Why Marry At All?
New rights for cohabiting couples. New reasons not to bother with marriage.
The government has launched a consultation today on giving cohabiting couples automatic inheritance rights and financial protections on separation. Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy says it will “strike an important balance between tradition and modernity.”
It will do no such thing. It will strike marriage.
If two people want legal protections, the options are not particularly obscure and they do not have to be expensive as he disingenuously made the case today on BBC Breakfast News. Marriage has been available in this country for centuries. Civil partnership has existed since 2004. You can take the vow, sign the document, and enjoy every protection the law can offer, and have change from £200.
People who choose to cohabit are exercising a choice not to have the same legal protections as marriage or civil partnership. Reducing the difference in outcomes is to remove some of the meaning of marriage as well to reduce the choice.
I say this as someone who has lived through divorce and knows its consequences at first hand. I am not starry-eyed about marriage. It is hard and it can fail. But the commitment itself — the deliberate, public, legal decision to bind your life to another’s — matters. It creates a different quality of intention.
And the evidence consistently shows that children do better with married partners. Studies repeatedly find that children of married parents outperform those of cohabiting parents on educational attainment, mental health, and economic outcomes. Marriage is a proven structure for raising children.
Paradoxically, this reform may create more instability for families, not less — by removing the incentive to make the harder, more deliberate commitment in the first place.
Would protections for unmarried couples risk any abuse of the system? Surely a three-year cohabitation threshold with asset entitlements is a gift to those who would exploit it. Does it risk possibility of cohabitations designed specifically to establish financial claims, or even residency claims? The most vulnerable person in many of these scenarios, paradoxically, is not protected by this reform. She, or he, is endangered by it. What happens to the woman whose partner moves in, waits three years, and then leverages newly acquired legal rights against her?
