Confusion about what exactly "getting married" means

[kritikvernunft]

Today, a female relative of my wife mentioned that she had put an end to the plan to get married with a suitor who has been locally for a year already, but also goes back to Australia once in a while, where he owns a few houses, inherited, and rented out to tenants. He got nervous when she mentioned the word "marriage". Now, what she means by "marriage", is that he would need to find the courage to ask for her to her family.

I told her that he probably had the courage to do that, but that he most likely had understood something else in the term "marriage".

As soon as local paperwork would start showing up, he would have to get all kinds of documents from his embassy, hand it over to the government locally, and ask for all kinds of permissions to his -and her governments for the marriage. Furthermore, these governments would not recognize him as the head of the family anyway, and if anything ever goes wrong, they are guaranteed to side against him, and incessantly seek to extract money out of him. Hence, he is not interested. He is not alone with that opinion. Most men that I know, will never agree to sign that kind of paperwork, especially when they own valuable real estate or are likely to inherit it.

The problem is that these men are not aware of the fact that dropping the idea to seek permission from the bride's family, is not just a problem of religion, but also often turns out to be quite damaging on the long run for their relationship. If she had clarified that the permission-zilla was meant to be limited to her own family only, he would most likely not have run away like that. I am quite happy that she has firm convictions and never considered having sex before marriage, because that would have made the problem only worse.

Furthermore, the paperwork was not even needed, because they were not going live in Australia anyway. The idea was clearly to stay locally. I don't think that the plan will get resurrected any more, but still, it was a silly way of letting misunderstandings ruin an otherwise good idea.

[Umm Abed]

He probably didnt want to risk losing his wealth in the case of a divorce, seems like too many legal complications involved, so he did a runner.

[M.I.A.]

dat feel when you have to spend child benefit on someone else's car payment..


sign a prenup already!