lifetime commitment just because we were eager for sex, essentially telling us that it was stupid to wait until marriage to have sex. I always thought that was wonderfully honest advice (and I love to tell Christianists that story because it freaks them out).

So, when I embarked on a long term relationship for myself I moved into my beloved’s horrible little apartment (I had just graduated college so I didn’t have a place of my own). After a year and a month of living together we made it official and eloped. Our wedding cost us just under $100, including the gas to the courthouse. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. All that happened 21 years ago this month.

Obviously marriage isn’t for everyone. In fact I would say it isn’t for most people. I like it quite a bit, but that is as far as I will go in recommending it.

One last thing; if you must get married, ELOPE! It is actually very romantic (if you like your mate anyway), inexpensive, and your relatives get over the fact that they weren’t invited to your wedding surprisingly quickly.

And that I have no problem with that, because going the other way about it—-deciding to marry and then taking applicants—-is creepy.

And yet you don’t seem to realize that there’s a middle ground—dating, meeting someone, deciding that this is someone you might want to marry, and discussing that you’d like to marry someday before moving in.  It’s either sliding into relationships with no forethought or going on a grim hunt for a spouse with a list of requirements in hand.

I wasn’t dating for the purpose of Finding A Husband, but I knew I would probably want to get married eventually so I should probably steer away from the guys who went on anti-marriage rants.  But, according to you, the fact that I was even open to getting married means I was on a creepy husband-hunt and interviewing candidates for the job instead of, you know, wanting to meet someone nice for a long-term relationship.

And don’t make the mistake of assuming that because I’m hostile to marriage now that I always was, and therefore I’m incapable of understanding so I can be fed a bunch of nonsense I have to accept.

Actually, from what you’ve written before, I’ve always assumed you’re hostile to marriage because you were engaged in Texas and all of the social expectations that went along with that.  Myself, my dad told me from childhood that I didn’t ever have to get married and that I needed to make sure I could take care of myself without a husband.  When I called my parents to tell them we were engaged, my mother was disappointed—she was hoping I was pregnant instead.  So, for me, marriage isn’t fraught with all kinds of social expectations.  Which is good because, by all social measures, I’m a really crappy wife:  I don’t clean, I rarely cook, I have a job and I kept my own name.

It’s probably also an age thing—I got married at 37, when it was supposed to be more likely that I would be killed by a terrorist than get married.  There’s a huge difference between getting married in your early (or even your mid-) 20s and getting married in your late 30s.  G. and I had each been living on our own without even a roommate for almost 10 years before we met so sliding into living together by accident wasn’t going to happen.

Sin and debauchery, baby! It’s what I live for. I’ll have a sampler platter of Seven Deadly Sins with a tall glass of Vice!

I’ve been with my partner nine years. We definitely did this on purpose. His belongings did not just mystically appear in my house; he had to be invited first, you know, like a vampire.

I have been married in the past. It didn’t agree with me at *all*, for reasons I won’t bore you with. I’m a big proponent of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” It ain’t broke. We’ve built a life together. Replete with debauchery, might I add. I don’t even care what the conservabots think of my lifestyle; if they think we have sex with donkeys on the front porch, so much the better, because it tweaks them and it’s really entertaining to see them freak out. XD

It’s always bugged me that we have homeless people on the streets and families living 3 to an apartment, yet young middle-class couples will effectively live in one apartment while paying for another one so as not to upset their parents.  All that wasted space and resources just to maintain the fiction that you aren’t “cohabitating.”  And hell, if you’re a parent, why is it so comforting that your offspring’s mail is sent to a different address than the person they’re fucking every night? Does the Sky Daddy have a different addresses exemption or something?

I would like to add two “reasons people get married” to Ms. Marcotte’s list

8) When you meet someone and you need to introduce your mate it’s just a hell of a lot easier to say, this is my wife (or husband), __________.

9) (If you are a young man) Car insurance. I was 22 when I got married and my insurance payments dropped by more than half by the simple act of getting married. Stupid? Yes. Valuable decrease in monthly expenses for a poor young couple? absolutely!

I can’t believe people are arguing and getting their feelings hurt. Do whatever the fuck you want. It’s your relationship, do whatever works. Whether someone else approves of my most intimate decisions doesn’t matter.

