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Comment by dpweb | Hacker News Reader

Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work together. Which has already been demonstrated is a problem since the marriage is breaking up in the first place. Some divorces are going to have to be adversarial.

But, speaking as someone who had to pay both lawyers sides, and substantial alimony and child support. My best advice - get it over with as soon as humanly possible! Time is the enemy. Not X percent. Lawyers will take it all. You gotta treat it like your future is on fire.

I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. We need to be grown ups and recognize at least half these marriages will break up. It would make the couple confront the possibility and have to state their expectations beforehand.

Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! This prob won’t happen cause it would also break up a lot of couples before the marriage but that would actually be for the best.

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Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so? If you want to publicly declare your love and commitment for your partner you can still have a ceremony and a party. Model it after hand-fasting ceremonies of old where you commit to each other for a year and a day. Then you can have a renewal party once a year. But soon as you sign a marriage license you are on the hook.

Now sure some will say that there are benefits for marriage such as tax breaks, etc. But the expectation value is against you: what you save on taxes for a few years you will lose in divorce to the lawyers. Ending a romantic relationship is hard. Don’t complicate with marriage/divorce.

In hospital, or death, there are benefits a spouse gets that a partner doesn't. Visitation, property transfers, etc. It's possible to get contracts a power-of-attorney things but the marriage license has some special legal power (in USA)

If that is your concern then yes get PoA set up. It will be orders of magnitude cheaper than a divorce and infinitely more customizable. The biggest benefit in the US is that you don’t pay estate tax on inheritance. That you can’t contract away. So either get married much later in life or have so much or so little money that it doesn’t matter.

Terrible advice. Most western countries would treat what you mentioned as a "common-law relationship", which entitles the partners to the same rights as a marriage. Check you local legislation. In Canada if you live with someone for more than 2 years, it's equivalent to a marriage in almost every case.

There are only seven states in the USA that recognize common law marriage (out of 50).

There may be only seven states that recognize the creation of common law marriages, but all the other states will recognize the existence of a common- law marriage created in one of those seven states.

Honestly, that’s for lawyers to decide. I suspect you’re right but have no idea, and unless you’re a lawyer neither do you.

most western countries are not common law

In my experience proving common-law relationship is tricky because it’s very undefined, and you may think you meet the requirements but the documents authorities will demand (because they do, they don’t just take your word for it) aren’t something most couples think of setting up until the time/need comes. Much easier to just show a marriage certificate.

So… get married because the government has made it inconvenient not to? Aside from the fact that this is factually wrong (see other replies to your comment) this is also an awful reason to marry someone.

How do you get that conclusion from my comment? Lol. If anything, my comment suggested that don't even live together with someone, let alone get married. Because living together is legally the same as getting married in many jurisdictions. I might have been mistaken about the amount of places with such laws, but it's always a good idea to check your local legislation or talk to a family lawyer.

In France civil partnerships are now more popular than marriage. You get most of the benefits and it's much easier to dissolve one.

> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.

This 100%. Eleven years into our relationship, with now a 7 years old kid. We were raised in non-religious families and we are non-religious, so why get married? Why then bring the "religion of the state" in our lives? We don't need no public servant to officially declare us married. We don't need no state-endorsed paper. We don't need no more administrative burden.

A breakup would, indeed, be bad enough in itself to then add insult to injury by having lawyers on both sides competing to see which of them has the sharpest teeth while they'd be bleeding us dry.

Just screw that entire system.

Just curious, what about medical insurance for the family if only one works? what about the signature thing when you need it most(e.g. in hospital that you need some signature), there are many inconvenience in daily life if you opt to not married but staying as partners with kids? there might be a long list of those things other than the marriage tax penalty.

There are something like 1200 rights that get conferred onto you when you get married. Most you can take care of with signing a power of attorney affidavit. Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.

if one spouse/partner is taking care of the kids and house(i.e. not working), it's hard to get a plan for single.

some company does provide medical insurance for "partners", but most probably don't, and that's a big headache.

A lot that cover partners cover only registered domestic partnership, which was created as a lesser option to avoid providing same sex marriage, but has generally been retained because it's been adapted to other uses. But it's still a state-defined legal relationship, so if you are against that with marriage...

