Should we get married?

September 11, 2008 4:37 PM

Long-term committed couple: Should we get married?

My girlfriend and I have been together for ten years now, we have a child, we have careers and all the other trappings of adult life, except the marriage.

I'm looking for hard data on the pros and cons of marriage versus cohabitation. I've heard different anecdotes from different people about the benefits of one versus the other, but now I want charts, graphs, cost-benefit analyses, ROI figures, numbers, and fact.

I know there's a lot of FUD, emotional and moral issues surrounding this question, and that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. I have my own issues with marriage, largely stemming from family history and a lot of superstition. I'm trying to steer past the emotional side of things and look at the basic underlying realities of what is, at its heart, a social contract.

posted by lekvar to human relations (28 comments total)

I'm looking for hard data on the pros and cons of marriage versus cohabitation.

Hard data doesn't really matter in terms of dealing with that specific person you're thinking of marrying. Hard data is just general data and may or may not apply to your specific situation.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:49 PM on September 11, 2008

Take a peek at these. Us queers don't get them really. I think its the same conceptually.

The big federal benefits are Social Security, disability, the ability to sue in court for wrongful death of your spouse .. etc .. etc ...

In my opinion you are much more legally protected at a federal level if you are married.
posted by duckus at 4:50 PM on September 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

It would help to know what state/country you live in. In many places living together for 10 years qualifies you for common-law marriage, with all the same legal protections as conventional marriage. If you've achieved that, and you're happy with your current situation as boyfriend and girlfriend, not husband and wife... then why get married?
posted by autojack at 4:51 PM on September 11, 2008

"In general, marriage tends to make people healthier, happier and richer, and that's especially true for men"

But dude, if you aren't cozy with the idea of getting married, don't get married!
posted by smalls at 4:54 PM on September 11, 2008

This is a poor non-answer to your question. I apologize.

I believe that your child may get to a point in his or her life where the fact that you've formalized your commitment to each other by marriage may, in your child's mind, reinforce your love and commitment to your child.

I've been happily married for 32 years but have told my sons (18 & 25) that as long as children are not part of the equation, I think they're best off being smart about specific life and living arrangements, but should feel no compulsion to get married unless they really want to do so.

I'm old school enough to believe that from a child's point of view it's hard to beat two loving, married parents, who have taken and lived up to the vows .

In the case of both my wife and myself, we've looked to both sets of our own parents' commitments as a source of strength over the years.

And yes, I do feel old and geezerly writing this and once again apologize for my answer which so totally does not address your question that it probably ought to get flagged for removal.

But that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
posted by imjustsaying at 5:00 PM on September 11, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

Brandon: There are concerns like taxes, co-ownership, and social security that don't apply to specific individuals, but do apply to classes of individuals. I suppose I should have been more specific. I'm still not sure I'm communicating this correctly.

duckus: Nice link. Thanks.

autojack: there's no common-law marriage in California.

smalls: Thanks for the link, I'll be reading it in a bit. But "cozy" is an emotional term, and I'm trying to get away from the emotional side and approach this rationally.
posted by lekvar at 5:00 PM on September 11, 2008

Well, first things first I would sit down with an accountant and crunch the tax numbers. If you both make high salaries, there's a chance that you would pay more in taxes if you got married. That personally takes a lot of the shine off marriage for me.

Now then, I assume that you already have a lot of legal documents drawn up to give each other power of attorney, detail what happens to your combined assets in the case that you split up, etc. If you don't, well, getting married simplifies some of that for you (or at least forces you to think about getting a prenup). Marriage also gives partners access to social security survivor benefits in the case that one dies earlier than the other, although I don't know exactly how that plays out depending on how much each of you earns. Being never married to the mother of your child might also cause you more custody difficulties if you split up.

Do your jobs provide domestic partner health benefits? It seems like most that provide married couple benefits also provide domestic partner benefits, but if they don't then in the case that one of you loses your job and needs health insurance it could be an expensive proposition.

Obviously there are other things to think about but these are the angles that I have considered when I think about marriage. I think if you are both quite wealthy and stable, you can contract yourselves into many of the important benefits vis a vis rights, without paying the various tax penalties. But if you aren't actually losing money by getting married, I see no reason not to if you already have a child and shared assets. You will cover any bases you might have missed and if you haven't bothered to cover all the "what if we split up" legal aspects (I really hope you have!), it will put some standard guidelines for you should that happen.
posted by ch1x0r at 5:04 PM on September 11, 2008

It makes insurance and visiting loved ones at the hospital easier, especially when unexpected accidents occur, or terminal illnesses.