My sister thinks marriage is some ridiculous institution that is best ignored. I can see her point, and she is welcome to it. If that works for her I will defend her decision to live with her guy for the last 16 years to my last breathe (and I frequently do at family reunions when my extremely Christian relatives bug me about my sisters long term plans. “It’s her life and she’s a smart woman. I don’t care if she ever get’s married”, is what I tell them.) She never implies that I sold out by taking the plunge. But, if she feels that way privately, well, that’s OK too. I don’t need constant approval from everyone.

I like marriage because it is comfortable and easy. I thought living together was comfortable and easy too, but I was so surprised that I was actually willing to spend my life with another person (I had long been a denier of the idea of long term love. I thought it was a myth; a self-imposed delusion) that I was eager to take it all the way. Marriage is the ultimate, “you’re the one” statement and I was eager to make it. Obviously if we had kept things in the status quo it would be obvious that she’s The One after twenty two years of living under the same roof, but I knew this was It pretty early in our time together, so I jumped in head first.

You know, Amanda, most of the time I really enjoy your take on things, but everyone has blind spots and marriage appears to be one of yours. *YOU* don’t like the idea of being married, which is just fine, but you twist yourself in knots trying to make marriage a bad thing, or at least a failure, in general. If you’re talking about the wedding industry, or the heteronormativity, or the Xtianists, or the propaganda that tells everyone they should be married and they’re a failure if they’re not, you have a pretty good point. But you often go far beyond this and criticize the whole institution as wrong, and almost seem to be rubbing your hands with glee at your belief in its imminent demise. It appears to be a case of you rationalizing your own prejudice instead of making a clear judgment, which is uncharacteristic of you.

And I’m with whomever said it upthread: if you’ve been living with the same person for a couple of years, you’re married. Gay or straight. It walks like a duck, etc…

There is also quite a lot to be said for the party. Especially if your friends are scattered around the country, it’s hard to bring them together just for the heck of it, so some kind of commitment celebreation is an easy way to justify the time and expense. Of course there doesn’t really have to be a minister or the state involved in that.

From the study:

“Those who cohabited before engagement (43.1%) reported lower marital satisfaction, dedication, and confidence as well as more negative communication and greater potential for divorce than those who cohabited only after engagement (16.4%) or not at all until marriage (40.5%).”

So the difference between those who lived together before engagement and those who did not was about 2.5% Is that difference even statistically significant in a sample of 1.050 people? Surely, there must be a statistician who can tell us the answer. Unless someone can show that the difference is statistically significant, the results are meaningless.

One last thing; if you must get married, ELOPE! It is actually very romantic (if you like your mate anyway), inexpensive, and your relatives get over the fact that they weren’t invited to your wedding surprisingly quickly.

Heh.  I’m the product of 2 generations of elopements.  Grandfather Avenger married GMA when she was quite young in TX in the living room of one of his brothers, and TX law about the wedding license being what it is, there was some planning involved, although he kept it hush-hush until right before it happened.

Grandfather Monk and GMM wanted to get married, but Great-grandmother Monk, a noted donor to the Catholic Church where they lived in Shanghai, China, made it clear that it would be better for any priest to have a millstone tied around his neck and be dropped into the Pacific Ocean than to marry them.

GFM and GMM responded by going to Hangkow, where she was born and lived some years before the family moved to Shanghai, and they found a millstone-proof priest to perform the service.

When G-GMM found out, she said something to the effect that it was done, and she accepted it.

Professor Avenger and Mother Avenger met at a party and he told her “I want to marry you.”  She replied, “You’re drunk.”  He said, “No, I’ll say the same thing when I’m sober.”  He took out to the beach the next day, said the same thing. After 6 weeks, and with the help of Grandfather Avenger, they eloped to Nevada, where they had to go from Reno to Carson City to get married because they were unaware of the laws against “Mongolians” marrying white folks there at that time, MA indiscreetly informed the clerk at Reno of her Chinese ancestry, which put the kibosh on getting married there.

As for sex before marriage:  MA was the graduate of Notre Dame High, San Jose, CA class of 1954.  She said half of her graduating class got married because they wanted to know what sex was about and that was the only way in those days for a ‘good Catholic girl’ to do so.

Her advice to me in this area was succinct:  “You can’t just screw them, you have to be able to talk to them afterwards.”  She didn’t expect either my bride or I to be virgins when we married, and her concern was reproductive, not religious.
 
