"The report's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says married people have it better economically than their unmarried counterparts."
CNN: "More U.S. couples living together, study finds":
I wonder if more people (especially men) want to live together because in a contractual marriage, the stakes are higher. How long will it be before there are "common marriage" laws that will make even living together more risky for a man--if he stays too long? Or will living together give men more freedom with less government regulation?
What do you think?
Stephanie Marshall and her fiance, Kelton Scott, are college-educated, gainfully employed and living together. They pay their bills separately but "get together on common things like the rent," said Marshall, who just finished medical school in Atlanta.
The couple is part of a growing segment of American couples who choose to cohabit -- and a new report from the Pew Research Center, released Monday, says financially, those couples are making out like bandits compared to their married and single counterparts.
Not only are there more of them today -- the number of cohabiting couples has doubled since the 1990s, according to Pew analysis of U.S. Census numbers -- but they make more money than other segments of college graduates....
"Working" in more ways than one: Among the college-educated, the study said, in 78% of cohabiting couples, both partners had jobs. For college-educated married couples, only 67% were in two-earner marriages.
The report's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says married people have it better economically than their unmarried counterparts.
"When we started writing this report, we thought that people who were married, and not those just living with each other, would be better off. But that's not the case," said D'Vera Cohn, the study's co-author.
I wonder if more people (especially men) want to live together because in a contractual marriage, the stakes are higher. How long will it be before there are "common marriage" laws that will make even living together more risky for a man--if he stays too long? Or will living together give men more freedom with less government regulation?
What do you think?
Labels: marriage
posted by Helen at 12:09 PM
22 Comments:
Until the modern version of "common law marriage" kicks in, sure. Then they're on the hook for even less reason.
Oh, wait... That's already happening in a lot of places.
How long will it be before there are "common marriage" laws that will make even living together more risky for a man--if he stays too long?
It has already happened in California, thirty-two years ago, to the late actor Lee Marvin:
http://law.jrank.org/pages/3295/Marvin-V-Marvin-Palimony-Suit-1979.html
I intend to make it a point to keep myself aware (not let the LameStream media keep me in the dark) of Common Law marriage regs and anything else pertaining to my having an intimate human relationship with a woman.
If I find out that my state is going to make my relationship vulnerable to gov't intervention, it's "goodbye honey" or we move to another state.
I will not allow a f*cking lawyer sleep between me and a woman.
This seems extremely advantageous to the male partner. All the benefits of having a live-in sex partner who helps pay the mortgage, with no responsibility whatever. None of the protections of the divorce court system.
From a purely tax basis, marriage filing jointly only favors a couple where one of the two earns a high income and the other earns only a small percentage of that.
I've also learned through direct experience and that of acquaintances that in marriages with disparate incomes, the lesser earning spouse tends to be "generous" with the joint money pool (and the less one makes, the more "generous" they are.)
To put this another way, I will pay $6000 more in taxes this year than last, yet even including that, alimony and child support, I'm able to save only a little less than I was when married. My ex-wife was VERY generous with my money.
In Utah at least, the common law marriage provision only kicks in if a couple present themselves to others as being married (or at least don't disabuse others of that belief.)
As for me, despite being raised quite religous and to my mother's consternation, I have no intention of getting married again. I'm not having more children and will not subject myself to the bullshit of alimony again (my ex stayed at home to raise kids for 15 years and for that she deserves something, but no future wife would.)
Interestingly, I know several men and women who don't live with another for religious reasons but are adamant that when they marry/remarry they will sign very strong prenups and are quite up front about it.
"The report's findings fly in the face of conventional wisdom that says married people have it better economically than their unmarried counterparts."
From what I can tell, the report says nothing of the kind. Just because there's a lower incidence of both partners being employed when married doesn't mean marriage is less economically beneficial. The conclusion quoted as your headline is about the most egregious case of implying causality in a statistical coincidence that I've seen in ages.
ZZ sez: "This seems extremely advantageous to the male partner. All the benefits of having a live-in sex partner who helps pay the mortgage, with no responsibility whatever."
----
Yeah, the bastard's having sex with her without PAYING for it. Is that really how you think?