Also has a tax consequence, unlike 'married' health insurance.

> Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.

Sure.

Where being married is cheaper for health insurance is when you have kids, at least with employer group plans.

(Premiums for 2-party plans tend to be about, often exactly, double single plans. Family plans, for 3+, tend to be about 2.5 times. If your coparent isn't eligible on the same plan the marginal cost of each of the first two kids is higher.)

Well, the simple answer is that marriage is the formal consent that lets you have sex. That's what the "I do" part is all about. (No, it's not just a pretty tradition.)

Consent was very important in the middle ages, and it's making a huge comeback in the 21st century.

(The monetary issues can be settled with standard contracts, but the sex part is what requires a special and distinct form of agreement.)

wow. just.... wow.

Holy shit what did I just read? I think it was justification for marital rape, but… what?

Most people in your situation — if they break up - will still have lawyers involved and spend about the same as a divorce.

It’s the children and fights over custody that cause the greatest drama and attorneys fees.

Yes, that’s correct. But the situation is actually much simpler as it is just about the kids.

You have it backwards.

Custody, possession schedules, who gets to pick the school, who gets to make medical decisions for the kids, who decides if they ought get braces, who decides what extracurricular activities the kids are in and which parent has to take them, which parent can hold the kids passport and what counties can they take them to, geographical restrictions, morality clauses, right of first refusal, and on and on and on...

The vast majority of cases that got to jury trial are custody cases... rarely property issues.

(Indeed, in most states you aren’t even entitled to a jury trial on property issues.)

Without marriage, you don't have a legal framework for breaking up. I know a couple who broke up after 25+ years, a mortgage, and a child together, who had never married. I think the lack of applicable legal precedent made it even messier to negotiate the split. It's been several years now, they're still negotiating details, and the lawyers aren't any cheaper.

If they’re buying a house together and don’t have at least a basic legal contract around that to cover this scenario - yikes.

There is a lot of existing precedent with marriage that can provide some of that, but it’s terrible. It is something though, no question about it.

Kids, child support and custody is handled separately (kinda) anyway, but if they didn’t already have that discussed or worked out, also yikes.

Agreed. You are making the case for why marriage should be a private contract and not a government-sanctioned institution.

Marriage is a private contract. It is just subject to specific rules. Employment is a private contract too as much as employment is a government sanctioned institution.. Really what the institution of marriage gets you is a tax break. But we also had the mortgage deduction in the past too.

For me it was around 8-15% extra take home pay from preferable tax rates.

That’s great! Especially if you put all of that into savings to pay the lawyers if you decide to get divorced since 50% of marriages do end that way.

People like to throw that number out there but mostly I think they’re just innumerate or justifying their own marital failures. Sure, 50% of marriages end in divorce. But that’s just one dumb average, and when you look at the underlying factors that affect divorce rates you’ll find they’re not that surprising.

Getting married very young, getting married due to a kid, getting married after dating for a short period, working in shitty jobs, living in certain states, marrying someone who has ever been unfaithful, marrying someone who has ever experienced a divorce before.

Not trying suggest one should not necessarily avoid anyone who falls into the above. But, while I cannot find any raw datasets to try and estimate this for myself, most of this have independent effects of double digit drops. Assuming a practical amount of multicollinearity, I would wager my best predicted probability of divorce is lower than 10% without considering any personal beliefs on our relationship.

Heck just looking at single variable analyses from various studies I see reason to believe my predicted divorce rate is 30-60% lower than baseline.

Right. Everyone thinks they can beat the odds/that their relationship is stronger than average. Yet most people are average.

Nope. That is the opposite of what I just said. I said ignoring the state of my relationship, the odds are vastly in my favor. Average is not your friend.

First marriages have an average divorce rate that is 20% lower than the average rate. Marriages in my state have an average divorce rate that is half the US average.

You can do much better than the top level average.

Do note that the chance of a first marriage ending in divorce is a good chunk lower than the average marriage.

But if you save up an entire year's salary after a few years, that should be more than enough for some lawyers...

