According to The Times, research at the University of Colorado has revealed that men with heart failure who have never married are twice as likely to die than men who have been married. The protective effect of marriage even extends to men who have been married, but are now widowed, divorced or separated. Being married made no difference to women’s chances of survival. The report does not say whether men in gay marriages or civil partnerships are also less likely to die.
Medical reasons are not the only reason why it may be better to be married. Marriage has a number of legal and financial advantages over being unmarried, including people who are unmarried, but cohabiting.
(For the avoidance of doubt, when I refer to marriage below, I am also referring to civil partnerships. It is worth noting that simply cohabiting does not make you a civil partner. To be in a civil partnership, you need to register it and undertake a formal civil partnership ceremony. I am encountering more and more people who describe themselves as being civil partners, when in fact there are merely cohabitants. When I refer to partners below, I do not mean civil partners; I mean people who are living together).
Firstly, there are tax benefits to being married. Inheritance tax does not apply to inheritances passed from one deceased spouse to the survivor; if you not married, you are more likely to get a tax bill.
Furthermore, married couples where one spouse is a basic rate tax payer and the other earns less than £12,570 pa, are eligible for a marriage allowance worth a whopping £252 per annum. At the risk of sounding cynical, given that the average cost of a wedding is (allegedly) £18,400, this would pay for itself in about 73 years (if you live that long).
Secondly, and more seriously, men are slightly better off if they are married when it comes to parental responsibility for their children. Parental responsibility is the rights and responsibilities for parents towards their children. All mothers automatically have parental responsibility for their children the moment that they are born. So do fathers who are married to the mother when the children are born, but unmarried fathers do not.
This used to mean that an awful lot of unmarried fathers didn’t have parental responsibility for their children. The fathers would only get parental responsibility if they later married the mother, or if the mother granted it to him in a formal parental responsibility agreement or if the father applied successfully to the court for a parental responsibility order or a residence order. It wasn’t difficult to get parental responsibility orders, as all you had to do was demonstrate sufficient commitment and attachment to the child; such applications were usually tacked onto an application for contact or residence of a child and dealt with as an afterthought.
It is rare nowadays to encounter a father who does not have parental responsibility for his children. Since 1 December 2003 any unmarried father who is registered as the child’s father on its birth certificate automatically shares parental responsibility with the mother. However, I occasionally encounter cases where a father has not been registered on the birth certificate, often in cases where an unmarried couple have split before the child is born and the mother is refusing for some reason to allow the father to have any contact with their baby. Married fathers do not have this problem as they have parental possibility from the moment that the child is born. Therefore, as parental responsibility is shared by the parents, both parents should be involved in significant decisions about health or education, the consent of both parents is needed before the child can be taken outside England and Wales or the child’s name is changed (failing which one of the parents must seek permission from the court).
Another way in which married people are better off than unmarried people is how the law works if they split up. There is no such thing as common law marriage (or at least, if there is, it is not recognised in English law.) The law that applies to separating unmarried couples is totally different to the law that applies to couples who are divorcing or dissolving a civil partnership.
In a divorce, the Family Court has enormous discretion as to how it can divide a couples’ income and assets between them in order to achieve fairness and meet their needs, and the needs of the their children and any stepchildren.
In contrast, in an unmarried couple’s separation, the court’s powers are far more constrained. It can order a house to be sold. It can divide the equity in a jointly owned property between a couple, but the court’s discretion to do so in a way that meets the parties’ needs is severely constrained. Where a property is held in the sole name of one partner, it can decide whether or not the other partner has gained a beneficial interest in the property; such claims are complex and far from guaranteed to succeed. It can make orders for financial provision for children under Children Act 1989, Schedule 1, but this only applies to the parties’ children; it does not apply to one partner’s children by a different relationship. Furthermore, this is limited to meeting a child’s needs, not to dividing the assets in such a way as achieves fairness. The court cannot order spousal maintenance to be paid to an unmarried person, nor can it make a pension sharing order.
Where a married couple live in a property that is owned by only one spouse, the other spouse has Home Rights in relation to the property. This means that the non-owning spouse is entitled to occupy that property until the marriage ends. However, if you are unmarried and live in a property owned by your partner, you probably have no right to live there (unless you have a beneficial interets in the property) and can be required to leave on reasonable notice (unless you obtain a court order allowing you to stay for the time being).
The law that applies to unmarried couples is woefully inadequate and in need of reform. (See my blog about this here).
The difference in the legal rights of married and unmarried couples is not widely understood by the public and can sometimes lead to some very nasty surprises for people are separating after living together. It is worth having a cohabitation agreement (also known as a Living Together Agreement) if you are planning on living together without marrying.
One of the few ways in which there has been reform is that now bereavement support allowance is available to people who were living together, not just people who were married or in a civil partnership.
There are many other advantages to being married, too many to list here. A useful summary of the pros and cons can be found here.
The reality is that not only does it appear that you may live longer if you are married, you are probably also better off if you are married (or in a civil partnership) and then split up.
25 February 2023
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