I waited 8 weeks from the time I met Ilocano Avenger until we decided to get married because I wanted to take my time, unlike my father.  Mom wouldn’t leave her dogs to go to our wedding in Las Vegas, but Dad and my sister made it, and I was given a roll of quarters to play the slots before we were driven back to CA by her sister and brother-in-law(as my mother liked to say, not about us, we didn’t have a pot to piss in when we got married).

One last thing; if you must get married, ELOPE! It is actually very romantic (if you like your mate anyway), inexpensive, and your relatives get over the fact that they weren’t invited to your wedding surprisingly quickly.

I’d really like that last part to be true. The idea of planning a wedding is enough to keep me from getting married. I’ve been trying to minimize my parents’ expectations since I hit 30. Dad is willing to let go of everything, except his attendance at the event. Mom is… still in denial that I have no intention of wearing a white gown. This is all grandly hypothetical as I’m not in a serious relationship and don’t think that I would require marriage anyway to feel committed.

I agree with Amanda that most people get married because “it’s what you do,” but I think she’s going overboard suggesting that people getting married for benefits are just intellectualizing it. I’m a fiercely independent 37 year old female. I’m all over ignoring things that are “to be done.” If I were in love with a man and he proposed marriage, I’d be perfectly comfortable turning him down if marriage would have negative financial consequences. But then I consider marriage a specialized form of business entity.

I’m hostile to marriage because I’ve seen how many people it makes miserable, myself included, yes.  I’m not hostile to married people, but I do find it fascinating that the institution owns its inhabitants so much they assume that my disagreements with the institution are slaps against them personally.  That’s one more reason I dislike it.  I’m suspicious of institutions that lay claim to people like this.

And yet you don’t seem to realize that there’s a middle ground—dating, meeting someone, deciding that this is someone you might want to marry, and discussing that you’d like to marry someday before moving in.

Actually, the “middle ground” is what I was describing. 

But no, I don’t believe that people marry for rational reasons.  I don’t believe people do much for rational reasons.  They do things because they want to and rationalize it after the fact.  And that’s okay, and it’s sad that people are so eager to deny their basic human nature.

Where I live it’s habitual that couples live together for several years, and usually get married when they decide they want to have children. To live together before marrying is considered the reasonable and responsible thing to do by most people. At least, it works like that in my generation in godless Bohemia; old people in a little South Moravian village might be more conservative, but that’s still a minority. Even a friend of mine, who is a (female) Protestant pastor, cohabited with her partner before they got married. But then, her church is quite progressive.

I really think it’s the best thing to do, even if you intend to get married later. You get to know a person really and thoroughly only after you’ve lived with him/her together.

But you often go far beyond this and criticize the whole institution as wrong, and almost seem to be rubbing your hands with glee at your belief in its imminent demise.

It was invented as a patriarchal institution to secure male ownership over women.  It’s theoretically possible for it to mutate into something else, but I fail to see what’s wrong with it dying, if people are better off for it.  What no one has been able to do is explain to me why it’s right or fair to consider married people better than non-married people, to give them more rights and more social esteem.  Conservatives have a ready answer for this—-we have to incentivize marriage because it’s about social stability and (fill in code words for control of female sexuality).  Conservatives are the first to say that marriage is a way to control and subdue human nature, and I appreciate their honesty.  But liberals don’t want to control and subdue human nature, so they’re left spinning their wheels and saying “health insurance” like a mantra, and it’s a brain fart that fascinates me.

“It’s always bugged me that we have homeless people on the streets and families living 3 to an apartment, yet young middle-class couples will effectively live in one apartment while paying for another one so as not to upset their parents.”

They should cohabit against homelessness?  Was my mother right about me eating all my vegetables having a direct effect on starvation in Africa?

It’s rarely just so as not to upset the parents.  For a lot of people, maintaining a separate residence for at least a while, even if you’re all but cohabiting, provides an important escape hatch if the relationship sours.  If you’re moving in together without being sure of the relationship’s long-term viability, you’re either going to need to put a lot of stuff in storage (zomg waste!), or you’re going to need a space big enough to fit two apartments’ worth of stuff (zomg more waste!).  If you’re happy with someone right now but unsure as to your ultimate future together, it’s not an unwise move, if you can afford it, to keep your financial and property entanglements to a minimum, even if you’re spending all your time together.  A little bit of enthusiasm for personal-life disaster prevention is difficult to criticize.

