Divorces are dirt cheap. Its the kids n money that cost time and money to sort out.
I found this interesting
One of the most certain ways to improve the health and well-being of the world's population is to encourage and support the idea of marriage. … Research continually reveals that married people are generally physically healthier, happier, live longer, enjoy better mental health, are more fulfilled and less likely to suffer physical abuse. Premarital cohabitation (living together as a family outside of legal marriage) does not bring the same benefits marriage does. Instead, it brings increased conflict and aggression as well as increased chance of divorce in later marriages.
Dr. Robert H. Coombs, professor of Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted a review of more than 130 published empirical studies measuring how marital status affects personal well-being. He concluded that scientific investigations, conducted from the 1930s to the present, "attest that married people live longer and generally are more emotionally and physically healthy than the unmarried." Coombs specifically looked at the areas of alcoholism, suicide, morbidity and mortality, mental illness and self-reports of happiness.
Cohabitation. Dr. Jan Stets, a leading scholar on cohabiting relationships found in general, "Cohabiting couples compared to married couples have less healthy relationships. They have lower relationship quality, lower stability, and a higher level of disagreements." Work done at the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire in the U.S. found that "cohabiters are much more violent than marrieds..." It was also found that the overall rates of violence among cohabiters were double that of marrieds and "severe" violence was five times as high for cohabiters.
So why does this make it more complicated? It just means you have to be a little patient. Division of wealth and property and any custody issues will take just as long as co-habiting couples. I'd guess divorce proceedings would make probably make these proceedings easier.
I sometimes think you are deliberately obtuse.
on a darker note.....
is the post I mean
yes but there are still steps peeple can take to protect themselves if they are not married.
i beleeve that the law is right in this area, that married couples get better protection than peeple cohabiting.
i have asked here why peeple bother to get married? married couples do and should get better protection. :thumbup: not just me that says that but the law states it as well :notes:
I am very sorry for your daughters woes.
Does this have any bearing at all on the debate in hand?
I see, you misinterpreted my comment. The emphasis was that dissolving a marriage is easy, the rest isnt. It needed to be read in the context of the debate.
there you go ben the average cost of divorce is estimated at 13k which as i said earler is hardly cheap is it
A divorce costs about 300 quid in court fees n form filling if you do it yerself and negotiate with your spouse.
I assume the £13,000 arises from employing lawyers to negotiate child arrangements and financial distribution.
The latter aspects are similar whether the couple are married or co-habiting. My experience is that cohabiting couples are less likely to involve lawyers than the married, simply because folk are under the misapprehension that the dissolution of a marriage requires professional input.
SO going back to what I said, divorce is cheap, sorting things out can be expensive.
Are we forgetting all this?
There is just one ground for divorce - irretrievable breakdown of marriage. However, you have to prove irretrievable breakdown in one of five different ways. These are: adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion for two years, separation for two years with consent from the other party, and separation for five years where no consent is needed.
My ha'p'orth.
A good relationship between the parents is infintitely better for the happiness and stability of the children than a bad relationship. No relationship is better than a bad relationship. And a good relationship does not have to include a marriage certificate, civil partnership form or even cohabitation. It's about time spent and communication.
This next bit is compicated - bear with me, I hope it makes sense.
You take 100 couples who are living together. A portion will be in weak realtionships, some will be in unhappy relationships and some will be in a good, solid relationship. If those 100 couples go through the process of considering marriage, agreeing to marry, how, where and when to marry, who will sit with Aunty Muriel at the reception etc etc etc you will have filtered out a fair number of the first group and a most of the second group. Some in the third group will be perfectly content not to marry but will stay together. The very process of getting married will filter out many couples with relationships that are likely to fail in the future. Therefore it is fully understandable that fewer married couples split than unmarried ones. It's just a statistical thing - nothing to do with marriage 'making relationships stronger'. Marriage indicates a relationship that was stronger in the first place. It is a correlation - to a causation.
The next bit isn't complicated.
Marriage is too easy. The legal steps for starting a marriage are too easy compared with the legal steps for ending a marriage. A marriage breaks down, the couple may still be managing a civilised communication, especially of there are children. The process of breaking the legal ties that are all that remain of the emotional ones, can often destroy the last vestiges of regard that exist between these two troubled people. There is nothing good that can come of making hurt, humiliated, angry people fight every step of the way away from each other. This harms the children and contributes to the fact that the parent who visits the children (too often the father) often loses the relationship with their children. I read some time ago that within 2 years of a divorce 80% of fathers had essentially lost touch with their own children - heartbreaking.
Marriage/civil partnership should not be encouraged without encouraging serious consideration of the exit strategy.
And, after all that, no I don't agree with married tax allowance. What I would support is 'partner can't work so shares their tax with the working partner' allowance. The 'can't work' could be children under school age, one partner being full time carer for someone, one partner being severely disabled etc etc etc.
:lol: 
