But - (and maybe some who are really happily married can share their opinion) - does it really matter whether you got married? The good thing is the relationship. The 'being married' part is a small detail. Who cares? What difference does it make? If you didn't get married, would that have prevented or limited your relationship?
Happily married here :) For me it would not make much of a difference regarding the quality of the relationship. We don't wear rings or celebrate our anniversary much. I took my husband's name because it is way shorter than my original one, otherwise he would have taken mine. I wanted to get married mainly for the reasons @boston wrote, to be somewhat financially protected while a stay at home parent. Plus I have a difficult relationship with my mother, and she does not like my husband, so I wanted to make 100% sure she could not get her hands on our child if something should happen to me.
If we hadn't had a child I would not have gotten married I think.
Jacobs points regarding cousin Elmo are very important though. You need to take care of these things very deliberately, with a marriage a lot of it is granted automatically.
I'm getting married next week, after cohabiting with my SO for over 9 years.
We finally decided to take this step for a number of reasons already outlined by other posters. Certain rights are much more easily accessed through marriage (although still possible with legal framework and a lot of paperwork), there are currently economical benefits from a tax code standpoint in the USA if one of us were to have a higher income or we were to alternate working (which has been the case), another for our situation is citizenship....we are both US citizens but I have EU citizenship which my SO will be able to attain after 2 years and it gives us much more geographical freedom in the future.
Another is our families. Call it old school, but it will make both sides of the family very happy for us to make it official, despite feeling very close without the contract in place. FWIW we do not plan on having kids, but if it ever does happen, there are certain benefits to having a legal family unit.
We've talked about many aspects of marriage, and will continue maintaining relatively separate finances (besides what we choose to co-mingle in the future), as well as separate property. After reading Harry Brownes' "How I Found Freedom In An Unfree World", many of the ideas around marriage resonated with both of us, and yet we still chose to take this step.
C40 asked “does it really matter whether you got married?” For me, yes but I grew up in a family and extended family where marriage is both a common and stable part of life.
I can see that for people without that background or indeed with the opposite background marriage may not be a goal and may not necessarily add anything to the relationship. Two people coming together from very different backgrounds may have a hard time finding a solution that suits them both.