I think the woman also has the benefits of having a live-in sex partner who helps pay the mortgage, with no responsibility whatever.
Whether ZZ is an entitled woman or a chivalrous man, that is exactly the attitude that causes men problems in society.
Women have rights and men have responsibilities.
Common law 'marriages' are closer than you think.
In New Zealand Helen Clark's government brought in a law that officially treated people as married after three years, they do not even have to be living together or have children, nor do couples have to be of the opposite sex. I know a number of middle aged men who drift from one relationship to another because it is safer to terminate the relationship rather than risk the assets they have spent their lives accumulating. Social engineering at its finest.
How long will it be before there are "common marriage" laws that will make even living together more risky for a man--if he stays too long?
Already there in Australia and, I believe, the UK. Just cohabiting "too long" (only a few years) gives the woman a piece of your assets, you don't actually have to hold yourself out as married as required by common law marriage. Since residency is part of the requirement, women have been getting kicked out of their apartments by their boyfriends.
Way to go, feminists! I could hardly have thought of a better way to hurt women. Now, from a certain point of view, hurting women was the point of the exercise. Men can be blamed for rationally responding to the law while feminists give themselves a pass. Harming relations between men and women is, unfortunately, the goal of too many feminists. The notion that one cannot be "authentically feminist" while being a wife/girlfriend is widespread. Naturally, should you attack feminism directly, feminists will claim that there are many "feminisms" and as such feminism is beyond criticism. The contradiction is obvious.
I once met a woman who told me, "I've got income property, my Ex works".
At least she was honest.
ZZ --
"All the benefits of having a live-in sex partner who helps pay the mortgage, with no responsibility whatever. None of the protections of the divorce court system."
What protections? Please be specific.
I once met a woman who told me, "I've got income property, my Ex works".
----
Yup. The difference is that her ex can be thrown into jail if he doesn't cough up her support payments every month.
A wayward tenant can't be.
In this day and age, when women are the leaders of some countries (like Germany) when a guy remarked that his boss, the mayor of his state and the governor of his state were all women, when there is affirmative action for women in many jobs, when women at universities severely outnumber men, and when women are the majority of voters ... you'd think that they could take care of themselves without alimony.
But the support of women is so damn important that you can't opt out of it in bankruptcy and you can literally go to jail for not making support payments.
This comment has been removed by the author.
I look at women and I just see human beings like me (male). I don't see wondrous beings up on a pedestal (like chivalrous males see) and I don't see entitled princesses (like some women see).
I'm sure that I'm going to wind up in a re-education camp soon with that fucked-up, misogynistic attitude.
It's just bizarre how the combination of chivalrous males and entitled feminists combine to give the world such disparate treatment of men and women.
I've always taken the marriage/single person comparison to be of single persons not co-habitating.
I'd never risk living with someone if the house and property was originally mine. You see too many instances where men end up having to split property when non-married but co-habitating couples split. Sondra Locke go $7 million out of Clint Eastwood.
And Sondra Locke sucked as an actress.
I was under the impression there is a common law marriage [law] in place in TN. 7 years, I believe. At least my ex believes it. She won't stay with any of her live ins more than 6.5 years. I might be able to weasel out of paying her way then.
I did a web search for common law marriage in Tennessee. What I found was that Tennessee didn't recognize common law marriage (LIke you, I thought they did.) unless the couple came from a state that did and had established common law marriage in the other state.
Even states that don't recognize common law marriage often recognize "meretricious relationships." In Washington State, the courts treat such a meretricious relationship like it was a marriage, even going so far as to apply the state's community property law to the parties in the relationship, "by analogy." The court case on point in Washington is Connell v. Francisco.
In Colorado we have "common law." Though we never married or divorced, and eventually moved on to new relationships, I got stung (annulled) in my next relationship, because of that previous common law relationship that I did not think to end in a court of law.
Texas has this horrid version where public presentation of yourselves as married counts. So no signing into a motel as Mr. and Mrs. Smith...
In a few foreign countries, I've seen churches bless marriages that are legally unofficial to escape insane tax rates.
Post a Comment
<< Home