I wouldn't know. My wife's the only person I've ever dated. Probably wouldn't just do that with random dates though. My wife and I knew eachother for a while before we were dating and got close even before then. That's why I was comfortable calling her my wife. I was confident it'd last. Even then it wasn't until a while in the relationship that we started doing it.

Plus we'd been getting mistaken for a married couple quite a lot, so I figured why not just act like one? Takes off the pressure to actually get married too early, too. After all, what's there to gain that we can't gain without it?

[–] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Depending on where you live and when you began behaving like this and calling her your wife, you may in fact be married.

[–] Sombyr@lemmy.one 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Luckily, I did look up the laws for my state, and legally we aren't technically married, but we do have the right and sometimes the obligation to apply for some marriage related benefits. It's weirdly inconsistent.

[–] Speculater@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

My wife and I get a huge tax break for filing jointly, not to mention healthcare and life insurance benefits.

[–] Sombyr@lemmy.one 3 points 11 months ago

Unfortunately, don't think we can do any of those to any significant effect. We're both on medicaid and non-taxable disability income. In other words, we don't usually legally have to file taxes unless we had some other kind of income that year because it's just gonna be a long string of zeros.

What we can do though is file for disability as a married couple, then we can legally save up a lot more money in exchange for being paid slightly less. The requirements for that are just living together and "holding yourself out as a married couple to the community you live." Well, actually, there is a bit of awkwardness with the wording last I checked that accidentally makes it only apply to heterosexual couples, but I'm sure they legally have to apply the rule to homosexual couples as well. We'll see anyway.

I believe we also have the same visitation rights as a married couple if we're ever hospitalized, which is helpful considering we've both found ourselves hospitalized as a result of our disabilities a few times. I'm not certain about that though. We had quite a distance separating us every time that's happened so far, so haven't had the opportunity to test that.