Depends on the lawyers haha

But more seriously… if you aren’t willing to take a guaranteed decently large pay increase (which scales with future income growth) with the added chance of losing more to legal fees and arbitration later on… you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re probably correct that for a middle class family the pure fiscal return will likely be positive if your marriage lasts just a handful of years.

Some people divorce several times, so 50% of marriages ending with divorce may correspond to much smaller part of the population.

40% of first marriages end in divorce on a quick google. 60% of second marriages and 70% of third marriages.

Edit: not clear if a once-wed person marrying a newbie counts as a first or second though. I’d imagine that could be significant.

I wish that governments didn’t do so much to try to force people to get married. I can’t bring my foreign partner to my home country unless we’re married, I pay more taxes if we’re not married, healthcare in the US is more complicated if we’re not married. People should be able to pick and choose how they want to live their lives, and marriage is a pretty much one size fits all solution.

Sounds like a terrible idea to me. You have these minimal commitment relationships that are only incrementally extended. What happens when the commitment ends after you've had kids? The mother and kids are screwed since they have no legal recourse to get you to support them ("sucks to be you, we never got married so I don't owe you anything")?

A healthy society is predicated on strong families and minimal commitment relationships sound like a recipe for weak families.

This is a complete bullshit argument. If you hate the person you are married to, the marriage certificate will not prevent you from leaving. If you love the person who you are with but are not married to you don’t need a marriage certificate to stay. Most jurisdictions will absolutely enforce child support regardless of marital status. The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women. There is zero reason to follow that logic today.

No offense, but your advice sounds like it's coming from one who doesn't have kids, let alone someone in a long term (10 year+) relationship.

There are far more benefits to marriage than merely child support. There's alimony, spousal support, survivorship, power of attorney, the list goes on.

You can do all of this without being married, of course, but at at that point you might as well be married anyway.

So basically your point is that the government takes your money, and when they return something to you obviously not all that has been taken from you you are grateful.

The gov should be out of your relationship, there is NO valid reason for it to be in there.

What? That's not my point at all.

I have two kids, had a 14 year marriage and many relationships after that :)

Just my opinion of course, but I don't think it's BS. The piece of paper has nothing to do with it. It's the attitude of the two people going into the relationship.

If both people go in prepared for full life commitment through thick and thin you'll get a different outcome on average than two people going in with one foot out the door ready to flee at the first sign of trouble. The latter is a recipe for weak relationships and families - kids deserve to have stable parents who are fully committed to each other, not volatile parents who re-evaluate their commitment every year and break up if either isn't "feeling it".

Marriage is not a chemistry coin toss where the marriage automatically fails due to "irreconcilable differences" if you get bad RNG. That's an excuse. Stable marriages aren't chance, they are hard work. It's like building a house, or software. You have to constantly pour work into it to fix issues, strengthen the foundation, etc, or it will fail under load later. IMO if people looked for partners with the right attitude and committed to each other with the right attitude and put in in the work to back up their commitments, divorce rate would be a tiny fraction of what it is. I argue the divorce rate is so high because the people getting married are doing so with flimsy commitment, unwilling to put in the work required to build a solid foundation. Your solution does not help the commitment problem at all, but exacerbates it by making it even easier for relationships to have flimsy commitment levels ("let's not go all in, let's just commit to each other for one year, and then we'll break up after the honeymoon stage is over").

You can have the attitude without the piece of paper, no? Your point about people getting married without it proves my point: don’t get married. At best all you need is the long vault attitude. At worst it is much easier to end a relationship.

> The “strong families” argument is decades outdated and has always been designed to oppress women.

So, a legal system - namely marriage - that guarantees a woman a large portion of the property earned by the man during the marriage is “designed to oppress women”?

How is that?

What legal rights is a woman deprived of in a marriage that she would otherwise have being single?

The entire point of marriage is to give the ‘weaker’ member of the relationship rights to the property and earnings of the ‘stronger’ member.

This made a lot more sense imo when rights were less equal and the expectation was for the wife to stay at home. I think as thinks become more equal the more irrelevant an doutdated the current legal expectations are around marriage. Especially because the state will enforce child support regardless of martial status.

At some point the narrative has to change when things are more equal. I think there is a lot of data supporting that they have in many ways changed already. Women are more educated on average and more are completing higher education degrees than men and have been for the last few years.

