Thursday May 2, 2013 at 9:00am
It seems to me that romantic notions are the bane of the pre-nuptial agreement. Think on this: you don’t want to, or plan to, crash your car, and yet you have car insurance (yes, I know it is the law but stick with me). You don’t want your plumbing to explode and flood the house, but you have insurance to ensure it can be sorted easily if the worst happens. And the last thing you want is for the cat to get injured, but you may well pay a small fee each month so that vet bills are tak....
Thursday February 21, 2013 at 9:00am
Well, it’s the piece of research we have all been waiting for. We can now confirm that the seven year itch is a myth.
A new report What is the divorce rate? has been published by the Marriage Foundation analysing divorce statistics and trends for the last 40 years. It shows a number of interesting points but two things stood out for me: people are making better marriage choices today than they were in the early 1970s, and seven years is not a common stumbling block for married couples.
....
Thursday February 14, 2013 at 9:00am
It has come as the perfect Valentine’s Day gift for homosexual couples up and down the country. All couples with a lifelong commitment should be able to call it marriage, Culture Secretary Maria Miller told MPs ahead of that important vote last week, whether straight or gay, and it was a noble cry.
The pros and cons of civil partnership versus marriage are things which I have mentioned relatively regularly in this blog for some time. The amount of Parliament time and newspaper column in....
Thursday January 3, 2013 at 9:00am
So you survived the festive season then, I see? So I would like to formally welcome you to 2013 and wish you a prosperous and happy new year. Both those words are key to my first new year message – happy and prosperous, that is. Everyone has the right to be happy and be in a fulfilling relationship. The irony is that as we look forward to an exciting new year, full of happiness, it is one of the busiest times for family lawyers as more couple seek legal advice about divorce in the weeks ....
Thursday December 20, 2012 at 9:00am
Who’d have thought gay marriage would cause such a storm? That’s right. All of us. Any politician who thought this was going to be a quietly applauded move – attempting to legalise gay marriage in church that is – is naïve or misguided. However, the ongoing issue reached soap-opera levels of drama recently.
Prime Minster David Cameron first announced that gay marriage would be legalised but religions opposed to it would not be forced to perform ceremonies. Then Cu....
Wednesday October 17, 2012 at 9:00am
A story about the high number of happy marriages caught my eye last week. A survey of more than 2,000 married couples found 91 per cent are happy with their relationship – with 17 per cent describing it as perfect!
This is a long way from the picture of broken Britain often painted with more and more families splitting up – or at least at civil war – and children running wild as a result. That may be an extreme take on things but some days, particularly when you read c....
Wednesday October 10, 2012 at 11:47am
Pre-wedding nerves are nothing to worry about, we are told. They are natural and a completely understandable reaction to the months of planning and the life-changing event about to happen. Now though, a new study suggests they might not be as innocuous as we are led to believe.
The UCLA study suggests that women who have pre-wedding worries about the future are 2.5 times more likely to divorce within four years. It appears that this trait is significantly more pronounced in women. Intuition? ....
Monday July 30, 2012 at 9:00am
Want a bit of happiness in your life? Then get married. Married people are happier than those who aren’t, suggests new Office of National Statistics (ONS) data on the “happiness index” published last week. This may raise eyebrows among 1970s comedians who joked about “the wife” and “the ball and chain”, but is music to my ears.
The figures show 82% of people in marriages or civil partnerships said they rated their life satisfaction as high or medium. F....
Thursday July 19, 2012 at 9:00am
I was staggered the other day when I stumbled across an article that said one in six married couples met on an online dating site. Isn’t that incredible? I looked into it more closely and these figures are a couple of years old and the study was in the US, (for dating website Match.com), but still – one in six?! I wonder what the statistic would have been even 10 years ago? It seems long gone are the days where a weekend trip to the local disco, throwing some shapes on the danc....
Thursday June 14, 2012 at 9:00am
The generally held view I think is that young people are less bothered about being married than their grandparents were. They are more focussed on money and, for some, careers, than walking up the aisle young and starting a family. Those things may come later on in life or they are as likely to happily cohabit than say “I do” in a big (expensive) wedding.
But a new survey has exploded this accepted wisdom. Researchers have found a huge correlation between the views of young people ....
Thursday May 31, 2012 at 9:00am
Marriage brings with it certain legal rights and responsibilities, not least of which is joining a couple’s assets. When a couple are simply living together (and there is no living together agreement), assets they buy and share jointly can be difficult to sort out if they split up. Tying the knot formally treats assets jointly and both have a claim to them in the event of a divorce. To the less romantic out there, it could be seen that it formalises a relationship, but that i....
Thursday May 10, 2012 at 9:00am
So Sir Paul Coleridge, one of the country’s leading family court judges, has launched his campaign to promote marriage. Heralded as a champion for weddings in some of the newspapers, he has lashed out at the country’s apparent “divorce addiction” fuelled by celebrity magazines like Hello! and believes there is clear proof that married couples are more likely to stay together.
