By the way I got married

[Guest]

Come to Lesbos, it's fantastic in the early summer.

you have no idea how badly i want to do just that.
when i was a kid, i heard about the greek islands and how beautiful they are...ever since then, its been a fantasy for me.

 

[SensualCealy]

Not to be crass but, think of the money you saved! NO gift, no new outfit, no getting a hair cut, didnt have to bust your hump helping out...

Sounds good to me!
C

 

[Aurora Black]

you have no idea how badly i want to do just that.
when i was a kid, i heard about the greek islands and how beautiful they are...ever since then, its been a fantasy for me.

Start saving up now. Since it's March, there are tons of good travel deals out before people start booking for the summer, and no, I'm not being paid by the Greek Tourism Board.

 

[Boxlicker101]

My parents' old friends were about to reach their 50th Wedding Anniversary and their children didn't know the exact date of the wedding. They wanted to organise a surprise party for the nearest weekend.

The children asked my parents who were vague about the exact date their friends had got married. They knew that it must have been shortly before the two families lived side by side in new houses. My father decided to ask the friends casually but outright... 'By the way, when will you be celebrating your 50th anniversary?'

The shit hit the fan!

Back in the 1930s in the UK, when a female Civil Servant married, she had to resign. She would be paid a gratuity but would lose her job, her career and her pension. The friends couldn't afford that because they were buying a newly-built house with their joint income. What they did was move into the new house in the newly constructed neighbourhood and tell their neighbours that they were 'Mr and Mrs.'. At work, they would still be Mr X and Miss Y, who just happened to have similar addresses. That situation lasted until the 1950s when the Civil Service rules changed slightly.

However, having lived as husband and wife for years in their community, and as singles at work, they didn't bother to marry. So their children were born out of wedlock. Because their mother was still single she preserved her pension rights when she stopped work to produce children.

My parents persuaded their friends to tell the children the exact situation. The children took it very well.

The 50th Wedding Anniversary party turned into a full-scale church wedding. The parents married on what should have been their 50th anniversary, with their children as witnesses and grandchildren as bridesmaids and pageboys.

The wedding made a centre spread of the local paper but no one criticised the parents for 'living-in-sin' for 50 years. The 1980s were much more relaxed than the 1930s.

Og

PS. She still gets her pension, and now he has passed on, half of his as well. Living-in-sin was profitable.

The best part of the story is that it describes getting around stupid rules and restrictions. I don't know about in the UK but in most of the US, they would have been considered to have been common law husband and wife, since they were passing themselves off as as being married. More power to 'em, I say.

 

[oggbashan]

The best part of the story is that it describes getting around stupid rules and restrictions. I don't know about in the UK but in most of the US, they would have been considered to have been common law husband and wife, since they were passing themselves off as as being married. More power to 'em, I say.

They would in the UK too. However, until recently there were very few advantages in being in a 'common law marriage' and several disadvantages. Since the 1930s the law has changed about children born out of wedlock whose parents subsequently married. Now, and this was law on their 50th 'wedding' anniversary wedding date, the children became legitimate as soon as the parents married.

When I was an employer, our company would pay a pension to the widow (or widower) of an employee to whom the widow was married when he was employed by us, but NOT to a widow who had married the employee AFTER he had retired. This nonsensical situation was required by tax laws. A common law wife did not count.

If an employee was reaching retirement age without being officially married, one of the things that they were told was about this anomaly. Several decided to get married just so their previously unofficial wife (husband) would have a pension.

There was one difficult case. The employee was dying and living in a hospice. His wife had started divorce proceedings some years earlier but they and their lawyers had taken things very slowly so they were still married but had been separated for years. He didn't want his pension to go to her. She didn't need or want it because she had always earned more than he did. He wanted to marry his long-term mistress (she hadn't been the cause of the divorce - she came along after the proceedings had started but not finished) and leave the pension to her. The poor man had to be propped up in bed to sign the final divorce papers and then a marriage was arranged with his mistress. It was touch and go whether he died before marrying and also if he lived long enough to reach retiring age.

It took some doing with help from the hospice staff but he was married two days before his retirement date in the presence of many of the staff and his recently divorced wife. He lived five days beyond it. Whether the marriage was consummated? I don't know and didn't ask. The new wife got her pension and a whole seven days of married life after several years as living as man and wife in practice if not in law. And yes, the old wife came to his funeral and stood side by side with the bride.

Og

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

One thing that I admire about Napoleon is that he supposedly eliminated restrictions on the inheritance rights of bastards. To treat children different because of their parents' marital status strikes me as unfair and absurd. But, then again, laws are frequently unfair and absurd. Laws are only as good as the legislators.