The children are legally entitled to financial support from both parents regardless of custody or marital status. If the mother has custody then she can sue the father for child support in family court even if they were never married. In many states if that mother were to seek public assistance then the government would also initiate a child support case.

Is this something you've done yourself (either cohabing or getting married is fine), or is this more theoretical / speculative?

Something I am currently doing and have been for the past 5+ years after getting divorced.

Ah okay thanks for replying. That's great to hear you're speaking from experience then. Did you need to convince your spouse of it or was your spouse for it all along? Sometime I think having these conversations is hard. Also do you act as if you're married or is the relationship "looser" in many ways (like living apart)? I'm genuinely curious because I do think the institution of marriage is a little dated in many ways.

It is operationally the same as being married, the relationships are not looser in any sense. Unless a longtime couple tells you about it, you often don't know. People assume you are married because you "look" and act how people expect married people to. Anecdotally, this is most common among people who were previously married, and therefore often have pragmatic and non-idealistic views of marriage, and both professionals; they already did it once and don't see the purpose or benefit. I know several couples that I discovered have been in this state for decades.

I do think this selects for relatively affluent couples who gain limited leverage by combining assets. For people with few assets, the benefits of combined economics are much higher.

Probably the biggest difference is that assets are not commingled by default and asset transactions do not require the signatures of both parties. Finances aren't just practically separate but also literally separate. Joint purchases are explicitly contracted as such. However, many well-off professional married couples also keep their finances approximately independent in practice, so this isn't unique though messier if they split up.

My situation is somewhat more interesting than most, but no I didn’t need to convince my partner(s) of any of this and everyone thinks of it the same way. That was one of the things that attracted me to the person with whom I have been living for the past several years.

> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married.

Lawyers (except maybe divorce specialist) love that, at least from a driving business point of view. It’s kind of like avoiding the problems that can arise with the a fallout between business partners by not creating a formal legal arrangement at the outset (except every US jurisdiction backstops that with what amounts to “common law partnership” [0], while marriage coverage is more spotty.) Marriage is, for people in a committed relationship of the type it is designed for, a shortcut to things you would need lots of legal documents drawn up to kinda sorta approximate without it.

Including, messy as divorce can be, the relatively easy, straightforward, and predictable unwinding of the partnership compared with one that isn't a marriage but involves the same kind of long term mutual support and resource sharing that marriage is designed to deal with.

[0] mostly, though, for the benefit of predictability for people who might want to sue you.

Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage : https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-to... and only one of them, texas, is a top 5 state as far as population goes.

So it's definitely a minority.

> Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage

10/51 States (including D.C. as a state) per your source.

>Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so?

For same-sex couples, the legal ability to complicate their financial situation was hard won. Recall: Only 10 years ago it took an executive order by the President of the United States to prevent hospitals that receive government funding from denying a same-sex partner visitation.

Legal marriage is a cultural legitimizer that has value to some.

I argue that instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in. There is zero reason for the government to treat a couple as a couple rather than as two individuals. In the past it might have made sense, when the expectation was that the man worked and the woman didn’t and gay people didn’t exist. That is not reality. Why are we pretending like there is some kind of virtue in throwing a $30k party and then falling out of love five years later but staying together because divorce is expensive?

>...Instead of pushing for marriage equality it might have been better to push for marriage to become a private contract matter, with expiration dates, extensions, remedies, and such built in.

No, it would not have been better. We were concerned about whether we'd be able to visit our loved ones in the hospital, or make decisions about their critical care when they were incapacitated, or whether we'd be able to legally pass on property. We did not have equal dignity before the law, those of us whose relationships were considered illegitimate. We weren't really concerned, and still aren't concerned, with creating the most libertarian expression of legal coupling. We are still fighting to be treated like everyone else.

Breaking up without being married is even more work, this is a shortsighted outlook. A partition sale for jointly owned real estate can be more expensive and time consuming than a divorce. And what happens if your non spouse partner dies is a bigger problem

You're 100% right. Most functional divorces I have seen, are those where process end up quickly, especially if there are children. For the sake of their kids it's the best thing that can happen.