He also said there was evidence that children with settled families performed....
Monday April 2, 2012 at 9:00am
There are many things you can plan for a wedding day and some things you can’t. The dress, the photographer, the flowers and the disco in the evening are fairly straightforward. The guest list and seating plan can be trickier, but you can be sure that someone like the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh are not going to just turn up on the day. Except that wasn’t quite the case for John and Frances Canning, married at Manchester Town Hall last week, when HRH, in the city as part of....
Thursday March 22, 2012 at 9:00am
I don’t think it is a revolutionary declaration but I think many would agree with the Government saying that it is better for children to be raised by two parents who are married.
Research suggests children from such homes are most likely to end up with a good education and a job and the stability of parents’ relationship is key to a child’s development.
There is no suggestion that there is any thing inherently wrong with parenting in single parent families or where t....
Thursday March 15, 2012 at 9:00am
There have been a lot of ruffled feathers, indignant spats and religious dogma over the last couple of weeks around the issue of gay marriage. This is something that has been on the agenda for some time, not quite since biblical times, but for some time nonetheless.
The soap opera started when Cardinal Keith O'Brien – the most senior Catholic in Britain – described gay marriage as "grotesque” amid ongoing speculation that a change in the law would soon make it legal for ....
Monday February 13, 2012 at 9:00am
Divorce can often leave a bad taste in the mouth. In fact, it is probably fair to say that most cases leave people a little jaded. After all, if a couple get on really well and sort everything amicably, then perhaps they didn’t need to divorce in the first place.
As family lawyers, we can help make the process as painless as possible. A relationship split doesn’t have to be expensive with the correct advice and both sides taking a pragmatic view to sorting out the det....
Thursday July 7, 2011 at 10:00am
I think it is fair to say that over the course of your life you will go to a fair few weddings. Many, if not most, will be fantastic occasions for all the right reasons. Others will be a bit of a bore. If I was a betting man, I would put money on the marriage of Freddie Bourne and Heidi Withers not falling into the latter category. It should be interesting, shouldn’t it?
This, of course, is the couple who have hit the headlines in the last week or so after Freddie’s mother Caroly....
Monday June 6, 2011 at 10:00am
I have been critical in the past of Ed Miliband but it was nice to see a politician carry through on a promise and marry his long-term partner Justine Thornton last week. It had been suggested by some, me included, that it might just be a box ticking exercise but the couple looked very happy as they joined together legally after six years together. It did allow their two children to take part in the celebrations, something that is increasingly commonplace. The timeline of old (which went somethi....
Monday May 9, 2011 at 10:09am
How do you keep a relationship exciting and fulfilling? If I could answer that question, I would be very comfortably off indeed and probably writing this on my own island, sipping a glass of wine from my own French vineyard. I don’t know how many times I have spoken to a man or woman going through a divorce who can’t really put their finger on what is wrong, just that they don’t want to be with their other half any more. They struggle to come up with issues to include in the di....
Monday May 2, 2011 at 10:00am
It is no secret that fewer people are getting married. In 2009, the latest (provisional) figures available (again statisticians, why the delay?) 231, 490 couples said “I do”, the lowest since 1895. To put it another way, 8.4 people per 1,000 in 2009 compared to 8.7 in 2008. Neither is it a secret that the divorce rate is high in the UK – but falling. There were 113,949 divorces in 2009 (again, the latest stats they have) with 10.5 people per 1,000 of the married population fili....
Tuesday April 5, 2011 at 10:00am
I was genuinely delighted to see Ed Miliband and long term partner Justine Thornton announce that they are (finally) getting married. There is either something in the spring air at the moment or Brits are just getting a little over-excited about another Royal wedding as I seem to have been informed of a sudden flood of engagements. By the way, by Royal wedding I meant William and Kate. I am not suggesting Ed’s is in the same league. I did though see a link to some rather disturbing “....
Thursday March 3, 2011 at 10:00am
Latest figures from the Office of National Statistics show the divorce rate in England and Wales is at its lowest rate since 1974. In 2009, there were a total of 113,949, a decrease of 6.4 per cent since 2008. Impressively, that is the sixth annual fall in a row.
Apart from the more troubling peripheral questions this raises for me, like why are statisticians always so slow (2009 latest figures when we’re now well into 2011?), I did ask myself why this might be.
Well, one simple contri....
Tuesday February 15, 2011 at 10:00am
Marriage Week UK ended on Valentine’s Day. I understand this was deliberate and simply a quirk of the calendar with the most romantic day of the year falling on a Monday. Slightly ironic though. Would it not have been better to start Marriage Week on February 14?!
The week celebrates commitment and the importance of marriage. The notion should be applauded. It is perhaps though unfortunate that the event, apparently running since 1997, is not more high profile so as to have a ....