No they clearly didn't care about stone tablet bearers.

I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I'm in Canada. Here's it is an iron clad arrangement. Our lawyer drew up our wills accordingly, our accountant handles our taxes accordingly. No benefit here.

If we split up we would have to go through the same process for custody and asset disposal & disbursements. It's a legally binding thing here.

The three of us walking around as a happy family is a public statement of commitment, no? When we were at Walking with Dinosaurs yesterday morning, no one questioned any papers or marital status. In fact there were thousands of people there, certainly a more truly public statement than hand-picked relatives & friends who feel compelled to show up for a plate of free food and booze.

It would cost time and money for something none of us care about. We'd rather spend our money on winter family holidays or finish off the new kitchen or new pool deck or just put extra into our daughter's education fund (which is appreciable already).

Not arguing, just pointing out that people have different priorities.

So what you're saying is that everyone considers you married already, so effectively you are.

In essence, yes. The key is that the government recognizes it for taxation and other family matters. In our province here in .CA in 2014 marriage would be an expense with no payoff. We'd be better off blowing that money on lottery tickets.

Perhaps in your jurisdiction, not ours. We asked about it ages ago when we were dealing with our lawyer for our wills and our accountant for our income taxes.

Forgot to include this link: Common Law marriage in Canada

We're in Canada and considered common-law: there are no extra legal protections the paper offers. When we were drawing up our wills, our lawyer said as much. Our life insurance has each other as the beneficiary, our wills are the same. If we ever split up, it's off to the lawyers to divide up assets and work on custody.

When we file our yearly taxes we check off the relevant box for 'marital status' (or whatever it asks) for common-law partnerships and do income splitting to minimize the tax hit. Our accountant said there was no difference in having the paper or not for us. My lady is a professional and known as her own name. So. if we ever did get hitched, she would keep her name. No hyphenating, etc. Fine by me.

So what are the benefits? Neither of us see any.

Tricky. It might be that right now, you both behave in a way so that the other person would marry you if you insisted on it. But after getting married, you might both stop behaving that way and then things go downhill.

We are not acting in a 'sales mode' after 10+ years, we clicked early on and are ourselves: no lies, no masks, no illusions.

Reading TFA was interesting as, according to that data, we are perfectly set other than the marriage question. We're both atheist, so for the religious question it doesn't apply though I guess saying "The three of us regularly go to the museum, watch sciency shows, etc." would count as attending a church. ;)

My lady and I have been together over ten years, we have an eight year old daughter and are completely happy.
I wonder how the "Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced" extends to us if we ever got married (not that we've ever thought about it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.)

"Are you looking at saggy tribal titties again, Anon?"
"No, mommy, I'm looking at -flip flip flip- the Aral Sea."

Alberta also has private liquor stores.

That is a reasonable conclusion. That is not, however what the GP stated. The GP state the he wanted a text book written on anthropogenic climate change. That is very different than being able to explain it to a lay person that is being able to convince someone it is worth publishing. In the case of anthropogenic climate change the book would be rather short:

• * A number of gases interact with the upper atmosphere is such a way as to trap heat within the atmosphere.
• * Since the industrial revolution we have been releasing huge quantities of these gases that were previously sequestered within oil and gas deposits.
• * The churn of the atmosphere allows for the passage of the newly released gases from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere.
• * Some of these same gases also sublimate into the ocean where they dramatically affect the PH of the ocean which cause major problems for the top dwellers of the ocean where much of our oxygen is generated.

The issue isn't that there isn't a text book or a clear laymen description of the problem it comes when someone says: so prove to me that the churn of the lower atmosphere can carry these gasses to the upper atmosphere and the scientist starts talking about climate models which cannot predict any specific event with a high degree of accuracy but do tend to predict trends with great accuracy. To me this is like saying: what is the energy of a particle in a chamber at a defined pressure, temperature and density. The answer is very easy to give the average but essentially impossible to give the exact unless your model knows ALL of the inputs (i.e. every momentum vector and quantum state of every atom contain within the chamber).

I am a physicist. I have explained the expansion of the universe to many lay people without trouble. I have also tried time and time again to explain it to my mother. All such explanations end with her asking "so where is it expanding into." The short answer to this is: nothing. And one can either accept that or learn metric differential geometry. The belief that whatever any given PhD is working on can "describe in laymen's terms what they are doing" does not mean a laymen has the knowledge to understand or even accept the details of the theory. Heck look at Quantum physics in the early 1900s and you see many very intelligent people thinking it is crazy because it is probabilistic. So in short a good scientist can explain to a laymen what they do but the laymen has to accept their expertise when it comes to many specifics.

As stated by others many frequent flyers are not flying by choice but buy direction from work. That work also REQUIRES many of us to purchase the cheapest fare. I cannot upgrade my seat and get reimbursed for my ticket. Furthermore you are technically correct about United, however, unless you are flying major city to major city you are going to be one of United's local carriers which do not have Economy Plus. Spend a couple hours on one of the smaller "local" carrier planes which has neither leg nor headroom for ANYONE on the flight and it becomes quickly clear that United doesn't care about anything other then their immediate bottom line.