The movie "Marriage Story" it's a great reflection of your point, in how the lawyers weaponize resentment in relationships (affairs, deadbedrooms, chores neglect, etc) to get the process going for as long as possible with the promise of getting the best %... but in the end, their funds are eaten away by legal fees.

#NotAllLawyers of course, they already have (with some exceptions) an underserved bad rap, and I have meet some with an ethic code of steel. But it's better the be aware that can still happen.

Yeah, certainly not trying to bash lawyers. I'm a billable consultant myself. I don't think our lawyers were trying to do anything wrong.

This was the process. Exchange information, Negotiate, if negotiation fails - meet w judge for pre-trial opinion (what they would rule with current information). If still contested, Discovery building up to Trial.

If they were milking us, they'd be pushing for the trial, cause the discovery is the real billable hours killer.

But, I had to take the responsibility when it looks like the negotiation is going badly - let's get this in front of the judge NOW. Discovery/trial legal bills would have wiped out most of our assets at the time.

No, as a lawyer who personally just completed this process, my faith in my profession will never be the same after witnessing the toxic mix of bad faith and incompetence of the opposing lawyer, collusive ineffectiveness of the retired judge we hired to act as mediator, and virtually everything else about the process. The first 10 months were wasted with those two failing to read past page 1 of a critical document to find the operative language and being unable to craft a coherent plan as a result. That was just the start.

The lesson I learned was it doesn't matter how high-minded your rules, principles and processes are, the matrimonial bar and bench seems to be a magnet for just craven incompence, mean spiritedness, and, when you get past all of that, in the best case, indifference to the unnecessary suffering they cause. So while I appreciate the optimism of the article, and in general I agree with the principle that lawyers are unnecessarily "bashed", when it comes to the matrimonial bar some higher level of regulation, self regulation or other form of redress is required.

A lawyer friend who has colleagues working in Family Law says they (the family lawyers) describe their practice as "Feelings Court". The law itself is a guideline, adherence to the rules for e.g. contents of filings is on a meh-effort basis (beyond things that are completely objective such as tax returns).

Yeah from what I've heard, family court is super wonky and does not follow the same standards that normal courts do, yet still have the same full force of law! It's crazy and makes me want to stay away from them with a 10 foot pole.

Agreed, in my case I offered a settlement early on for uncontested divorce, literally dividing everything in half. My spouse hired an attorney whose website says he knows how to find the money the other side is hiding. Well, tens of thousands of dollars and 18 months later, we arrive at mediation and settle on the identical division, which just about everyone thinks is unfair because she took all the cash and home equity I get just the business assets. Risk doesn't really get priced in.

But one of the worst things about it is that the mediator said she looked in really bad shape, like she'd been through the wringer. And we had complied with alacrity with her attorney's requests. I found that very inhumane of the attorney.

Edit: I think I meant to reply to the child comment.

I did a prenup with my wife. Wasnt easy because im an immigrant in China and she s Chinese, so when I proclaimed that a good mariage prepares for divorce, like we do now in France where separation of wealth is a trivial matter my family did for generations, I was met with defiance.

How big a fortune must I have for being so protective :D But in the end we did it, it made total sense to her: what she works for and buys with her money is hers, and vice versa.

Now we never have money issue or anything: she bought an appartment I have no stakes in nor claim to and she loves this financial independence. If we divorce, Ill prob pay an alemony since we have a child, but we wont tear each other over splitting possession: it s dealt with since the get go.

I think it helps mariages to do that. Especially multi cultural ones like ours where there's a lot of small traps along the way.

Different strokes I suppose, but my wife and I went all in when we married, with combined bank accounts, credit, car and home titles, etc. Our marriage feels stronger for that by signalling the commitment. (Married >20 years)

I got married a year ago. That's what we do.

There's no reason to "prepare for divorce" when both my wife and I made a vow before God to each other til we die.

The problem is that alot of people don't mean it. They don't mean their vow "for worse, for sickness, for poorer until death do us part". People forget there is a 100% chance of worse, sickness, and poorer.

Of course I can't comment on your particular situation nor do I wish you bad luck, but religious couples are as likely or more likely to get divorced compared to non-religious couples [0].

Or at least the majority of divorces in the US are among the religious (according to this particular poll).