Who do you want to control your finances in case of catastrophic injury? Your "nearest living relative" ( not that that is necessarily bad) or the mother of your child?
posted by Max Power at 5:06 PM on September 11, 2008

lekvar: I'm looking for hard data on the pros and cons of marriage versus cohabitation. I've heard different anecdotes from different people about the benefits of one versus the other, but now I want charts, graphs, cost-benefit analyses, ROI figures, numbers, and fact.

Just to make some clarification: are you saying that you only want to know about the economic and legal benefits of marriage?
posted by koeselitz at 5:24 PM on September 11, 2008

koeselitz: the economic and legal benefits or drawbacks of marriage.

I didn't really spell that out very well, did I?
posted by lekvar at 5:45 PM on September 11, 2008

and if you are, there's a pretty good FPP here
posted by dolface at 5:45 PM on September 11, 2008

This comment on the blue had an excellent listing of the benefits. Drawbacks include the marriage penalty, the inability to disinherit your spouse, and increased cost and hassle should your relationship break up. Also, California is a community property state, which means (among other things) that you could potentially be liable for debt accrued by your spouse, and the money you two earn during the marriage can be considered as belonging equally to both of you in the case of divorce, as well as for tax purposes. (I am not an expert on CA law and don't know how having a prenup, for example, would affect these things.)
posted by phoenixy at 6:04 PM on September 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

"In general, marriage tends to make people healthier, happier and richer, and that's especially true for men"

Is there evidence that marriage is the cause here, rather than being merely coordinated?

It seems to me it's possible that either healthier people tend to attract and mate more frequently. Or, as the linked article points out, that divorce is a hell of a wringer. If either is true, married people would show up as healthier, happier, and richer, but marriage itself wouldn't improve those things.

On the other hand, as the article points out, it seems very likely that being married "gives you more access to social support," and I suspect you could actually get stats about this particular benefit on a hard basis if anyone has cared to do the research. However, like others are saying here in the thread, your personal situation is far more relevant here than a lot of statistics. You likely have a very good idea of what your social network would be if you married this woman since it probably wouldn't change much after 10 years of being together. So, whether or not there's literature supporting the idea that's a verifiable real benefit is probably more or less irrelevant.
posted by namespan at 6:04 PM on September 11, 2008

rather than being merely coordinated? correlated
posted by namespan at 6:05 PM on September 11, 2008

I'm going on this:

I have my own issues with marriage, largely stemming from family history and a lot of superstition.

Dude, you're already married; you just haven't informed the State of California.

There's nothing bad that could happen to a married couple that can't happen to you. Do not think for an instant that if you decide to break up, that it's going to be like breaking up with your girlfriend in high school -- it is going to be a divorce, where you're going to have to deal with splitting jointly-held property, or even property that's only arguably jointly held, and decide custody for your kid, and all that. And rest very firmly assured that in that event, you can't say "But honey, we weren't married, so you're not allowed to get vindictive and try to take half my stuff and never let me see my kid and generally go psychobananas about it." Especially not in the birthplace of palimony.

You don't need to invoke anyone's prehistoric sky god if that's your objection. You only need to go down to a boring secular (in CA anyway) government office, fill out some paperwork, and make some promises that you've been living up to for a decade anyway.

Plus side: a whole shitload of state and federal rights and legal protections.

Downside: possibly marginally higher taxes if you are both high earners.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:33 PM on September 11, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

namespan - totally agree with you on this one, and you were able to put into words exactly what I was thinking. Marriage isn't going to make an unhappy individual happy.

My use of the word "cozy" was intentional, because you just can't take the statistics and assume they will be true for you. This applies to a person and your particular feelings toward her, so how can it not be emotional? Anyway, I gave ya both - statistics and my emotional reaction. I couldn't help it.
posted by smalls at 8:39 PM on September 11, 2008

But I do have more facts for you (and I use the term facts loosely). Here is one that states unmarried cohabitations overall are less stable than marriages, and then it goes into probability of divorce based on specific situations, which is also interesting, but perhaps not exactly what you were looking for.
posted by smalls at 8:46 PM on September 11, 2008

Thumbs up for what smalls says.

Cohabitation, marital quality and resistance to reason is what comes to my mind (I have a big collection of more scholarly grounded articles, but this blog entry is memorable)

Advice, especially coming from parents generation, to not get married is very ill informed. The reason for it is that first sociological research results on marriage vs. cohabitation was only published in 1988, which is very recent in terms of reaching the minds. Benefits of cohabitation will one day be commonly known as the false logic of the previous century. But we are not there yet.

Yet for anything that matters for the OP... OP: the information you are looking for has high probability of being irrelevant to you. As a couple, you entered the dynamics of cohabitation so long ago that regaining dynamics of a married relationship is hard, if at all possible. I wish your family well.
posted by Jurate at 10:56 PM on September 11, 2008

Thank you, everybody, for your input and links. I know how I feel about this, and I'd appreciate it if feelings were left out of the equation. Seriously. Let me decide what is relevant and irrelevant.

