Cecilie1200
Diamond Member
Understood......true...it is a financial agreement. But this should be a finacial agreement between the couple only.....not all the tax payers in the country. As soon as that happens....your life isnt really "Your" life.
The government needs an over-haul....a big one. Its just not working for us anymore.....its tripping us up...and flattening us down. Its holding back everyone.
One problem with financial agreements is that they sometimes come into dispute and need to be mediated or settled by a third party. For all other financial agreements, that third party is the legal system, and so it is with marriage. Also, you only mentioned wills and inheritance. How about child custody, or any of a number of other situations where it doesn't work to leave it just to the couple?
Your life is never "just your life". It always affects other people. That's what being a social animal means. Like it or not, the institution of marriage and all of the people living in that institution affect society as a whole. That's why society recognizes marital contracts of a certain type and tries to encourage them, or at least facilitate them.
I'll agree with you on the government. We could use whole lots less of it in any number of areas.
Child custody needs to be considered separately though. Being married does not make somebody a "fit parent." Even sex offenders can get married, that doesn't mean the state would allow them to care for a child just because he/she is married.
I never said that being married makes someone a fit parent. However, when a marriage breaks up now, the circumstances under which it dissolved are often taken into consideration in the subsequent custody battle, even when those circumstances were not actually criminal. If the law no longer recognized marital relationships as legal contracts, it would also have no basis for considering those actions when determining custody.
That's just an example. There are any number of ways in which a marriage is not just a romantic relationship between two people, and requires a standard to be set by which the law views that relationship. Sure, you could accomplish that by having couples simply sign a legal contract concerning those occasions, but then that would essentially be the same as they're doing now, but with more paperwork.
You also have to consider that the law always will be involved to some extent in marriages, if only because they are such extensive meldings of two lives into one, involving legalities, finances, responsibilities . . . All of which means there's really no way to keep the law from having some standard somewhere that says, "This is what we recognize as a legitimate marital contract, and this isn't."