You can replicate a lot of the benefits of marriage via contract, but not the really important ones, basically anything that requires the government to treat you as married. We went through a lot of this before gay marriage was legalized
I should know, every thread on the internet about marriage end up with the 50% divorce rate stat and itâs always the same people who cite them. go figures.
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I understand why everyone is focused on the financial side (this is FD after all), but I donât think you can boil marriage down simply to numbers on a spreadsheet. For many people there is a business side AND an emotional side.
Like it or not, in many circles marriage is the norm for long term relationships. Sure you can tell everyone you know to pound sand when they try to start a conversation about when you are going to marry your 10+ year GF/BF. But you will quickly run out of friends⌠At least in my area, you can have a nice, non-extravagant wedding for $10k. At that point itâs just a nice party for family and friends.
Find the right partner instead of trying to fit a bad one into a financial contract.
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I given up on caring what other people think about me a long time ago. If youâre just getting married just to have âfriendsâ, well, thatâs not a very wise choice.
Just remember, the person you marry is not the person you divorce. Just because one party is happy, doesnât mean the other one is happy too. Thus, get ready for a butt pounding (financially) when the unhappy party all of a sudden files for divorce.
Good luck with your roulette wheel.
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Many people? I would hope thatâs the case for nearly everyone!
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We got married in 1992 and spent $1500 total. Thatâs fifteen-hundred dollars, to make it clear I didnât leave off any zeros. We paid for it ourselves, no financial help from either side. We didnât have a lot of money at the time. We werenât trying to make our wedding into something to impress everyone else.
The number of guests was around 60. We had a sit-down dinner in a private room at a local restaurant that weâd scoped out ahead of time. No alcohol to keep the costs down. The food was much better than at other catered weddings we later attended in fancy halls. We had only minimal flowers, bride, groom, matron of honor, best man, church altar. Standard size wedding cake. No music. We had pictures taken at a photography studio that was a couple of doors down from the restaurant. The rest of our wedding /reception pictures were taken by our guests who made copies for us. My BIL shot some video during and after the ceremony. I had a nice, brand-new wedding dress that cost $189. It looked as good as any that add a zero or two to the price.
The only thing Iâd do differently today is leave some of the guests off the list. We were somewhat âpressuredâ by family on both sides to invite âso-and-soâ. Weddings are supposed to be about the couple getting married, not the guests. Itâs not the coupleâs job to impress them, either.
Even $10K sounds extravagant to me today, for a wedding. I worked with a woman who had spent $10K just on her wedding dress. I couldnât see the sense in it.
My neighborâs daughter just got married last month. Last year my neighbor was sharing some of her stress with me over the potential costs. They were paying for the wedding, totally. Iâm not sure why. Daughter has been living away from home for several years and is about 25/26. But I digress.
Guests were to include cousins that my neighbor hadnât seen since childhood and, therefore, the bride-to-be had never met. I asked point blank, âWhy invite them?â She felt obligated to, because âtheyâre family.â Quote for just the reception was about $10K, maybe for a couple of hundred guests.
Just my opinion, but I think too much money is spent on weddings to impress guests. Or to please them. Or to brag to others about how much was spent.
Or out of pressure from family to invite brideâs deceased motherâs cousin who hadnât been seen by said mother since childhood, because brideâs maternal grandmother wants her sister there and thinks that her sister would appreciate having her daughter there also. Or grooms step-motherâs 2 brothers announcing loudly at a funeral that they were looking forward to our wedding, when they werenât originally going to be on the guest list. With SO, wife, and 2 kids, that multiplied the guest list some. Yes, this happened to us. Though groom did put his foot down when step-mother tried to get him to invite her nephews. 
In hindsight, we could have eloped. 
Speaking of the emotional side of marriage, oneâs wedding planning is an excellent place for each party to the marriage to start asserting themselves against this sort of thing.
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Dang!!
Before I got married I kinda wanted to do that and told my fiance that any money our parents wanted to put into the wedding we should use for a down payment on a house. That got shot down right quick. But Iâm kinda glad it did while I still bemoan the amount of money spent (>$20k) we made out pretty well in gifts/checks and didnât spend a sig. amount of our own money on it (obv our respective inheritances have been affected but who really knows how thatâll play out in 40-50 years). And the memory really is nice.
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30% divorce rate for college graduates by age 46 (Still high, but a significantly lower than the overall rate (49% for high school graduates, 59% for less than high school).
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Actually, itâs not. There are many studies that debunk this number. Albeit, itâs not a wild swing, but itâs not 52%.
From your article:
You said it was 52% and then went on to cite an article that shows itâs less.
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Good luck to you then sir. Hope it all works out for you. Apologies for being off by 2%.
Thereâs no room for condescension here. I was merely pointing out that you claimed 52% and then cited an article saying itâs 41 to 50%, implying there is a fairly wide range. The fact of the matter is, too many people cite this figure without backup. You attempted to backup your claim by citing an article that clearly differed from your claim, which goes to show that there are believers that donât care enough to do proper research of the underlying data and simply spout off figures as if theyâre fact.
No reason to be defensive and make snarky comments. If you have a claim, support it by all means. But next time, provide something that backs up up rather than contradicts it.
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Always room. This is an open discussion. I was only claiming what the "data states. However, one can find data to state just about any #. Which, TBH, the data is not all that reliable. Reason being, the govât doesnât report marriage #'s 100% accurately.
For those of you who donât know @Greatness, he has data from his own failed marriage and thatâs all the data he needs in order to know that getting married ainât worth it. And heâs not shy it letting you know thatâs why he thinks marriage is for the birds.
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I thought Iâd read at one time that the data doesnât account for people who were married/divorced multiple times.
If so, a data point that says 50% of marriages end in divorce doesnât necessarily mean that each divorce involved totally unique people. Some people get married again and again without ever learning from their mistakes.
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Opinions vary meed; no need to get personal. Seems I continue to strike a cord with you. Just stating the other side of things. Not everyone can wear rose colored glasses such as some anonymous members.
In theory, marriage is wonderful. And, for a time, it is. However, divorce is not and a very real possibility. As for mine, it was financially painless. However, it could had been much worse. This is not a male vs. female thing. Itâs more of a one with a lot of assets prior to marriage to one with not many assets prior to marriage. Itâs just reality. Since youâve not gone through it, you have no idea. Itâs not safe in this day an age. As one gets older and marries with more assets, itâs a big liability that can cause one to lose everything; sometimes more than everything. To all who are not married, proceed wisely.
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It will be interesting to see the stats going forward on same-sex divorces. Hopefully, I wonât become one of those statistics.
There havenât been more than a handful so far. The former legal situation before the Obergefell decision caused a weird situation in which you be legally married in one state, but lacked the standing to get divorced in the state you reside in, nor the residency in the state of marriage to petition for divorce.
They will be high, of course. Specializing in same-sex divorce is going to be good business for some divorce lawyers.
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Yeah. Weâre somewhat less hung up on monogamy, but that doesnât insulate us from the forces that break up hetero unions.
From the couple of studies I have seen which were based on comparing long term male and female homosexual couples to married heterosexual couples. Male homosexual couples had the lowest âdivorceâ rate, female homosexual couples had a much higher divorce than their male counter parts either just below or above hetero couples. These studies are imperfect of course not the least of which because long term relationship and marriage are materially different in a number of ways. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in a decade or two.
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on divorce⌠http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
includes state by state data and attorney interviews.
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