Hell, the practice recently saved my mother’s bacon when the long-term boyfriend with whom she’d been wastefully cohabiting while maintaining her own residence decided that it was time to fall off the wagon and morph into an emotionally abusive drunk.  Part of her ex-husband’s control strategy with his new girlfriend was to badger her to sell her house, since she was living with him anyway.  They could use the money, she didn’t need it, blah blah blah.  The fact that then she wouldn’t be able to pick up and leave him at a moment’s notice was, I’m sure, just as much a coincidence as his discovery that most of her friends and family members were objectionable and his paeans to the joys of shared substance abuse.

One of the things that disturbs me about marriage is the fact that the social pressure to submit to it is so high. When combined with the fact that, as Amanda just said, it is essentially a way for men to claim women as their property, it sets off real alarm bells in my head.

My girlfriend is also a committed feminist, but even she falls prey to this ridiculous notion that somehow “we’re supposed to get married” without really questioning the underpinnings of why. Social conditioning can be an enormously powerful force, and what amazes me is the extent to which it still affects even people who intellectually know better.

*YOU* don’t like the idea of being married, which is just fine, but you twist yourself in knots trying to make marriage a bad thing, or at least a failure, in general. If you’re talking about the wedding industry, or the heteronormativity, or the Xtianists, or the propaganda that tells everyone they should be married and they’re a failure if they’re not, you have a pretty good point. But you often go far beyond this and criticize the whole institution as wrong, and almost seem to be rubbing your hands with glee at your belief in its imminent demise.

felagund,
How do you separate these things, the wedding industry and heteronormativity and especially the propaganda from the project of marriage itself? I don’t see how the two are separable, and really don’t get why marriage should be preferable to or considered superior to cohabitation, unless you’re factoring in outside issues like health insurance, et cetera.

You should totally go get yourself a ring.  Rings are pretty.  Plus, if you ever wanted to make a phylactery, you’d already have something to make it out of.  Not that I think that you’d have any interest in making a phylactery, but if you did, you’d be a step ahead if you had a ring.

For the record, I don’t see myself being as happy if my husband and I were still cohabitating but without the “thereto I plight thee my troth” party.  We’ve tried it both ways together, but we didn’t get married because we wanted sex or even companionship (which we could have gotten from non-committal cohabitation).  We’re both children of our parents’ nasty divorces, and no doubt due to deep-seated psychological inadequacies or something like that, it’s sappy and corny and stuff, but what we were both looking for was a permanent relationship.

So some people say that they can’t imagine anybody getting married and agreeing to forever if they didn’t think that if it doesn’t work out, they can get divorced.  We were the polar opposite of that, and we lived together before we got married because for us, without that trial non-commitment period, we would never have been able to say “yes, I can agree to commit to this for the rest of my life.”  For us, it wasn’t a question of being ‘hip’ or ‘traditional’, it was about our comfort zone on the freedom/commitment relationship spectrum and finding someone else with the same comfort zone.

That people get married after living together really demonstrates that there’s no truth to the theory that men will not buy the cow if they can get the milk for free.

Exactly.  Mom really beat me about the head with this one when my then-boyfriend and I started living together at his place.  Imagine her surprise when he proposed to me despite getting all the bennies of a marriage without having to pop for a ring.

Amanda: I support your right to think marriage is ucky. As I said above, my sister thinks the same thing. But frankly your opinion hardly matters outside of you and your loved one’s relationship. We choose our own paths and work out what is best of us. I think the experiences of others can inform our decisions, but in the end it is our decision on how to play this that matters. Anyone who needs constant approval and re-enforcement of their long term life decisions should not get married in the first place because they have not matured enough to take on such a monumental commitment.

Now if you want to argue that the wedding industry is evil, I got your back.

@Dark Avenger Guardian Chow Mein. Cool story. My dark secret is that I waited almost eight years to marry Mrs. Fastandsloppy. We met in High School when I was 15 and she was 17. It was honest-to-God love at first sight. Fortunately my mom moved us to another state where I was able to play the field a bit, have bad relationships with other people and grow up a bit. We wrote each other goofy letters for years (I still have a drawer full of the our letters in my desk). Once I finished college though, Mrs. Fastandsloppy’s siren’s call pulled me back to the Midwest and her tender charms. After a little over a year of cohabitation I knew we were right for each other. I still love her like a stupid 15 year old kid.

