My Opinions on Marriage

08 Jan 2024 | ~3 minute read

I saw a post on Mastodon recently asking about folk's opinions on Marriage. I replied, but thought I'd write my thoughts out here in a longer form.

Here's the post as it appeared on Mastodon (thanks to Mastopoet for creating the screenshot):

Personally, I think marriage is overrated and I don't really see the point of it. I say that as a married man, not because I'm jaded, or in an unhappy relationship (I love my wife and we're very happy together), but the whole concept of marriage seems silly to me.

So why on earth did you get married then, Kev?

-- All the readers

Great question, dear reader. My wife and I have been together for 17 years, but we only got married 4 years ago. We did this because we were due to adopt our 2 sons.

We never wanted kids, but later decided we wanted a family. Still not wanting to add to the problem of over-population, we opted to adopt instead of popping a couple of biological kids out.

Marriage isn't a requirement to adopt in the UK, but we felt that us all having the same surname would be less confusing for the kids. So, we got hitched and became "The Quirks".

I spoke about this a little bit with Robb Knight during our PenPal conversation. Neither my wife and I particularly wanted to get married - we both found it to be a frivolous expense that we really didn't need. We ended up having a "small" wedding, but it still cost in excess of £10,000. Which is ridiculous to me.

Anyway, I digress...

The benefits of being married

I knew there were some legit benefits to being married in the UK, but I didn't actually know what they were. After doing a very quick web search and reading a single post on the matter some research, it appears that married couples in the UK get the following benefits:

• Inheritance rights - a will is not required for one of us the inherit everything if the other one snuffs it
• Parental responsibilities - weirdly, I get more rights as a father. I get a say in where the kids go to school, their religion, medical treatment and I can take them abroad
• Tax breaks - there's some tax breaks if one half of the couple doesn't pay tax
• Joint ownership - We have joint ownership of all our assets

That's it. That's all I could find. Hardly seems worth the £10,000+ now, considering I could just write a will that leaves everything to my wife, and vice-versa.

The parental responsibilities thing surprised me though. I didn't realise that fathers who weren't married have so few rights. It seems that without a wedding ring, we're glorified sperm donors in the eyes of the law.

Final thoughts

Despite being married, I still find the whole thing pointless. If you're thinking about getting married to your significant other, and want some advice, mine would be to not bother.

Instead, write a will and save yourself thousands of pounds. You could put it toward home improvements, an amazing holiday, a new car, or (if you're anything like me) a new motorbike. 🙃

• Opinion