I've asked for data, studies, and statistics. Opinions hold very little interest for me on this issue.
posted by lekvar at 11:25 PM on September 11, 2008

You should make sure you have legal structures in place regarding your child. Specifically, a will. You should consider health care power of attorney. All the things gay people have had to do to have the same rights as married people. You should consider tax and financial implications. You may be benefiting on taxes, and, at some point, financial aid.
posted by theora55 at 6:53 AM on September 12, 2008

You may enjoy the book Unmarried to Each Other which explores this and other aspects of marriage/cohabitation from an American perspective.

The writers also run the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which may have some of the data (or pointers to the data) that you're looking for. They have a page devoted to statistics.
posted by heatherann at 8:15 AM on September 12, 2008

Oh, and they also have a response to the CDC report that smalls links to:

What You Should Know About the CDC's New Study on Marriage and Cohabitation
posted by heatherann at 8:16 AM on September 12, 2008

Oh, also ? If you are considering Domestic Partnership rather than marriage, in CA it is limited to opposite sex partnerships of those 62 and older only.

That plus the exclusion of common-law marriage makes it seems like there aren't very many options in CA for heterosexual couples who don't wish to marry.
posted by duckus at 11:11 AM on September 12, 2008

You may also want to consider the estate and intestacy issues that relate to the status of being legally married vs. not and whether/how a common law marriage in your state would affect the estate distribution outcome. I would speak to an attorney about the legal issues surrounding your choice, esp. if you have children together and ESP. if you don't have wills.

There are also potential tax benefits/ramifications to consider.

You've done the hard part - fostering a successful relationship and family life. The trappings of marriage are the bonus round for someone in your situation. I'd just go ahead and jump through the hoop.
posted by smallstatic at 12:02 PM on September 12, 2008

This toes the line of hard facts vs. emotional, but if you get married, you get to have a party that all of your friends and family have to come to. That was pretty much the reason I did it, since we already had every other trapping of marriage.
posted by anildash at 6:34 PM on September 13, 2008

lekvar: I've asked for data, studies, and statistics. Opinions hold very little interest for me on this issue.

Just a small point, though I believe it throws a wrench in your gears here:

Keep in mind that statistics cannot rationally be applied to specific cases. Statistics are a measure of what a population tends to do, and they don't say anything about you and your partner. "Marriage tends to keep relationships together longer," for example, may be a statement about a population, but a good statistician would be very quick to point out that that says nothing definite about what effects marriage would have on any given relationship.

In other words: statistics and emotions are really on the same level when it comes to determining the paths of a relationship. There has to be some other way to go. I agree that it's good not to fall back on familial tropes and baggage-laden buzzwords like "vows" and "lifetime of commitment" and such, but statistical figures don't tell you any more about how to live your life.

The only way, I think, is to be rational and yet personal. It's not being 'emotional' to consider what getting married means to the two of you, or what implications it has, given your circumstances, or what directions you might end up going in. It only becomes 'emotional' when you deviate from rational consideration and lazily rely on what you've learned from your parents or from society to explain things that are more complex or to simplify things that are difficult.

In short, there's plenty of space between "emotional" and "statistics." I think that space is where you have to go if you want to steer a relationship. But that's yours to decide; I only offer these observations up as personal experience. When my wife and I go to make a decision, we certainly don't wonder what our parents would say about it; but that doesn't mean we try to figure out what the larger percentage of Caucasians residing in Western states between the ages of 20 and 30 would do, either. We talk about it carefully and rationally and then decide.
posted by koeselitz at 2:48 AM on September 14, 2008

I say all this because I think you're making a fantastically false dichotomy between "the emotional" and "the rational." I, too, have been engaged in a struggle against sloppy thinking and the buzzwords and baggage that my parents handed down to me, but if I tried to be utterly 'unemotional,' I'd be cutting off something that's just as much a part of me, and I suspect that I'd end up even less rational. Not to mention the fact that I believe you're using 'emotional' as a pretty broad brush to cover a whole variety of things that probably have nothing to do with the baggage you're trying to leave behind. Just a thought: we can be rational about our emotions, and it is rational to anticipate that we'll have them and to try to plan for that eventuality. In fact, I believe that, if we don't plan for that eventuality, we're much more likely to have marriages that fall apart when we suddenly find ourselves feeling things we never meant to feel or never expected to experience. I repeat, there is a rational way to deal with this. It's just not very statistical.
posted by koeselitz at 2:54 AM on September 14, 2008

A lot of good meat to chew on here. Thanks for the input, everybody.
posted by lekvar at 3:16 PM on September 15, 2008