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- [00:02]
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From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story on Saturday. I'm Luke Jones. The number of people getting married is falling. It's predicted that by 2050 only 3 in 10 people will be married. Meanwhile, cohabiting families. So unmarried people in long term relationships are now the fastest growing family type in the uk. So what is happening this week in the Times, feature writer Hannah Betts laid out her argument for why she is never going to marry her partner of 10 years, but also why she, like millions of others, are calling for the same rights as married people. It's a concern too, for features writer Simon Mills. His piece is read by Will Ro.
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Why I will never get married by hannah betts. Your husband's so wonderful. Charming hot people are forever informing me he is not my husband. I retort. He's the person I'm currently sleeping with. How they laugh. Only I'm not joking. Terence and I may have been together for 11 and a half years, but I will never marry him. Nor he me. We are not outliers here. While figures for those getting hitched are declining, the Office for National Statistics reveals that the number of cohabiting families rose from 2.9 to 3.6 million between 2012 and 2022. Space sharing. But unmarried couples being Britain's fastest growing family type. In a poll of more than 2,000 people, 60% believed that unmarried couples should have the same right as those who marry to leave assets to each other free of inheritance tax. Meanwhile, the law firm forsters reports a 50% increase in the number of clients requesting cohabiting agreements. Terence and I were early adopters of this trend, setting ourselves up with a nonnup seven years ago to allow for strategic financial withdrawal. Should push come to shove, come to walk out. Neither of us was remotely offended by this. It seemed as normal as setting up a joint bank account. And still people ask when we're going to tie the knot. Why I wouldn't want to grab a catch like Terence. Whether he is going to make an honest woman of me or why I don't harbor a fantasy for some extra extortionate white frock. I try not to go all froth mouth psychotic loon about this. At 55, I have finally realized that it is useful not to sound like a maniac. I will serenely acknowledge that people can hold different points of view and that those must be respected. I will proffer the kind of base level concessions one needs to make to be taken for a rational human being. Regardless, there is one subject on which I will remain a maniac, unable to countenance any sort of different strokes for different folks relativism and that is is marriage. Full disclosure, I cannot begin to see how anyone would do something quite so separatingly bloody awful. Forced to unpack my festering loathing, I can cite four PO face feminism, atheism, a disgust over state and or communal intervention in matters I regard as private and something more metaphysical concerning the idea of being owned. And let's not forget the heinous hamdram ordeals that are weddings here a carnival of capitalism in the form of sub Victorian pastiche, one source of pathological hatred would be enough to quash any Doris Day aspirations. Five mean I must concentrate very hard to stop my head swiveling when others raise the subject. Legions of fellow feminists insist they have managed to put a less Stepford spin on the setup, considering themselves to have reinvented the institution, and I wish them joy. I find this as impossible a concept as the notion that one could somehow reinvent slavery. Marriage is the sum of its parts, parts that encompass subordination, drudgery, property theft and the legal impossibility of rape. This inheritance isn't ancient history. I was 2020 before the law was changed so marriage wasn't considered to give husbands a free pass to rape their wives. 20 as a teenager I remember looking at the married women about me and wondering how they had allowed themselves to enter into such a call amnesty style situation. Not only would I be mortified to participate in such an arrangement, I would be ashamed to bring children up in it. Shame was traditionally associated with the unmarried state. In my case, matters would be reversed. Over the decades my refusenik stance has ended relationships, friendships, and for a couple of years even cost me a sister. So I lie, I dissemble, I smile and focus on having the best covertly parodic hat. I have managed to arrive at the stage where I don't act up at other people's nuptials largely by concentrating hard on something else. Although if a father walks an adult woman down the aisle, every fibre of my being will be tested not to shove him out of the way and slap her hard. I will never not regard the state of marriage as untenably dubious, a piece of ugly ideological baggage incompatible with modern life. My gamma phobia fear of marriage lies at the core of my being, conscious, subconscious, all consuming. Even safely in middle age, I have nightmares about being dragged up the aisle in it. My dress is an Angela Carter esque shroud, trains snaking about, my throat, removing first speech Then all vital signs. And the punchline. I would really rather like a civil partnership soon. This summer. Alright, pipe down. Symbolically speaking, civil partnerships represent a sparkling clean slate, a winningly unceremonious agreement enshrining mutual rights stripped of marriage's smells and bells, actual and ideological. This wouldn't be a mock marriage, but an anti marriage. Terence and I, following not in the tradition of patriarchs and wife beaters, but fabulous gay men and women who have shown society an alternative, more righteous path. There would be no announcement, no party. Although if Tezza did insist on showering me with jewellery, then I suppose I might concede it would simply be a means of putting him in charge of the off switch should I ever be on life support and avoiding a great wodge of inheritance tax on what scant possessions we amass, I merely have to persuade Terence to accept my non proposal.
