Refusing to Get Gay Married Cost Me Big Time
Not taking steps to protect yourself and your children is one of the biggest financial mistakes you can make.
Marriage never appealed to me: not when I was a child, not when I dated men, and certainly not as a lesbian. An ardent feminist and incurable contrarian, I scoffed at the idea that my relationship needed legal recognition in order to be valid, even after I had a baby with my female partner. Little did I know that rejecting marriage would prove to be the biggest financial failure of my life.
When my partner and I met in Iowa in 2002, gay marriage was in a liminal state: legal some places, illegal most, including Iowa. A commitment ceremony did not interest me. Although I am inclined to disagree with him on many things, at the time I concurred with gay sex columnist Dan Savage’s thoughts on commitment ceremonies: “the pretend wedding, the pretend priest, the pretend vows.” No matter how hard you tried, you weren’t really married.
It’s complicated (but do it anyway)
When we moved to North Carolina five years later, I worked full-time while my partner finished graduate school. I put everything in my name: the mortgage, the car loan, the credit cards and all the bills. It just made sense. We purchased sperm together and inseminated at home. I got pregnant on the first try.
When I was 26 weeks pregnant, I went into labor and was put on strict bed rest, at which point I drew up some informal papers indicating that if I died, I wanted the baby to live with to my partner. I filled out the power of attorney form at the hospital. Throughout this extremely stressful time, I thought about protecting my baby’s right to be with his other parent. I thought about dying. I worried about the baby dying. I stressed over whether my partner would be allowed to advocate for me if anything went wrong during delivery.
I never once thought about money.
The premature birth was a trauma from which it took me many years to recover, and I could not imagine leaving this fragile child with a babysitter while I worked full-time. I stayed home with him for five years, piecing together work as a freelance editor and writer in between wiping his nose, changing his diapers, and preventing him from completely destroying the house.
Forms are awful but worth the pain
“I want you to adopt him,” I would tell my partner, occasionally. But I loathe filling out forms and I can’t stand government offices. I hated the idea of social workers inspecting our house to make sure that we were fit parents. It seemed so invasive. I kept shelving the idea, filing it away as something to do later.
By the time same-sex marriage became legal in October 2014, we weren’t really getting along. Tired and cranky, we were working to keep the peace while raising our child and each running our individual businesses. Although we talked briefly about getting married, organizing such an event seemed virtually impossible. Anyway, we prided ourselves in crossing boundaries, not being bound by convention, doing things differently, flaunting the status quo.
Look beyond the romance
I was still thinking about marriage as a patriarchal construct that oppressed women, or as an unnecessary saccharine gesture that fueled a industry rife with sexist tropes: flouncy dresses, misty photography, images of innocence and purity. In retrospect, I realize that I was guilty of being a romantic, of conceptualizing marriage as being about love rather than understanding it as the legal contract that it is. My resistance, in this case, turned out to be futile.
Partnership and parenthood are as much about money as they are about love, and I knew this. I had been teaching Women’s Studies for years, telling my students about marriage being a contractual agreement that had to do with property and taxes, but this reality did not sink in until I was living on my own and trying to support a child on $18/hr working part time at a preschool.
Until my relationship fell apart, I didn’t fully grasp the importance of marriage.
I was not sold on the idea of gay marriage as the ultimate prize for the LGBTQ community. I had been in relationships with women for almost twenty years, and had never experienced any institutionalized homophobia. When I was in the hospital for two weeks on bedrest when I was pregnant, my partner was with me the entire time and nobody batted an eye. She visited our son in the NICU, and nobody questioned her right to be there. We bought two houses together, shopped for cars together, travelled internationally. There were many times when I actually forgot that she wasn’t biologically related to our child. Having a piece of paper just didn’t seem that important.
In July 2015, after nearly 13 years together, my partner and I separated. Not being married meant that my ex had never been able to legally adopt our son, but we both agreed that we should share custody. However, we could not come to an agreement on financials, and not being married meant that she had no established legal obligation to pay child support.
Money brings out the worst in people, and the financial burden of divorce can be almost as devastating as the emotional toll. In my case, the lack of legal obligations and guidance as it pertained to money and property created what seemed like an insurmountable barrier to resolving our financial disagreements. When both parents are biologically related to the child, whether or not they are married, the higher earning parent is legally required to pay “guideline” child support. The state believes it to be important that if one parent makes more money than the other, the child will not be impoverished in one home and enriched in the other. In other words, the child won’t feast on prime rib at Dad’s house and subsist on ramen when he’s with Mom: he’ll have chicken thighs at both places.
Guideline support is important, particularly for women who stayed at home with their children or who worked part time and who will almost certainly face a financial crisis once the higher wage earner move out. When parents are married: a qualified domestic relations order (QDRO) splits the pension or retirement fund. There are rules about the division of marital property and assets. There rules about spousal support and alimony. Clearly, as anyone who has been through a divorce knows, having the rules in place does not mean that everyone follows them. The rules may not feel fair, they may feel overly punitive, they may not fit your particular situation. But they do provide a framework for the division of financial assets during a highly emotional time. In the end, we wound up in court fighting over money rather than celebrating her legal adoption of our child.
I wish I would have gotten married so that my divorce would have been a smoother financial transaction. Not taking the institution of marriage seriously cost me almost two years of financial and psychological anxiety worse than anything I have every experienced.
My ex-partner and I are coparenting our little boy, and we are doing a decent job. He can play “Let it Be” on the electric guitar, he’s a decent hockey player, and he’s a generally happy little guy. I know my ex to be an enthusiastic and loving parent, a doting aunty, a devoted daughter, and a very hard worker. I believe that eventually we will resolve the money issue because we both want the best for this boy that we adore. We know that we will be connected to each other for the rest of our lives through him, and I trust that eventually we will be able to dispense with the tension and anguish that haunts our interactions.
That said, if I ever cohabitate again, I will do so with my eyes wide open. I will get married, I will have a prenup, I will do things by the letter of the law. I will dot every “i” and cross every “t.” Love may be blind, but money changes everything.
Jill Moffett is a writer, single mother, feminist, poet, and recovering academic. Follow her on Twitter: @dr_moffett.
This story is part of The Billfold’s Financial Fails series.
