but this pours water into the completely wrong mill.
It changes. It even makes a difference. The legal status is changing, the perception of yourself, the perception of your spouse, and the perception of you as a couple by other people are changing. Dating, even long-term, is not the same as an official marriage.
I like being married in a social sense.
This does not mean that I felt inferior without the ring, commentators are very fond of going to extremes in such cases. I feel differently in a relationship with the same person. I like my new last name, the photo in my passport is beautiful, and it’s nice to wear a ring. I see that I am treated differently in personal communication, whether it is work or acquaintance with the concierge. I became invisible in a good way: men on the street or on public transport stopped bothering me (they didn’t bother me because I was so sexy, but because assholes like to pick on unmarried girls. Now they’re looking at the ring and holding themselves in check. Not always, alas, but an order of magnitude more often).
We are social beings, and rituals are very important to us, no matter how hard we try to deny it. Even if you think it won’t affect you, you don’t know for sure. You looked at this husband as a boyfriend, but you haven’t lived with him as a husband yet. There will be changes in consciousness. Alas, it’s not always for the best: I regularly read the stories “the most progressive dude in the world abruptly uncovered himself after the registry office, because a relationship with a girl can be polyamorous, but a wife is the one who stands barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and does not wither.” We had no tin, but yes, we calibrated our expectations of marriage for the first few months. It doesn’t matter how many years we’ve been together, but it felt like we’d both forgotten everything about each other and had to somehow re-negotiate, that’s how I wrote in the advertisement above. I was very strongly influenced by the social attitude of a good wife, and she is at odds with my character. I tried to change myself somehow, but it turned out that a particular husband didn’t really need it, but he also couldn’t immediately convey it to me. It was weird, to be honest)
Since about the middle of the tenth century, a non-tasteless attitude has appeared in the media: if you are a modern and progressive woman, and not a “sad patriarchal litter,” you choose a career, not a marriage, and even more so a wedding. You don’t want such banal things, you’re really ashamed to admit it, otherwise you’ll be discharged from the feminists. Fufufu! When I was preparing for the wedding, I heard: they say, you? I thought you were too progressive for such a trivial thing!
Well, change your mind.
“But you said you weren’t getting married.” So I didn’t come out while I was saying that. Everything is OK, actions were combined with words, what is the claim? Or should I keep the attitudes that I had at the age of 16 for the rest of my life?
“Oh, we don’t need this, we’re not like everyone else, it’s so corny.” Look, a lot of good things are banal. Sunset is banal, summer is banal) Love, family and children – it couldn’t be more banal. And now what?
We live in a legal environment and marriage simplifies a lot: from the tax deduction for a spouse to receiving an inheritance. People associate inheritance with old age, but very wrongly. Bricks are still falling on people’s heads, and trucks hitting people are still driving through the streets. After all, men die in war. And fuck what kind of inheritance you’ll get (or keep a roof over your head) if you haven’t been married.
And I’m sorry, but all these “I call him my husband, even though we’re not signed, we don’t need a piece of paper to confirm our feelings” look like self-deception, not something progressive. I always feel sorry for such women: unreliable men are messing with their brains, talking about “banality”, and they are only happy. The whole picaboo is full of stories like “my father lived with a woman for 30 years without marriage, died of a stroke, the inheritance went to the children, and at 60+ she had to go somewhere to a room in a communal apartment”