Reply to What's so bad about living in sin?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The problem with not marrying when you are in a LTR, is that the legal rights associated with marriage are legion and ever-changing.  Currently in Maryland, there are over 400 rights granted to married couples that are not granted to cohabitants or even common-law marriages.  In the federal laws, there are over 1100.  Yes, you can pay to duplicate many of these, but even if you reviewed the laws and were current today, legislation that hasn't passed or even been proposed yet can change the picture in a matter of weeks.  By this time next year, there will be new laws and rights granted to marriages that are not granted in your legal paperwork.  When that happens, all married couples are immediately granted the legal protections, but those who are in LTR with legal paperwork would have to amend their paperwork to include those changes (if they even knew about them--many of these changes are never really publicized well).

Also be careful about how your documents are drafted.  I know of a case where a couple had such documents, but due to a slight issue in the legalese during drafting when one partner died, the family of the deceased partner was able to successfully sue and overturn the final directives.  That included having the body returned to their home state for interment and half of the property going to the family instead of to the surviving partner.  Additionally, the surviving partner had to sell the joint home to award the family half of the value of the property.  Marriage laws are designed to withstand such cases much better than privately drafted documents.[/quote]

I think when you get married many people don't realize all the rights being conferred in marriage, I know I didn't, and many of those things are the furthest from your mind until something happens like the spouse cheats and when you look to divorce you see that he/she is entitled to half your pension etc.  By the other side of the coin many people living together haven't thought thru all the things they give up legally speaking by not being married until something happens like your loved one is injured and you can't make any of the care decisions etc.  In some ways, you can be more a la carte in the LTR, for example you don't want your boyfriend to be entitled to your 401K if you split up but you want to split the house. You start from all these rights for the spouse when you are married and have to be deliberate in taking any away, like having a pre-nup while you start with no rights by being a live-in girlfriend/boyfriend and have to be deliberate in adding them in.

Legal reasons aside, if my daughters truly never wanted to get married, I'm talking if Prince Charming rode up on a white horse and asked to marry her she would turn him down because she didn't believe in martiage ...I would have no problems with her living with her boyfriend. I wouldn't feel like she was settling for something she didn't want in order to be with him.  I always think back to the Harry met Sally comment when she says "all this time I've been saying that he didn't want to get married.  But the truth is that he didn't want to marry me."  I don't want my daughters to be married to the wrong person but I also don't want them to stay living with someone that isn't ready to commit in the legal sense (either thru marriage in the near term  or coming the closest you could get to the legal protections in marriage while living together)

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