Hi, first time poster! To preface, I am not married at this point. My partner and I have been together 6 years next month, and I’m curious as to whether or not there’s really a difference between our relationship and a marriage.
We have no plans to even get engaged for a while due to our age, but I know a lot of couples get married after a couple years rather than the back half of a decade. When people are asked about their relationships they often say “We’ve been married for ten years!” rather than “We’ve been together for twelve years!” and I don’t really understand why.
We’ve lived together for years, spend a ton of time with one another, and work hard to build a happy life for ourselves. Is it really that different?
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edit: Thank you all so much for your replies, I didn’t expect such a huge response! I’ll definitely be replying to comments later 🙂 I should’ve clarified that I’m asking about the interpersonal relationship rather than any legal issues, but thank you for those replies as well!
(And to be clear – I have no issue with marriage! I’m just young!)
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33 comments
20 years and no marriage! Right here.
Similar situation, only we were 4 years in and not married. Had the house, baby, everything. We got married and joked about how everyone thinks marriage is different. Nothing changed, and that was 17 years ago.
Shouldn’t be too different if you already live together. Besides maybe financial activity. After marriage you share more financial information with your spouse for a common goal, you have more plans together as a whole rather than just yourself separated from the other person. So in general you just get use to having your spouse being all over your business 24/7 bc after marriage you are no longer yourself, you become a team with her/him.
I’ve been in my current relationship for a bit longer than you have. Both of us were married before so we know what a marriage feels like. We have chosen not to get married, but we both think our relationship feels like a marriage, even though it isn’t legally. The only difference we see is in the legal aspects, not the actual relationship aspects. She sometimes even calls herself my “wife-ish”.
No, it’s not. You can be committed and have a wonderful life together with or without legal papers. Only difference I see for us is that it’s easier to move to different country together (visas and such) and you have more rights if the spouse is in hospital. Actually that was one of the main reasons why we got married. We both don’t wish that our families decide for us in the case of cases.
Legal/logistical things aside, I was surprised to realize that after getting married, I feel a much deeper responsibility toward my husband around staying happy, healthy, and loving toward each other over the long term. Those things were certainly already true in our relationship, but “officially” making the decision to be each other’s lifelong partners has made me be more intentional about and aware of them. It surprised me in a wonderful way!
Legally and socially they’re worlds apart
My husband was with his ex for almost a decade without ever getting married.
I was with a guy for 5 years and had two kids with him without getting married.
Me and my husband were together for a year and a half before we got married.
We both think it DOES feel different to be married. In a very good way. Neither of us can quite specify why. We just like being married.
Yes, it is. Just ask any divorce lawyer.
My partner and I have talked about this and concluded that, in terms of the relationship itself, nothing would change with marriage. So in that sense, no, marriage is not really different from a long term relationship.
On the other hand, depending on the jurisdiction and laws, there can be a lot of legal differences between marriage and a non-married long term relationship. In my case, for example, me and my partner have different nationalities so getting married is a good idea to ensure that we can live together at the same place for long term.
In a realistic sense, I don’t think there is any different. My wife and I started dating in 2011, were living together by 2012, and married in 2015. From the time we started living together until now, I can say very little has changed in our relationship (aside from having a child).
Now, I can say that there is something about the formality of being married to provides an extra level of security and commitment that can’t be fully quantified. If you’re not a sports fan this may miss, but I think of if it as signing your star to long term contract vs continuing to promise them you’ll sign them to 1 year contracts until they no longer want to play. In both scenarios the goal is to be together long term successfully, but the added security and commitment of the formal, long term contract changes the dynamic, especially when times get tough.
Relationship wise I haven’t noticed any difference.
Legally wise a marriage provides protections that a long term committed relationship does not.
Ie: assets if one partner dies or a separation, making medical decisions if your partner is incapacitated, etc
Probably not much difference unless you want to separate or one of you dies
Personally no I do not find a difference. My Husband and I both felt there was no change to our relationship we were very committed before and after marriage. Together 20 years married 15.
The only real difference are legal ones like tax breaks, asset transfers (inheritance) and medical access.
But you can get most of that sorted with other legal paperwork. Same sex couples did legal packages for decades before marriage equality happened in the states.
It gets complicated when kids, finances, and property are involved. But if you don’t have kids and keep your money separate, then I would say it’s not much different.
I honestly didn’t think it would make a huge difference after a 5 year relationship and living together. But it did make a difference it just feels.. different. We’re a family now (even though no kids yet). We’re even closer than before and we both feel a strong sense of responsibility for each other beyond the closeness and love that we already had.
The way people treat you is different the way you treat each other doesn’t. Marriage felt different with kids.
No not really. BUT and it is a big one. Hehe.
You should celebrate your love for each other. Have a ceremony to share the love ❤️ idk might be fun
Yes. Often, one partner starts to say “mah WIFE” incessantly (YMMV)
I think it depends on you all and your personal feelings. Aside from the obvious legal differences, I do feel there’s a difference between being in a long term committed relationship vs a married relationship. Having made the commitment to marriage (for me) makes the relationship with my husband more of a priority than it was before. I think that’s definitely going to vary from person to person and relationship to relationship, but it solidifies our bond and our commitment to each other in a way that feels different than before. If we had never gotten married we would definitely still be together, but I do feel that getting married makes the relationship feel different for us for the better.