@valdimir It is true. My mother in law was devout Southern Baptist and my Father in law was a small town chief of police; not exactly DFHs. Mother in law was pretty upset that we had pulled a fast one (I still remember her crying fit) but she got over it in a couple of months. I’m sure she was at least a little relieved that at least we were boinking each other in sin any longer.

@Jenniebee You just perfectly stated the reasons I opted for marriage. Mega-dittos to you! You aren’t actually me are you?

And I’m with whomever said it upthread: if you’ve been living with the same person for a couple of years, you’re married. Gay or straight. It walks like a duck, etc…

I’m married, so no dog directly in this particular fight, but fuck that. No one should get to define anyone else’s relationship for them. Under any circumstances.

And you know what else? Sometimes I shake it more than two times, and I’m still not playing with it. Got an opinion about that?

I’m married, so no dog directly in this particular fight, but fuck that. No one should get to define anyone else’s relationship for them.

Yeah, it was funny to me when Amy’s dad told us one morning (after we’d been together for about 6 years) that we were the most married couple he knew, because I knew how he meant it—that our relationship was tighter than that of any of his married friends—but he wasn’t trying to impose anything on us. And I was a little insulted by the two people upthread who decided to define the relationship I’m in as marriage. No thanks—been married once, and that was enough for me.

“we have to incentivize marriage because it’s about social stability”

I’m not really sure I want to rock out with social instability, though.  It seems to come with a large helping of individual suffering and vulnerability.  Social evolution seems to be much like physical evolution, in that you need the transition phases to work without being too disadvantageous.  As it stands now, marriage comes with a crapload of things like healthcare, absent which the individual household may well be at significantly greater risk for involuntary dissolution.  This isn’t really a conservative “we must weld families together and never let them separate lest the union go commie” thing so much as removing burdens and allowing voluntarily interdependent households to achieve a sort of peak resilience.  The greater inequality or inability to resource-share you have within a household, the more unstable it’s going to be whether the people involved like it or not.  It’s one of the reasons marriage equality is so important; it’s inhumane to contribute to the instability of otherwise solvent and internally satisfactory households for no good reason.  Expanding the social safety net and fixing holes in it and so forth is going to take a while.  We can at least close that one gap relatively easily.

As for the greater rights thing, I mean, it’s not like I get to jaywalk and double park and defy county electrical codes and feed the animals at the zoo people-food in express disobedience of the signs because I’m married.  I get greater rights wrt my individual husband.  Because he wanted me to have them.  If we decoupled marriage from the rights-package, unless we ditched the package entirely and everybody had to go to lawyers to delineate everything pertaining to their estate and care should they be incapacitated or die, we’d still have some people tooling around with greater rights than others in certain very specific situations, because we’d still have a lot of people finding it useful to have one person as the executor of their affairs should they run into trouble.  The greater social esteem though, yes, is pretty bullshit.

“Sometimes I shake it more than two times, and I’m still not playing with it.  Got an opinion about that?”

Zomg you totally are.

What no one has been able to do is explain to me why it’s right or fair to consider married people better than non-married people, to give them more rights and more social esteem.

I gave you an answer.  If, for whatever reason, you want to form a family with another person, this is the existant legal way to do so.  Unless you want to completely breakdown the idea of family (good luck with that), marriage is the sensible way to do that.  You want to add a kid who is not related by blood, you adopt them (provided they don’t already have legal parents).  You want to make another adult your legal partner in all things family and make them the automatic nearest kin, you marry them (provided they aren’t already married).

Legal rights are based on documentation, not feelings.  The person who makes lif-death/health care decisions for you isn’t the person who you happen to currently feel closest to, it’s you nearest legal kin.  That is not your live-in partner; it is your spouse, if you have one, or your parents, siblings, etc.

There are entire dating websites devoted to helping people find other people who are also looking to get married. Lots of them. They are really popular. A lot of them serve particular sub-groups who have trouble finding appropriate partners in their day-to-day lives—religious or ethnic minorities, people with Asperger’s, fat people. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting to get married (in general, without any particular person in mind) than it is with wanting to fall in love (in general, without any particular person in mind) or with wanting to have sex while being tied up and spanked (in general, without any particular person in mind). Everyone has some fetish or another.