- [09:30]
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Recently, after about 40 years of struggling with lenders and brokers juggling a yo yoing career and roller coastering interest rates, I managed to pay off my mortgage. My small Oxfordshire cottage, which I bought 14 years ago for a song, then extended and renovated with help from my talented interior designer girlfriend and long habit, and which is now worth a whole lot more thanks to the Cotswolds rebrand, is finally all mine. As an unmarried homeowner with grown up children. When I die the house will be passed on to my two daughters who will inherit a mostly debt free property. Depending on how much the house is worth at my demise, the they will have to pay inheritance tax charged at 40% on the value exceeding thresholds. That's how things work. As a technically single man, it is my next of kin kiddies who get all the stuff right. All of which means I'd be kicked out, probably while your body is still warm. My girlfriend once warned, somewhat darkly. She has a point. Having contributed to the house's improvements, creatively and financially transforming interiors and outdoor spaces in a way I could never have conceived of adding charm and value that recently inspired a visiting private house hunter to give it a multiple zeros valuation. Surely she would should have some kind of say in this arrangement. Then again, were I to override my offspring and give my significant other the house, where would that leave my children? Pretty pissed off, I reckon. And would she then own it and be able to pass it on to the next man she meets or to her myriad of nieces and nephews? Legally speaking, without a marriage certificate, neither of us particularly wants to get hitched by the way, or an increasingly popular cohabitation agreement AKA a living together contract by which unmarried couples, common law partners, can set out financial arrangements, property ownership and how assets are handled. If the relationship ends or someone dies, she would be out on her arse like poor Jackie Kennedy, effectively evicted from the White House after JFK's assassination with nowhere to go and Lyndon B. Johnson's removal van idling on the drive. This seems harsh and unfair. But despite the widely held misconception that cohabitants have a similar status to their married counterparts as common law spouses, in reality they are neither recognized by the legal system nor afforded the same rights and protections as married couples. Because unmarried cohabitors do not have an automatic right to claim or inherit assets in the event of a relationship breakdown or a partner's death as married couples do, a lethal combination of law and limited time can lead to what the courts like to call urgent marriages. Having cohabited as common law spouses for more than a decade, and with only a few weeks to live after a terminal cancer diagnosis, the writer AA Gill wed Nicola Formby, his partner and the mother of his twins. The marriage proposal, Gill said, left him feeling fantastically elated, very possibly in part because he knew that his girlfriend would get to stay in the same house after he'd gone. In 2018, the 90 year old comedian Ken Dodd, just a few days before his demise, married his partner, Ann Jones. The nuptials saved the new Mrs. Dodd from having to pay an inheritance tax bill of more than 2 million pounds on the funnyman's 7.2 million pounds fortune. Could the need for these urgent weddings be on the wane? Conventional marriages in England and Wales are now at their lowest levels since the 1850s. After a post pandemic in 2023, there was a 9% decrease in weddings on the year before. While it is predicted that just 3 in 10 people will be married by 2050, a whopping 28% decline from 2019. As such, unmarried and cohabiting couples are demanding the same rights as those who are married, the government is expected to launch a spring consultation on reforming the law to strengthen cohabitation rights. Meanwhile, intrigued by the law firm Forster's findings that there had been a 50% rise in the number of couples requesting a cohabiting agreement, I checked the price of commissioning a lawyer to draw up one of these for me and my girlfriend and got a shock as much as £3,000. For that kind of money, we could throw a decent little wedding bash in the back garden of the cottage.
- [14:58]
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The words of Simon Mills and Hannah Betts they are both feature writers for the Times. You can read all of their pieces and all of the features over@thetimes.com if you've got a subscription. That is it from us. Today's producer and sound designer was Dave Creasy. The executive producer was Edward Drummond. I'm Luke Jones. See you very soon,
- [15:41]
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Sam.