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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2009 9:10:53 GMT
I think I read somewhere that in France there are fewer cancellations of PACS (the domestic partnership law) than divorces, perhaps because people do not feel as 'suffocated' in a PACS, since they can be unilaterally dissolved at any time. Also, it appears that the PACS is often being used as a trial marriange and/or official engagement now, because many couples go on to marry after a couple of years when they are ready to start a family.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 7, 2009 12:00:04 GMT
I think I read somewhere that in France there are fewer cancellations of PACS (the domestic partnership law) than divorces, perhaps because people do not feel as 'suffocated' in a PACS, . I can understand that, this from someone who has had the same partner for over 11 years.
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Post by spindrift on Oct 8, 2009 18:08:22 GMT
I'd like to marry for LOVE. My first time was for 'fun' and the second time for necessity.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2009 23:44:48 GMT
I'd get married if I knew for sure that love was going to last forever.
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Post by happytraveller on Oct 12, 2009 5:56:33 GMT
happytraveler - you pay more taxes for being a married couple? that is strange... i think here it is the other way around, you pay less taxes if you are a married couple (but then i don't know the exact details as i have never been married)... Once you're married, both incomes count as one. So if we were not married, my husband would not have to pay taxes for his income, as it is very low (he is still studying) But because we are married, his income is added up to my income. At the moment we pay about 2000Euros more than if we were not married. Yeah we can really afford it.
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Post by tillystar on Oct 12, 2009 11:17:14 GMT
That’s crazy!
Saying that some people who run companies and pay themselves a wage here abuse it by splitting their salary between themselves and their spouse (calling them PA or something when in reality they don’t work for the company) so they have two salaries lower than then high tax bracket rather than one high.
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Post by rikita on Oct 12, 2009 15:51:10 GMT
well as i said i am not sure how it works here but there is that ehegattensplitting and i think it is something like that what both partners earn gets added and then divided by half, so if someone earns a lot and would usually pay a lot of taxes but their partner earns little, then they end up paying less taxes, and apparently it works out well for most married couples. don't know if there are also cases like yours, where it works out that they pay more.
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Post by Kimby on Oct 12, 2009 20:00:23 GMT
That is what is was like for Brian and I. It was an honour to be his wife. Neither of us expected much, we had lived together for a long time before we got married, but the next day over breakfast we both commented on how different it felt for both of us. I'm with Palesa. My husband and I had known each other for 8 years and lived together for 6 years before getting married in a small, intimate ceremony, presided over by a judge, under the maples in my parents' back yard. I expected being married to make no difference, but I was wrong. It was a whole new feeling to be someone's chosen person. And the first time I said the words "my husband" was amazing. I'd also never slept with a married man till my wedding night. ;-)
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Post by Kimby on Oct 12, 2009 20:00:53 GMT
Interesting how many of the people who are still happily married DON'T have children! One of the biggest changes in marriage, IMO, is that many marriages serve only to produce children and (maybe) see them to adulthood. Perhaps if the rules were changed and people knew they could get out after their youngest child hit 18, they wouldn't feel so trapped. And by the time the kids flew the coop, maybe they'd actually be happy in their marriage. But if not, they could leave. Once the kids were grown.
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Post by tillystar on Oct 13, 2009 12:11:56 GMT
Not sure about that, out of my friends that are married I can't see any did it simply to produce children. Most of them had children first and decided on marriage later. I think we are the only couple of who were married first - and by then we had been together for 12 years.
From what I have seen, certainly in the UK this is more of an outdated view of marriage than a new trend. People rarely feel the need to get married to have kids, there just isn't the pressure from society here.
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Post by Kimby on Oct 13, 2009 13:54:54 GMT
I didn't mean that they got married so they could have children.
I meant that the marriage (in the final analysis) served only the purpose of providing a structure for having and raising children. The marriage did not survive to have any of the other possible functions of marriage, to serve as a life-long emotional and physical support structure for two individuals, to provide a BFF to spend one's golden years with, so to speak.
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Post by tillystar on Oct 13, 2009 14:55:02 GMT
Yeah, I know what you mean, it seems like that with lots of my friends parents who seperated pretty much as soon as all the kids had left home.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 13, 2009 16:11:00 GMT
Perhaps marriage just means different things to different people? Some marry for love, some marry for financial reasons, some marry to have kids and 'give them a name', some marry to get away from their parents, (as was my case years ago), some marry to get status in another country, some marry just out of rebound, some marry because they were drunk that day (Britney Spears).
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Post by spindrift on Oct 14, 2009 8:46:17 GMT
I married my first hubby because I thought it would a fun experience. I guessed it wouldn't last for the longterm. In fact it wasn't fun at all but I enjoyed living in Kenya for a couple of years. Also I got fed up with people saying 'why isn't a lovely girl like you not married?' when all my g/fs were busy producing babies. Now I see that I'm not the marrying type.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2009 10:36:53 GMT
Neither am I, spindrift. I'm happy just the way I am. I know what you mean about the pressure. I was under pressure to get married from 17 years onward, and it would have been an arranged marriage too! There was just no way.
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Post by gringalais on Oct 14, 2009 17:35:14 GMT
I never had a real interest in getting married before. I pretty much always figured I never would. I think in the end, what I was really against was the big wedding. Of my two long, living together relationships before, one did not want to get married and the other only saw the point ¡f we were going to have kids. So, even if I had wanted to get married, it probably would not have happened.
My husband says he felt the same way in the past, but with me it felt different. For me too, when he brought it up, I started to consider marriage and the idea grew on me to the point where it felt right. I think part of my change of heart was that we did everything completely our way, no family butting in, since mine lives so far away and he is not close to his few living family members. With my ex's insane family, no way I would have gotten married. When his brother got married there was so much drama with different people angry they weren't invited, complaining about the location being inconvenient, or that they were only invited to the larger church ceremony not the small civil ceremony. I would have hated that, and my ex was never good at standing up to his family and telling them to butt out. In our case, we did it exactly the way we wanted with no one else involved and, fortunately, we had very similar ideas about what we wanted to do.
We've only been married 7 months so far, but I have to say I do like it. It does feel different, in a good way.
Some people are surprised that here in Chile it is acceptable to live together without being married, despite the Catholic church having an influence in society. Basically that is because divorce only has been legal for about 5 years. Before that, they could only get a legal separation, so remarrying was not possible. A lot of people would separate, meet a new partner and end up living together. Even now with divorce legal, a lot of separated people haven't bothered to get a divorce because of the cost and hassle involved. I think about 60% of babies are born to unmarried women too, so there doesn't seem to be a stigma attached to that either anymore.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2009 18:32:19 GMT
It's pretty much the same in all developed countries now. There seems to be no stigma attached to unmarried couples, with or without babies, basically because appropriate legislation has put in all necessary guarantees. In the old days, unmarried people were basically screwed not only fiscally but lots of other ways as well.
Right now in France the big debate is about stepparents, both legal and 'illegal'. Sometimes the stepparents are closer to the children than the blood relations, but in case of death they often lose all of their rights (and of course even more so for same sex couples). It is a hard problem to fix.
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Post by gringalais on Oct 14, 2009 19:04:59 GMT
With the election coming up, there is talk of establishing some sort of domestic partnership law that would give certain rights to couples, straight or gay, that live together but aren't married. Who knows what will come of it. It may just be a ploy to gain votes with no viability since the legislature is mostly old men that are pretty conservative on social issues.
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