
Living with an Unmarried Partner Now Common for Young Adults - infodocket
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/11/cohabitaiton-is-up-marriage-is-down-for-young-adults.html
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seandoe
My girlfriend and I have been together for several years. We're happy. We're
not religious at all. I don't see why we have to declare our relationship
commitment to the government. Beyond that, our incomes are similar and after
some research it looks as if we would pay more in taxes if we were married.
Plus, my girlfriend has substantial student loan debt and is on the public
service loan forgiveness track. Her monthly payments are based on her income.
If we were married my income would be considered and her payments would go up
significantly. So... marriage?

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devwastaken
>to the government

Marriage has privledges it grants that you may find necessary when you least
expect. Medical responsibility is one of them. You don't have a say in their
medical treatment if they are unconscious or otherwise unable to make
judgements.

I understand not wanting the religious part, and I understand reviewing the
cons of marriage and rejecting it, but making it about the 'government
knowing' is the least of the problem really.

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jdavis703
> but making it about the 'government knowing' is the least of the problem
> really.

In the case of divorce that actually becomes very important. You now have a
judge from the government who is making life decisions for you and your
family. Source: grew up in a divorced household.

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johnm1019
As someone who lived abroad for 6+ years then returned to my home country
happily married I want to give out this advice: if living/working abroad from
your home country and having your partner with you is an important part of
your life plan - get married now. This includes couples who have the same
citizenship but might go abroad for work/travel for an extensive period of
time. While many countries have domestic partnerships, and other forms of
legal "pair-hood" you could also theoretically use, it's often not recognized
across country lines and many times can slow down and really complicate
paperwork because foreign jurisdictions don't understand the law in other
countries. Without it your ability to get travel/resident/work documents in
foreign countries together can spiral out of control or not happen at all.
Then you would have to choose between your life goal, dream job, or
significant other.

This is one of those things many people I've spoken with never considered or
knew about (why would you!) until it was too late and -- had they been
"married" for 2/3/5 years or some threshold, everything would've been a
cakewalk.

~~~
barrow-rider
+1

Canadian immigration gave us hell because we could only prove the relationship
existed for 11 months and 3 weeks (gotta be able to prove 1 year).

In the end we were saved by online pizza receipts and amazon orders that
proved we were living in the same place at the same time for a while. Delayed
the application for months though. Should have just put a ring on it earlier,
even if a pro-forma sign-at-the-courthouse thing.

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flipp3r
As an unmarried Young Adult (in the Netherlands) myself I can give my 2 cents
about why I wouldn't get married; I've simply taken to heart the advice nearly
every senior developer would give me; Don't EVER get married.

~~~
tptacek
That is very weird advice. I've been a software developer since the mid-1990s,
when I was a teenager, got married at 21, had two kids, started several
companies, sold some of them, and getting married is easily the single best
decision I ever made.

I would like to gingerly suggest that this is a subject for which you might
not want to sole-source your advice from software developers. We are an odd
lot.

~~~
sjg007
Married men live longer too.

~~~
gxigzigxigxi
Something something correlation causation

~~~
stcredzero
There are a lot of instances where long married men lose their wives then die
very soon afterwards. When there's a correlation of something with longevity
_and_ removing the something is soon followed by death, then there's good
reason to believe the causation theory.

~~~
barrow-rider
True for both partners -- usually after one dies the elderly widow/widower
tend to have ~5 years or less.

Some of that is just timing, like if the average age of death per the actuary
tables is like 79, and your spouse dies at 80, you're statistically going
fairly soon as well.

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brobdingnagians
Marriage is hard, so is starting a company. But both are worth it and
incredibly rewarding; you learn a lot and you experience things in married
life that you can't in any other way. There is something about the lifelong
commitment which changes things, and that is amazing to me.

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setquk
Honestly I think this is a good thing.

If I knew what I knew now, from my own relationship after being married for 20
years, and observation of friends, I would not have got married. People can
drift apart. Situations change. Health problems get between you. What can
remain is obligation and legal difficulty for a lot of people and nothing
more. And in some countries, such as the UK where I live, this is a massive
problem because the law is predatory and unfair towards one or both parties.
This is an inescapable risk as well.

I am extremely lucky with the respect that we are extremely good friends, but
we go our own ways now and cross paths to look after our children together and
share our advantage of working together to go forwards in life.

We are still bound by law however which makes it difficult to be independent
once tied if you need to be and is also a situation which is expensive and
difficult to change.