You talk about how totally gross it is when you accidentally go on a date with a marriage-seeker, but that’s not universal—plenty of people are looking for just that and would be relieved to find out that their date is on the same page. You’d probably be pretty wierded out to find yourself on a date with a latex fetishist, but that doesn’t mean that the latex fetishist is wrong to be out dating.

I’m married, so no dog directly in this particular fight, but fuck that. No one should get to define anyone else’s relationship for them. Under any circumstances.

If this is to be true, if you want the benefits of being legal partners, you must become legal partners.  If you are talking about forming a life time commitment,  there is a ready made solution.  It’s called marriage. 

If it is available to you and you don’t take it, how can you expect anyone else to respect your current partner as the person to make serious decisions when you are incapacitated unless you accept the idea of common law marriage or have formally drawn up some other legal documents that give you the same rights?

Seriously, make up your minds.  Other people can’t decide what your relationships are but they are supposed to let someone who claims to be your live-in life partner into your hospital room to make decistions for you regarding your health?  The would be negligent on their part.

If you want the legal rights of being next of kin and you are not related, you have to take legal steps to make that so.  It isn’t giving special rights to married people, it’s reserving rights to families rather than giving them to someone else without basis.

“If this is to be true, if you want the benefits of being legal partners, you must become legal partners.”

...Auguste was responding to someone labeling all cohabiting relationships of more than two years as “married.” Couples who do not refer to themselves as married, couples who have taken no steps to be married, couples who may be actively anti-marriage.  It’s on par with telling a married couple that they’re not really married because they’re gay, or don’t have kids, or do not demand monogamy.  So, uh, you may be agreeing strenuously here.

helen,
What you’re saying, in essence, is “this is the system we’ve got, and if you don’t like it, fuck off and die.” Well fuck me for refusing to accept that the mere existence of a system makes marriage better than cohabitation, especially since that system mostly reinforces the patriarchal system that cause so much goddamn heartache and anguish on this planet. I’m not even going to get into how hateful that attitude sounds to someone who is precluded by law from marrying their partner—you’re basically saying that my nine year relationship with Amy is worth less than a marriage that lasts six months because we don’t have a governmental blessing.

What’s more, when I made the comment you responded to, I acknowledged the privileges that the government confers on married people, and I was asking why marriage, aside from those privileges is better than cohabitation. Got an answer for that?

Doh!  I just realized that side B for “traditionalist” argument about men milking them cows for free is that women have to have artificially lower economic and social opportunities or else they won’t want to put of for, or marry, men either.

Yeah, it’s inconsistent, or if not inconsistent then still incoherent, but when has that ever stopped “traditionalists?”

figleaf

So, following up on the debate over marriage vs. long-term cohabitation, I wonder, is it “better” to have a boyfriend than to have a male best friend whom you also happen to love and have sex with? Is it “better” to have a husband than to have a boyfriend who’s promised to be there for you always, through thick and thin, because he loves you? Is it “better” to have someone who adopts you as a child and assumes full responsibility for your physical and emotional care than to have a parent? Well, no, it’s not better, it’s exactly the same. Congratulations, Amanda, you’ve won the argument! I dare say the feminist defenders of marriage are suitably chastened.

And yes, I understand that some people hate the word and the history of the word “marriage”, and no, I am not going to call them “married” if they don’t want me to, any more than I am going to call someone bisexual if they self-define as a lesbian who sleeps with men, or a wife if they self-identify as a spouse or a partner. Words do matter. But to insist that because you call it something other than a marriage, your relationship is somehow different from marriages in any real identifiable way, is so much self-serving BS.

If you ask someone—someone feminist—to describe a marriage without using the words “insurance” or “taxes,” they will describe the union of two people who love each other and make decisions together. That’s not because marriage is pointless and has no purpose, it’s because that’s what marriage is. I hate patriarchy as much as anybody and I’m never going to get married, personally, because even though I kind of like the concept in the abstract, I don’t want to be a wife and I like financial freedom. But it’s hard not to read all these anti-marriage posts you keep valiantly making and not be remind of the joke about how many legs a dog has if you call a tail a leg.

Wasn’t the comment about 2 years of cohabitation being married about “common law” or informal marriage?

11 states and the D.C. still have this rule on their books while 26 prohibit it.

New Hampshire does this so that cohabitating couples (more than 3 years) have spousal rights in particular after one of them dies