I put up with way more shit from my husband than I would’ve if we weren’t married
Together for 6 years, married for less than 1.
Yes, and no. Logistically to how our relationship is, I don’t think that it’s really any different. I do have a slight mental shift that I was holding onto that now he is my family and that when I say family I mean him and me before all else. We didn’t have joint finances before marriage (we’ll sort of, we bought a house together and shared a CC, but otherwise everything was separate) and we’re now getting around to that and making joint financial goals. But I don’t think it’s changed they way I feel about him. I love him just as much, and we still interact the same way, my sense of commitment to him hasn’t changed.
I guess that all it has changed is my willingness to remove some barriers – I wanted him to be my legal family, it didn’t feel right to have joint finances before marriage, and I wasn’t willing to have children without the first two things.
I would say not really, in my opinion.
But we eloped. Had been together for 5 years already and were very young.
We did it for legal reasons!
Been together 10 years now, still celebrate our anniversary as the day we got together, not our “official” wedding day.
There are definitely legal and social differences. As far as the relationship side of things, I can only speak for my own, but I think marriage deepened our connection. We’d already been together almost seven years, but somehow saying “till death do us part” gave us a sense of security, I think. But it’s different for everyone.
Marraige is essentially a legal, social and religious contract. You are telling the government, the people around you and whatever deity you believe in that both of you should be treated as one person.
A marriage is a vow not to leave. Meaning not matter what there is a boundary and I am in it for the long term.
The only thing I can say is, if you can’t think of a reason why you would want to legally obligate yourself to another person for the rest of your days in a contract that is difficult and expensive to dissolve, then marriage might not be for you.
Completely different. But it can be better or worse depending on how you go into it.
I think when people genuinely want to be together whether they are married or not then it’s just a tax write off and a pure benefit. (These are the people who would get up the day after they fight with the door wide open and still decide they want to work through stuff and figure it out.)+ It gives you so many protection & there is no reason to not do it.
The problem is when people see marriage as the goal. Like it is the finish line and you can just ride off into the sunset. Those are the Marriages doomed to fail. Marriage is hard with no easy exits. You have to deal with the emotional lost you have when an LTR ends + the social & financial lost no one expects.
So yeah it’s different.
Yes, you are committed
Consider this scenario: Your partner has a medical issue or accident. Their family says “Hey, OP. We don’t recognize you as anything more than a friend. Go away.” Sadly, the partner dies. OP has zero rights regarding their shared life, possessions, or funeral arrangements.
It isn’t “just a piece of paper” to be married. Protect yourself and your relationship with your partner.
It depends on what country you live in.
In Canada there’s common law partnership.
In Australia there is defacto partnership.
These are terms to describe a long term committed relationship in which a couple is not actually legally married.
Legally, there is very little difference between a married couple and a common law couple. Socially, the difference is entirely up to you. My friends back in Canada had been a common law couple for a while, and even though they weren’t married, the guy referred to the girl as “wifey” socially. So everyone pretty much treated them like they were married. If the two of them still referred to each other as “boyfriend” and “girlfriend”, I imagine the social behaviour of the people around them might be different.
One of my BILs is nearly 70. He’s been with his defacto partner (they are Australian) for 30+ years. They have two adult children. They are not legally married. They live together and have a shit ton of joint commitments together (property, joint venture business). They do not call each other “husband” and “wife”. They just call each other by their own names or pet names. They say “my partner” when referring to each other. Looking at their relationship, after 30+ years and two adult children, I don’t see a difference from them and a legally married couple.
So I suppose my opinion is that legal marriage is really just a piece of paper. If you want to *feel* married, it’s very easy to adopt the attitude and the language. Just start calling each other “hubby” and “wifey” and in a couple of years people will naturally assume you are married.
…. And hah, leave it to me to not have read your edit. The answer to your edit question is this: Yes, there are absolutely differences in regards to how society treats you when you are in a long term relationship versus being married. This is simply because there is still such a large portion of society who believe marriage is sacred, therefore they treat you differently depending on your marital status. They don’t care how long you’ve been living together–they care how long you’ve been married.
Personally I do not believe marriage is sacred. (I am married, but we did it for visa reasons–probably would have skipped it if we didn’t have to). So personally I would not treat a long term couple differently than a married couple. But I also recognise that I am not the norm.
There’s a big difference between “being married” and “having a wedding”.
The wedding is a party. The ceremony is a verbal commitment, but it’s just a ceremony, like a graduation ceremony. Physically receiving a diploma doesn’t affect how much you learned, it just shows people that you completed the coursework. You can get the certificate in the mail.
Being married is a completely different ballgame. That’s when you’re living life in the trenches of commitment. Marriage is an active path you take together.
This is why I’ll say a couple is married even though they don’t have the certificate. They completed the coursework, but didn’t bother getting the certificate.
But, this is also how you can have a couple who had a wedding, but never actually married each other in the emotional sense. They tend to either divorce quickly or if they stay together they seem to actually hate each other after awhile.
My husband and I emotionally married each other a long time before we had a wedding and got the legal certificate.