July 22, 2011

I do, I do, I do, I do, now off you go

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:57 pm

The town of Beuningen near Nijmegen in the East, with a population of about 25,000 is going to scrap its free civil ceremonies. Currently, you can get married at town hall for free, as long as you are from Beuningen. You get a private room where your friends, family and witnesses can watch the happy event. I cannot imagine that it costs them a bundle every year in a town with surely a handful of singles getting married, but OK, cutting costs is all the rage. As of January 2012, the now free ceremony will cost 100 euro.

However, the new town trend will be Las Vegas style, albeit without Elvis priests: the quickie marriage between 8:45 and 9 am at the wicket with a quick ‘ja’ (yes), the paperwork signed, and off you go. Somehow, the ‘charm’ of the quickie ceremony cannot possibly come close to anything I’ve seen or heard about Las Vegas.

In many cities, civil ceremonies cost different rates at different times. In an expensive city like Amsterdam, 9 am on a Monday is either free or cheap, as opposed to a Friday afternoon at 4 pm. It’s all about time and money, and not about the l-word.

(Link: gelderlander, Photo by Anthony Kelly, some rights reserved)

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March 27, 2011

Gays marry less than straights

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:39 pm

April 1 marks the tenth anniversary of gay marriage in the Netherlands. In that period some 15,000 same-sex couples got hitched here, making 1 in 5 same-sex couples married. Four in five heterosexual couples are married, AD reports.

Jan Latten of Statistics Netherlands told the paper that gays marry for the same reasons as straights—love, children and security—, that the relative number of divorces between the groups are virtually the same, and that both groups have the same preferences for wedding months: “spring and summer”.

See also:

(Photo by CarbonNYC, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

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January 8, 2011

New tax law encourages both marriage and divorce

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:04 am

Since 2001 tax forms have had a checkbox that allowed two people living together to declare a ‘fiscal partnership’, a relationship just for tax purposes. It appears (I never looked it up before), that if you and somebody else declare a fiscal partnership you get certain tax breaks, such as mortgage interest deductions for the highest earner.

This year the law has changed. It is no longer enough to declare to the tax people that you and Bob are partners, you and Bob need to have some legal status to confirm this. A wedding certificate is good, as is a registered partnership (civil union) or a notarized ‘cohabitation agreement’. The latter is used for non-intimate relationships (think father-son) and sometimes for uncommon intimate relationships (think polyamorous). What also works is owning a house together or having children together. Couples who never got around to making it ‘official’ now have a decision to take.

Interestingly, married couples who are estranged may wish to explore the possibility of a divorce under the new tax regime, Elsevier reports. You see, this new fiscal partnership is obligatory. It is harder to get into, but you cannot opt out either. One reason for such a divorce could be if each partner owns a house, so that they both can get their own mortgage interest deductions.

Another way to become fiscal partners is to have a partner recognised by one’s pension fund.

The people that may be inconvenienced the most by this measure is those who refuse to divorce for religious reasons, even if they no longer live together—a situation called ‘separated from table and bed’ in Dutch, and legally recognized as such, just no longer by the tax people.

(Photo by Eunice Chang, some rights reserved)

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November 24, 2010

Parliament pushes for prenuptial agreements

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

According to NRC newspaper, the Netherlands is one of the few countries in the world where marriage takes place in a standard way under community property (joint ownership) rather than separate property. Drawing up a prenuptial agreement (the Dutch have surely heard that in American television series) costs money and sharing all your stuff is still considered the right thing to do here, someone please tell me why. A prenuptial agreement not only provides in case of divorce, but also protects property during the marriage in case of a bankruptcy or the likes. Don’t give me that it’s all about trust argument because most of the time in heterosexual marriages women get more than they brought in stuff-wise, a reason some women marry in the first place.

Putting aside gay marriage for a moment, women were traditionally dependent on men, and so community property made sense. The politicians who submitted this proposal to parliament to have the rules changes feel married people should have more say in their own marriages like the rest of the Western world, and parliament agrees.