Maybe "biased" because marriage is something more encouraged by religions in the first place.

[0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-s...

What he said is true: the vow has some strong words in it that a lot of people are not taking so seriously. Yes, just as many or more people who identify with a religion get divorced, but just because they identify that way on a form does not mean they are giving as much weight to the vow that some of us do. For us, our pastors counsel us at length to think through the commitment in advance—possible differences/preferences in many scenarios, including finances. We are taught to think of marriage as hard, and to take important steps to guard it along the way. Passively identifying with a faith is not the same as actively trying to let it guide your everyday life.

To me, it's like student loans - giving those "permanent vows" when you are 18 is like making an 18 year old sign up for $50,000 of debt to start a career with no future guarantee.

What happens when your life partner is screaming at you and stabbing the counter with a butcher knife because you dared to ask how she was doing?

Because that’s one of many instances that led to me getting a divorce.

I took the vow quite seriously, but treating it like a suicide pact is not a good move either.

Extremely tragic. I do not want to diminish your situation at all. The difference is that so many of the dozens and dozens of divorces I’m personally connected to had no tragedy such as yours and the people involved were not going into marriage prepared for the road ahead (something they could have enjoyed if they’d been in a more supportive community that taught them more). So many I know end the marriage for far less difficult situations than yours.

> Maybe "biased" because marriage is something more encouraged by religions in the first place.

Maybe? Ha. An entire thread of non- or semi-religious people arrogantly mocking the need for marriage...

And you think there is ‘maybe’ bias?

People change over time, and the people who made that vow at the age of 20 are probably not going to be the same people at the age of 40. If all goes well, the people that they have changed into will remain compatible with each other. But, sadly, all does not always go well. I know multiple older people who are trapped in miserable, loveless, emotionally destructive marriages that they feel they cannot leave solely because their 20 year-old selves made that vow before God. It's not that these people didn't "mean it", it's that they (like all of us) could not perfectly predict the future.

When I got divorced, I would have happily paid a huge one-time settlement payment to my wife to avoid going through the whole process. I had a lot of high value assets from before, that did not appreciate much during our marriage. (In Canada, you only have to pay 50% of the increase in asset value from wedding day to separation day). I intimated this to my wife. She took that as a sign of weakness and dragged me through the courts (with encouragement from some social workers). At the end of the legal process she ended up getting a paltry sum (as compared to my initial offer). Also since our marriage lasted very small period of time, her alimony came out to be zero. My initial offer was 5x the amount she got in end. But I had to pay the lawyers a lot. I would have rather given that money to her. Also, by the time the whole process ended, my assets had significantly grown in value, so I had to liquidate a smaller amount to pay her share.

Mandatory prenups that have to be approved by a judge along with the marriage license.

Mandatory coursework on what divorce looks like.

Affirmative renewal of the marriage every 7 years.

Marriage is nothing more than an implied legal contract, whose terms are set upon dissolution, and a lawyer would be disbarred for advising their client to enter into such agreements.

> You gotta treat it like your future is on fire.

I rather stupidly wrote my experience without reading all the comments, but wish I'd read this quote first. This is exactly how I'd sum up how to treat it!

> Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter!

this. The whole point of making a contract is to agree how to disagree. The best contracts spell out the edge cases. If both can be mature enough very early to talk about these, then it's a basis that predicts the ending to be civilized in the first place.

In reality motivation for marriage is a lot more complex than what can be spelled out in a contract. In my case how would I have put on paper the edge cases that came with wanting to get married to a manipulative, deeply broken, drama queen which was the only reference model my bi-polar, suicidal and abusive mother equipped me with. Or how would a young woman from a wife-beating father chose her spouse.

In my case marriage accelerated my own demise (a path that I was already on) but I needed that crash (without knowing it back then) to figure out the problem in the first place.

I've seen in myself and many friends (both smart and dumb, poor and rich) no matter how intelligent, prudent and sensible in other areas of life, people abandon all reason with love. Like it's the most powerful and destructive drugs of them all when taken by people who haven't fixed their own issues. Like women who go into it as a way of "fixing him" or guys who need somebody to "complete them" (or a million other ways to destroy themselves).

