Would you get married again??

I ve been here for many months reading stories from others - I am 38 years old in a great financial position and I just get horrified when I read the stories of divorce and people literally getting wiped out.

I have my own london house (bought in 2002) so lots of equity and a great job in IT earning good money - Life seems great but there is pressure to get married

Would anyone like to explain when and if they would get remarried?

I am afraid that when you get married (or enter into a formal civil partnership) the price of getting out of that relationship by way of divorce is that the courts have jurisdiction over all your assets and have the final say in how those assets are distributed. If more people were aware of this before they got married then I suspect there would be many fewer marriages.

As the law currently stands if you do not get married (or enter into a civil partnership) then your assets and income are yours and there is nothing any court can do about it - even if you live with someone else.

But please note that there is continual campaign to assimilate the rights of cohabitees with married couples. It is supposedly 'unjust' that cohabiting couples have no rights when they split up. I don't subscribe to that view. At the moment people do at least have a choice over whether to get married or not. If you ascribe the same 'rights' to unmarried couples as to married couples then everyone is deprived of any meaningful choice and the courts would always have jurisdiction. The courts would, of course, be happy to the take the jurisdiction and the power that goes with it.

You do need to be aware of this campaign. Like so called 'hate' crime these things have a habit of sneaking up on people if they are not vigilant.

Absolutely not, I lost a lot when my wife walked out on me and I have taken the last ten years building up my finances to something way beyond what I thought I would, helped by the fact that I don’t have someone spending faster than I am earning.

I have a partner and we spend a lot of time together, but maintain separate homes, perhaps a week or so at mine and then a week or so at theirs and every so often we have a few days on our own. It works for us and neither of us wants to be in a position where we have to separate our finances should we split up. Purchasing a property together might be on the cards in the future, but we are in a position that we would both keep hold of our current homes so should it all go wrong and we have to sell up we have the ability to go back to our previous lives.

A friend of mine when he divorced went out and got himself sterilised. He was adamant that he would never get married and have to start over again and he also wanted to protect himself from any girlfriends accidentally getting pregnant by him to “Secure their future”

As a single guy at work once said to me, if you can’t afford to get divorced then you can’t afford to get married.

By the way, if a couple is not married then they can, say, buy a property jointly together and have a deed of trust which says that A owns 90% and B owns 10% (or whatever percentages you fancy). If they split up then that deed of trust determines what they get. A court cannot interfere with it. The position is very different upon divorce.

Similarly an unmarried couple can make wills benefiting one another or open a joint bank account or whatever if they want. The point is, they are free to make whatever arrangements they want and a court cannot just tear up those arrangements.

It is true that so far as a house is concerned this works best in the type of situation described by Andy above - where each has a property of their own and they are talking about a third property. If a cohabiting couple buy one property together and then live in it together for X years with a deed of trust in place they should be fine. However, when a relationship lasts for any length of time there is always the possibility that A will say he/she paid for an extension or whatever. If the deed of trust is not drawn up at the time they bought the property together and if it is not explicit about such situations then it can give rise to litigation. At worst, though, that litigation is about property rights rather than being an exercise of discretion by a court over all the couple's assets and incomes.

I am not sure if I get married again, but I did wanted to get married at the first place.

Why are you here? More you digging into finding the disadvantages of marriage, more you'll find them. More you concentrate on the problem, bigger it becomes. If you don't want to get married - don't. why do you need almost an excuse for it? You can find a women who were married before and she probably would not mind about marriage at all.

And not all marriages finishing bad. This forum is very helpful but designed for "bad cases". And it doesn't mean that your future marriage has to be the same.

Rather then read all this horrified stories, ask yourself - do you really love that person and want to be with them for rest of your life? And if the answer is yes, start reading a 'happy forums' on how to maintain good relationship.

With love,
Yana x

>>do you really love that person and want to be with them for rest of your life?

There is very much more to it than that. For instance, one blindingly obvious question you would have to ask even based on your assumptions is, 'Does the other person really love me and want to be with me for the rest of our lives?' This is not a one sided equation. Just being clear eyed about this can save a lot of grief.

Also, whether one likes it or not marriage has many consequences. Plain prudence suggests being aware of those consequences before taking what is an important decision. No-one would go into a shop and buy something without knowing the price. Marriage is an even more important transaction or sacrament or whatever you choose to call it.

Of course, that is not to say that people do not get married without a second thought or that weighing up every option can lead to paralysis but human beings are rational as well as emotional. Ditching one in favour of the other rarely leads to a good result. There is a balance to be had between the two.

>There is a balance to be had between the two.

Totally agree, the balance is the key in any aspect of life.

>'Does the other person really love me and want to be with me for the rest of our lives?' This is not a one sided equation.

Thats what you finding out when you propose

>No-one would go into a shop and buy something without knowing the price.

Thats so not true.

>>>>'Does the other person really love me and want to be with me for the rest of our lives?' This is not a one sided equation.

Thats what you finding out when you propose smiling smiley<<<

No, actually, it isn't.

>>>>No-one would go into a shop and buy something without knowing the price.

Thats so not true.<<<<

There you have a point in two situations. (1) When the proposed purchaser is like Bill Gates to whom price probably doesn't matter (although people tend not to get to that sort of position without being very aware of price in a broad sense in the journey getting there). (2) The sort of person to whom 'look before you leap' means nothing. Such people are by no means uncommon. They tend to get divorced by their spouses rather a lot.