(Link: nrc.nl, Photo of Wedding cake by philipyk, some rights reserved)

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November 14, 2010

Record number 40th wedding anniversaries

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 1:16 pm

About 73,000 Dutch married couples will have celebrated their 40th wedding anniversaries at the end of this year, Blik op Nieuws reports.

The online news service quotes Statistics Netherlands who point out that this record simply follows from the fact that so many people married in 1970 (124,000 couples). Since 1970 was a peak year, it is not expected that the record will be broken soon.

Another contributing factor is the increased life expectancy, especially that of men. In the Netherlands, men typically marry younger women and die at a younger age than their wives.

(Photo by Anthony Kelly, some rights reserved)

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November 26, 2009

Hiring a hacker to check up on hubby’s online activities

Filed under: Online by Orangemaster @ 1:14 pm

I bet Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet gets all kinds of questions and this one I just had to share with you.

A woman asked if she could hire a hacker to find out what her husband does on the Internet. In other words, what he does online at home using their shared computer. Surprise, surprise, she thinks he’s mailing (nice euphemism) another woman and wants some confirmation.

Engelfriet explains that in the Netherlands, installing spyware or hacking someone’s password to read their mail is technically ‘ruining their peaceful enjoyment’, which is illegal and cannot be done directly or indirectly.

However, within a (obviously not very healthy) marriage, a computer is common property, unless otherwise specified in a pre-nuptial agreement (not very popular here). Then it’s not a crime to hack your own system, like it’s not a crime to hire someone to break one of your locks.

Of course, it could be considered an invasion of the husband’s privacy. And then Engelfriet gets cocky: “Even in a marriage people have privacy, although not much at all, if you ask me. After all, you got married to share everything with one another.”

My advice to the woman, putting aside the mess of advice to be given about the obvious trust issues, is why not check his mobile phone? Follow him under another name on Twitter, MSN or Facebook. And get some professional help, collectively or otherwise.

(Link: security.nl)

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July 20, 2008

Gay marriage leads to new word for “maiden name”

Filed under: Dutch first by Branko Collin @ 8:01 am

Civil servants who felt that the term “maiden name” might not be appreciated by the participants in an all-male wedding asked the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union) to come up with a new phrase. The Union is not in the habit of creating words but asked around (Dutch) and found out that some people had already started using “geboortenaam” (lit. birth name, and not, as one commenter at the Queerty blog would have it, gay birth name). :-)

An alternative, “geslachtsnaam” (inherited name) was rejected for being cumbersome and old-fashioned, according to the Onze Taal blog (Dutch).

Photo by CarbonNYC, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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June 23, 2008

Rare oak wedding anniversary celebrated in Amsterdam

Filed under: Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 7:23 am
Pieter Ably and Henriette Jeanne Ably-Tritsch

Today, the very first oak wedding anniversary in the history of the Netherlands is being celebrated. It was exactly 80 years ago that Dutchman Pieter Ably and French woman Henriette Jeanne Ably-Tritsch from Amstelveen said ‘I do’ to each other. They are now both 102 years old and living together in an elderly home in Amstelveen. The Mayor of Amstelveen Jan van Zanen will visit them today to congratulate them. The longest standing anniversaries that Statistics Netherlands has registered are couples that have been married 70 years known as a platinum anniversary, hence the assumption that this is the first ever oak anniversary.

(Link and photo: ad.nl )

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January 22, 2008

Using husband’s name costly affair

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:13 pm

Researchers at the University of Tilburg (Dutch) have discovered that married women who use their husband’s family name are generally seen as more dependent, less ambitious and less intelligent. Subjects were told that they were introduced to Peter and Helga Bosboom at a party (Helga using her husband’s name), and when asked rated Helga as caring, dependent, less intelligent and emotional. Using a hyphenated last name has the same effect.

The researchers estimated that using the “wrong” last name could even cost a woman EUR 361,708 during her life time. In an experiment in which subjects were asked to take the place of a human resources manager, women that used their husband’s name were generally rated for jobs that paid EUR 861.21 less than those for women that retained their maiden names.

According to Dutch law, both men and women keep their own family name when marrying, but both the wedded and divorced are allowed to use their own name and that of their (ex)partner in any combination in public.

(Via Jong Nieuws.)

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