No amount of risk management can help you when your goal is to jump off a cliff.

Oddly couples never see it themselves. It's always the friends or a stranger who can tell with shocking accuracy by looking at the couple for only a few minutes why their dynamic is f'ed up.

When I got married the prenup was just a checkbox (yes/no) on the application form. I ticked yes of course, because I don't know anyone in Europe who in their sound mind would want to lose half of what they have (or more?) during a divorce. It's an archaic system leftover from a time when women did not work and so it served as a lifeline for them, but that isn't the case anymore, at least not in Europe as far as I've observed. And so while yes I am aware that most marriages will fail, and mine might just be one of them, I'm not afraid for the divorce process at all.

Don’t prenuptial agreements only cover prenuptial assets? Most first-time married people obviously aren’t bringing many assets in the first place.

Nah, depending on the state, the law permits them to cover nearly anything.

It's not usually the assets that cause a problem. It's future income that's the issue and usually in the context of a woman who raised kids and a man that worked.

Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?

Where I live prenups cover assets both: pre and post marriage. There is no such thing as co-owning anything unless both sides explicitly make it so.

From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.

I know a few people here in Cyprus who are here because they did not want to divorce (the other side made it clear it won't be amicable for them, with full intention of taking over all property). Instead, they just vanished to surface here :) (legal loopholes due to collisions between church vs civil marriage enables it to marry again while being married elsewhere). Of course, after that you got to be very careful about safeguarding your assets, but the infrastructure offered by this place - a former offshore tax haven - makes it easy even in much harder cases than "some dude who owes his wife an alimony".

Or just skip marriage altogether.

In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.

It might be worth swapping jurisdictions. Some places seem just bad for having any prolonged relationship.

or depending on your gender swap jurisdiction when you see it's going pear shaped. France sees quite a bit of divorce tourism from UK and other European countries because they're "less progressive". So if you have a lot of money to lose move the whole family to France and after 2 or 3 years get divorced there.

So you can’t be a room mate with the opposite sex without being considered common law married after that time period? I feel like any decent lawyer could blow that to pieces.

Usually part of the definition is holding yourself out to not married

same sex a applies as well in CA!

CA doesn't have common law marriage, so it is more accurate to say that it doesn't apply to same sex couples in the same way that it doesn't to oppozit5-sex couples.

My mistake, I heard that once before as a child and just parroted it. Very stupid of me

Correct, but CA recognizes common law marriage where it was triggered in other jurisdictions.

> Correct, but CA recognizes common law marriage where it was triggered in other jurisdictions.

Every US state recognizes common law marriage from other jurisdictions, and (because of federal Cobstitutional rulings) does so without regard to the gender of participants.

Maybe not, but I bet it's hard to claim the person you have a 10 year old child with is your room mate.

No, see kuang_eleven and my comment to him above. Many factors are weighed.

> common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage

These laws are awful and need to be changed.

Common Law Marriage doesn't seem to be a thing in the UK since 1753. Is this just a US thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clandestine_Marriages_Act_1753

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/living-together-mar...

https://www.familylives.org.uk/advice/your-family/relationsh...

Edit: also a related term, parental responsibility...

https://www.bma.org.uk/media/1840/bma-parental-responsibilit...

Edit2: also you can assign each other as "Next of Kin".

https://www.royalfree.nhs.uk/patients-visitors/advice-and-su...

Edit3: also note, married couples don't automatically have "Lasting power of attorney" which grants partners a say in their medical care, and being "Next of Kin" is not an equivalent.

https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/money-legal/lega...

So... don't get married, sign your name on the birth certificate, and fill in that NHS card

Isn’t it the same as a defector relationship? Australia also has a system where you don’t have to be married to be considered as a couple for some legal purposes.

You mean "de facto relationship"? From what I understand, no, it's the exact opposite.

https://www.gotocourt.com.au/family-law/de-facto-relationshi...

"The courts can make an order for the division of any property that you own together or separately. They may also order a split of any superannuation, or that one party pay spousal maintenance.

The net asset pool will include anything acquired before, during, or after separation. It does not matter whether the property was owned jointly or individually. When determining a property settlement, the court evaluates the types of contributions – financial and non-financial – made by either person, as well as their future needs."

