Marriage and Cohabitation

San­dra Par­sons, writ­ing in the Times of Lon­don, sees an obvi­ous dilemma:

…the more divorces there are involv­ing huge sums, the more afraid men become to marry. And while that may not affect the man much, it’s very bad news indeed for the woman. I know of some­one, I’ll call her Anna, who for the past ten years has lived with her part­ner, who I’ll call Harry. They have two young chil­dren. For years, Anna said to Harry she thought that they should get mar­ried, for the sake of the chil­dren if noth­ing else. Harry refused. Anna had a job when they first got together but gave up work when she had her first child. This suited her; she wanted to be at home. It suited Harry; he liked her to do the clean­ing, the wash­ing, the iron­ing and the shop­ping – indeed, he thought it was her place. He gave her £80 a week house­keep­ing money. She was never allowed more. If she wanted to buy some­thing for the chil­dren, or a birth­day present for a friend, or new clothes for her­self, she had to scrimp and scrape each week in order to save suf­fi­cient money to do so. You might ask why Anna accepted this sit­u­a­tion. The answer is because she is a gen­tle, frag­ile soul with no stom­ach for a fight. She pre­tended to her­self for a long time that every­thing was all right, and then she went to see her GP, who gave her antidepressants.…

The law as it stands offers no rights to cohab­itees: no rights for main­te­nance, or asset shar­ing. The con­cept of the common-law wife remains a pop­u­lar myth, and the Civil Part­ner­ship Bill offers no pro­tec­tion to any­one who has not reg­is­tered their relationship.

I have no idea whether this story is true. I don’t know “Anna” and “Harry.” How­ever, if these facts are accu­rate, then I do feel bad for “Anna.” She obvi­ously chose to have chil­dren and live with the wrong man.

Still, Par­sons has indeed dis­cov­ered a wor­ry­ing trend in the West­ern world: Men are increas­ingly opposed to mar­riage because they know that they will most likely lose their home, their chil­dren, and half their assets in any divorce due to laws that are biased towards women. And roughly half of all mar­riages end in divorce. How do you like those odds?

But the oppo­site side of the coin is that mar­riage offers legal pro­tec­tion and assis­tance to spouses and chil­dren. Men, in general, do not suf­fer neg­a­tive con­se­quences from not being mar­ried — but women do. Women ben­e­fit from being mar­ried, but men do not. This is just another way in which women them­selves have become vic­tims of the unin­tended con­se­quences of fem­i­nism. (See here for more.)

The obvi­ous solu­tion is to rewrite mar­riage and fam­ily law so that it is impar­tial to gen­der and so that both gen­ders are treated equally. After all, that’s what fem­i­nists want. Right?

Ear­lier: Cri­tiques of Fem­i­nism: Argu­ments Against Fem­i­nism Essay