After 10 Years Together, My Partner Said Marriage Was “Just a Piece of Paper”. The Next Morning, Everything Changed
My medical decisions if he were incapacitated — same.
His estate, in the event of his death without a will — I was not his legal heir. His family would be.
Ten years of shared life, and if something happened to him tomorrow, I could be removed from the home we shared within the legal limits allowed by the deed, my access to his belongings would be complicated, and the decisions about what happened to him would not be mine to make.
The third page was a list of things I had scheduled for the following week.
An appointment with an estate attorney to discuss a will and healthcare proxy — mine, for him, to make him legally responsible for my medical decisions and a primary beneficiary.
An appointment with the same attorney to discuss a cohabitation agreement, which is a legal document that establishes the rights and responsibilities of unmarried partners and which protects both parties in the event of separation, illness, or death.
And a note at the bottom of the third page:
Marriage is not just a piece of paper. I have spent the night learning this. The paper protects us in ways that matter. You don’t want the paper. That’s your choice. But I’m getting the other papers.
David read the folder.
He was quiet for a long time.
This is the part I want to be honest about.
He did not immediately apologize.
He did not have a dramatic realization and get down on one knee.
What he did was ask questions, because David was a person who processed things through questions, and the questions were real: he asked about the specifics I had outlined, he asked about the attorney, he asked what the cohabitation agreement would cover.
He was not dismissive.
He was, for the first time in the conversation that had started at dinner and was continuing now, engaged with the actual content of what I was saying rather than the emotional frame he had put around it.
“I didn’t know about the medical decisions,” he said.
“Neither did I,” I said. “Until last night.”
“If something happened to you,” he said, slowly.
“Your name wouldn’t be on anything,” I said. “It would go to my parents, legally. Or whoever I have designated, which is currently nobody because I have not made a will.”
He looked at the table.
“And if something happened to me,” he said.
“Same,” I said.
“My mother,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
His relationship with his mother was the kind of complicated that had its own particular history and that he did not talk about in detail but that I understood, from ten years of proximity, to be genuinely difficult.