Edit: this applies to AU "de facto relationship" vs UK "common law marriage" terms... it might be different when discussing different countries.

Indeed “defacto”. Damn auto correct.

Not just the USA. New Zealand calls it "de facto marriage" https://www.justice.govt.nz/family/separation-divorce/divide...

>Is this just a US thing?

Canada too.

In the very few places where common law marriage is allowed, it still requires the couple to hold themselves out in public as married. It does not "trick" people into getting married if they don't treat themselves as married.

There can be complications if one party claims to be common-law married and the other does not, especially during divorces.

Those factors can be, amongst others: joint financial accounts, mortgage, title to assets, children, vehicle insurance policies, reciprocal wills, reciprocal beneficiaries of life insurance, health coverage, intimacy, etc. What I’m getting at is that it’s not that hard to hold yourself out as married when you’ve got so much “entanglement.”

That’s not always the case. Here in Ontario there was a case of a relationship being declared common law by a court despite not cohabitating. That is quite unusual, but simply living together for 3 years (or 1 year with a child) is the normal yardstick courts use.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7327501/couple-no-home-no-kids-sp...

Yes in the provice of Ontario common-law spouses have the same rights to spousal support as married couples if they have been living together for at least three years, or if they have a child together and have been living together in a relationship of some permanence.

Cold comfort if she gets pregnant and now you have no say.

Don't make her pregnant.

Unfortunately, that requires exercising your say ahead of time, through contraception, vasectomy, or the radical step of making sure that your long-term goals are aligned with those of your partner.

You don't have to be married to the mother of your kids in many countries.

Huh?

> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married.

Everyone already gets a mandatory pre-nup when they get married. It's <whatever the default divorce law of the land in your jurisdiction> is.

IANAL, but as I understand it, having a pre-nup, in most jurisdiction is not a great shield against vindictive litigation.

There are other good reasons to get one, though.

Being required to agree on something in advance with your prospective spouse would be different from agreeing to go with the default. It means learning a bit about what is standard, and putting some thought into whether what you want is different from that. It would also remove the negative signal of asking for a prenup: if everyone is required to talk and agree on something, then you aren't doing something that indicates low confidence in the success of your marriage.

This is great and important advice. You made a very smart move.

Parents went through a 20 year divorce and indeed the lawyers bled them dry.

A divorce after 20 years of marriage, or a divorce that took 20 from initiation to conclusion? (In normal context, I’d read it as the former; in this specific context, it seems ambiguous.)

No one has enough wealth to hire divorce lawyers for 20 years. Even Bezos would be on the streets.

> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married.

Isn't this basically what happened everywhere in the civilized world? People used to just dump their families so now you're legally required to support spouses and children (even if not legally married).

This then leads to shock headlines like "Billionaire forced to share unearned fortune with the person they agreed to legally conjoin themselves with"

What are you proposing that's different from that?

What places have mandatory pre-nuptial agreements?

Everywhere? The point of an explicit pre-nuptial is to opt out of what would happen by default. It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you don't have a pre-nup, then you get the standard pre-nup terms which have usually been established over a long period of time, with detailed rules about homes, children, property etc.

Do you think that’s what GGP meant (or others would most naturally read) in the phrase “I’d be in favor of mandatory pre-nups”? I do not.

Well, that's why I asked my question, ("What are you proposing that's different from that?") because I don't know what he means by mandatory pre-nups, because we already have a mandatory pre-nuptial agreement, and indeed it sometimes kicks in literally before any nuptials.

Clearly they intend something else than a mandatory agreement you sign up for before marraige, because that exists, but they're not really providing any details on how it would differ?

Maybe pre-nup has a different meaning where you live. I'm in the US, and here a pre-nup is an agreement that defines custom rules for a marriage and divorce that are override, add to, and/or clarify the rules of the default marital contract. So, not everyone has one.

Wikipedia defines it well:

> Couples enter into a written prenuptial agreement to supersede many of the default marital laws that would otherwise apply in the event of divorce, such as the laws that govern the division of property, retirement benefits, savings, and the right to seek alimony (spousal support) with agreed-upon terms that provide certainty and clarify their marital rights.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement

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