And the only reason we got married was it was seen as the done thing and a lot
of peer pressure from the last generation. I've learned to think about things
as calculated risks and not take advice from my parents now.

~~~
Gibbon1
> the law is predatory and unfair towards one or both parties.

When I got divorced 20 years ago some of my friends thought it was unfair that
my ex took $20k (of $40k) out of savings, packed her stuff and left. When I
tell that to men my age they're like HFS!!! _fist bump_

Another fiend got divorces, wife got full custody, child support and alimony.
The take was so much he and his two kids had to move back into his mom's two
bedroom house.

Friend of mines after she married her husband quit his job and started playing
video games full time. Spoonged off her for ten years till she divorce him.
And so now he's legally sponging off her using his partial custody as a lever.

Currently I have a GF who's been unemployed for a year. Sort of typical in her
industry. If we were married we'd be hosed because health insurance would cost
me another $800/month.

That aside, problem with the law is the law can't cover the myriad of ways
people can get screwed over in relationships. My take is don't get married it
either allows the other person to screw you or gives others the ability to
screw you.

~~~
setquk
This is exactly it. The real issue is that even the couples who genuinely want
to just walk away are sold the idea of financial justice.

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tetra_proxy
I am 27 and I've been with my current partner for almost 3 years and we've
semi-lived together most of that time. She's currently still at university so
we spend weekends and holidays together. Her parents are divorced and mine are
married but miserable, also neither of us has any religious drive to get
married (I'm pagan and shes agnostic). We agreed early on that neither of us
wants to get married or have kids but we plan on spending our lives together.

~~~
DanBC
Have you written wills?

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tuxxy
I'm 22, not religious (escaped religion, actually), and I live with my
partner. We're a bit over one year having lived together and I would say we're
very happy.

We have both decided to not discuss marriage until we're 26. We both know that
people change and we want to make sure we both have our independence and our
early 20s.

~~~
thaumasiotes
What exactly is it that you're saving your early 20s for?

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samspenc
The interesting things is that the total numbers don't match - does that imply
that more young people are single?

For example, age 18-24: drop of 22.6% married or with partner

* 1968 = 39.2% married + 0.1% with partner = 39.3%

* 2018 = 7.3% married + 9.4% with partner = 16.7%

Age 25-34: drop of 26.6% married or with partner

* 1968 = 81.5% married + 0.2% with partner = 81.7%

* 2018 = 40.3% married + 14.8% with partner = 55.1%

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sheepmullet
An interesting thought experiment: what would marriage have to be like to make
marriage appealing again?

~~~
jdavis703
It would need to be as easy as starting or quitting a job. There also couldn't
be pre-conditions around it such as a limit of two people, prohibitions on
same-sex marriage, and bans on "adultery."

~~~
tptacek
You are describing an arrangement totally unlike marriage. If you want
termination-at-will, don't get married! If there is some social pressure to
get married when you don't want to, _that pressure_ is wrong; you should only
get married when you're sure it's the right thing to do.

On the other hand, at least in the US, there are huge numbers of people who
fought for decades just to have the right to enter into the arrangement we're
pretending needs to be fundamentally re-thought.

~~~
jdavis703
The idea is to get some of the government benefits of marriage without the
overhead, i.e. the ability to make medical decisions and potentially lower tax
rates depending on income situations.

Past generations of my family were prohibited from marriage because of race.
It took a lot of rethinking of what marriage was for them to be granted those
rights, ditto for LGBT people who just got those rights a few years ago in the
US. There's still no reason why the current definition of marriage is the
right definition.

~~~
tptacek
Can't you arrange to make medical decisions for each other without being
married? Isn't that what an MPOA does? I'm not sure what tax benefits you're
looking at but I believe we pay for the right to be married.

From a formal perspective, considering marriage as a (very old) legal and
economic arrangement, and stripping it down to its essence (without any of the
bullshit about it being a means to bring children into the world or express
Judeo-Christian values), marriage is about durable interdependency. You agree
to combine assets and opportunities, in order to maximize those opportunities
jointly and to bear the costs of misfortune together.

Define marriage as an "at-will" arrangement dispenses with durability. A
person in a transient marriage can't reasonably put their spouse through
medical school, or help them start a company --- or, for that matter, raise
children --- without an onerous set of additional contractual arrangements
that would asymptotically approach what marriage already is.

Again: it's totally reasonable to want a long-term at-will relationship, and
to seek one out. You don't have to get married.

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charlieflowers
I have also heard that some people are now having sex outside of marriage.

~~~
civilian
(People have always had sex outside of marriage. If anything, the current
generation is doing it with honest communication, rather than going behind
their partner's back.)

~~~
derefr
If you're suggesting that as a justification for an assumed rise in rates of
casual sex among youth, well, forget it:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-
sex...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-
recession/573949/)

~~~
charlieflowers
I guess it was somewhat subtle, but my post was intended as a joke.

~~~
apricot13
I got it!

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gremlinsinc
this is horrible...the eroding of the morals/values of America...jk I'm an ex-
mormon now agnostic... who cares if two people live together, who cares if
lgbt's get married...live and let love...

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detcader
To paraphrase someone else, marriage has, historically, been a pretty
atrocious institution for women. Maybe as women as a class become educated and
conscious of history, there is now an ambient awareness of this.

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graycat
For a species with a lot of weak, sick, or dead limbs on the tree, Darwin has
a solution.

