Demand: What is wrong with civil marriage
Alexandra Sheveleva
Live together without a stamp in your passport - this choice is increasingly made by residents of Western countries: Americans, Italians, French, Germans, Dutch, Scandinavians are not in a hurry to marry and more often have children out of wedlock. This trend is characteristic both for Russia and for us, as well as throughout the world, fierce disputes regularly arise around it. It is clear why: on the one hand, civil marriage does not imply serious obligations and it is easy to enter into it, on the other - at least the legal rights of each of the partners are not protected. Wonderzine decided to weigh the pros and cons and figure out whether to worry if the boyfriend behaves like a husband, but in Tiffany & Co. not in a hurry.
Here and now
In general, Russians living in a civil marriage are satisfied with their position and do not want to change anything (here you can download a document with a detailed study). Only every fifth unofficial wife thinks about the change of marital status, 23% relate to marriage with great prejudice, and 34% refuse to go to the registrar. Stubborn hater-seekers cannot convince even such a weighty reason as the birth of a child. This is due not so much to the freedom-loving Russians, but to the uncertainty of the spouse: those who have already been burned in a formal marriage, prefer not to register the second relationship and live without a stamp in the passport. What is nice is that Russian men are more likely than women to legitimize relationships (with the proviso that this is the first marriage), and the birth of a child is still a sufficiently convincing reason for going to the registrar.
There is no denying that civil marriage has a lot of positive things: renting an apartment together is cheaper, and waking up in the same bed in the morning is more pleasant. But is cohabitation a compulsory step on the way to official marriage?
Easy to be, hard to get out
American clinical psychologist Meg Jay has made a lot of noise by disproving in her column in The New York Times the widespread belief that living together has a positive effect on the subsequent married life. The author claimed that couples who had long lived together before marrying were less satisfied with their marriage and more often divorced than those who gathered only after the wedding.
Their problem is that partners act by inertia: first they come together and then get married
However, they do not make conscious decisions and do not discuss any of these important steps between themselves, and accordingly, they do not think about those obligations to each other that arise at both stages. It just so happens that once he (or she) stays at your house, then he brings his toothbrush, and then a cat with an exercise bike. It is easier for such couples to marry than to break up, even if the partners are wisely aware that they are not suitable for each other. In the end, they have already invested too much in this relationship: they bought furniture, made common friends, and made friends with their parents.
The danger of cohabitation is precisely that, warns Meg Jay, that it is very easy to find yourself in a civil marriage, but it is too difficult to get out of there. Plus, we should not forget that women and men still perceive civil marriage differently. The former tend to view it as a step towards marriage, while for the latter it is a way to experience relationships or postpone a decision about their status.
No stamp - no rights
The main argument of opponents of a civil marriage in the United States is that children suffer: they study poorly, face psychological problems more often, because their parents are twice as likely to be as often as they are married. In Russia, the well-being of children is also, oddly enough, associated with a stamp in the passport: for example, 42% of refusals from newborns in maternity hospitals are mothers who live in a civil marriage.
Another serious side effect of civil marriage is the insecurity of the legal rights of spouses. British businessmen Pamela Curran and Brian Collins became famous for the public division of property. They lived together without a stamp in the passport for 30 years, got a home and started a joint business, which was later sold for $ 1.2 million. After the separation and long litigation, Pamela did not get anything from the acquired property, because everything was written to a civil husband .
Turns out that a civil marriage is a good thing, but very dangerous and insidious, alluring with ease and simplicity, which later can be as expensive as the absence of the habit of reading the conditions written in small print in the conditions of the loan agreement.