Kids and inheritance complicate older adults’ decisions to get married, study finds

Dating later in life isn’t too uncommon anymore if you find yourself single and of a certain age.

But getting married later in life? That’s still very uncommon, according to Cassandra Cotton.

Cotton is a family demographer and sociologist at Arizona State University. She found a surprising trend in her newest study.

“Something that really struck me when I was talking to older adults about what kinds of relationships they were interested in was how striking it was that the financial piece mattered so much, especially in relation to their families,” she said.

And when Cotton says families, she means their grown-up kids. The Show spoke with her more about it.

Full conversation

CASSANDRA COTTON: There was a particularly notable interview that I did with a 91-year-old who had been married a couple of times and was now in another committed relationship for something like seven or eight years. And he had been really surprised because his adult children got frantic when he got into this last relationship, something they’d never had a problem with before. And he was telling me he thinks it’s all about the inheritance, that they were really worried at this stage if he started something new, that everything that they thought was coming to them — probably relatively soon — was suddenly going to be taken by a new partner.

And that’s what really got me thinking about how are people thinking about their money? How are they thinking about their family when they’re making these kinds of decisions?

LAUREN GILGER: That’s so interesting. So a lot of the sociological literature around this talks about marriage as a wealth-building institution, right? Like you can have more wealth at the end of your life if you have been married during your life. But this is almost the opposite of that. 

COTTON: Yeah, it’s almost as if people start thinking about marriage as a threat. Instead of marriage, people coming together, pooling resources, all of a sudden there’s the possibility that a new partner might take everything that you’ve earned over a lifetime. And so people would tell me things about not only were they worried about having enough money for the rest of their lives, not wanting a partner to take what they needed for themselves, but they were worried about a potential partner taking what they felt really belonged especially to their children.

People would say things like, “Me and my former spouse built this up over our life together, and that needs to go to my kids. I can’t put that at risk by potentially marrying a new partner.”

GILGER: And it sounds like the kids also agreed with that sentiment. 

COTTON: It was striking to me how often people would have referenced specific things that their children had said. So the 91-year-old I’d mentioned, whose kids had been pretty vocal about it.

Another woman who I had interviewed who was really set on marriage because she felt marriage was the right kind of relationship for her, but she had to go and plan out all of her estate and actually share the resources that she would have left to her sons with them before she died because they were so worried about who she was dating, and they bothered her a lot about it.

GILGER: That’s so interesting. OK, so you found in this research — which was interviewing a whole lot of people about this — older people who were in or not in relationships, you found that they were kind of doing other things, like finding other ways to be in committed relationships that did not amount to a government-sanctioned marriage. 

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Shelley Linford

COTTON: Yeah, and so we sort of used the term in this paper, one of our participants said, “no-government marriage.” And by that, they were thinking things like spiritual marriages or living together or living apart together.

And so lots of people I spoke to saw those as sort of the ideal, being able to structure relationships that still meant people knew they were committed. People knew that those were important romantic relationships to them — but with some of this potential protection from a partner taking on all of their money, or conversely, them taking on all of a partner’s debt.

It was surprising to me, actually, the number of people who had done what we might kind of think of as a commitment ceremony or a spiritual marriage. And sometimes this came up in interviews in kind of a funny way, because I, for example, interviewed a couple who had told me when I called them to set up the interview, “Oh, we’re married.” But I got to the interview, and each of them shared separately that they weren’t actually legally married.

It really surprised me in the moment because I guess they had decided they would present themselves to other people as married because they felt you know marriage was more official, people would take that relationship more seriously. But they — and especially the man’s children — didn’t want the hassle of any of the legal paperwork.

GILGER: Does it amount to more than that in your research, Cassandra? Like, you’re talking about people’s children potentially being very upset about this, but is that what the law actually says in Arizona in terms of like, if you marry someone later in life, they could take all of your money from before that?

COTTON: Well you know this is what was so striking to me. And I am not a legal expert, but I had to sort of become a mini expert in this case because I realized people were telling me, “Yeah, if we get married, what happens to my house? Does that guy get to take my house if we get divorced? Does he get to take all the money for my children?”

And I think people have this expectation because most of us might know Arizona is what’s called a community property state. And when we talk about community property, what this typically means is that anything that’s accumulated in marriage is shared by both of the people in that marriage.

But it turned out that’s actually not how community property works in Arizona, because people who are coming into a marriage — and this is really important in later life when people are entering a new relationship with a lifetime of accumulated wealth and resources. When you start a new relationship, everything you had up until that moment is called separate property. So it belongs just to you.

It’s only what people bring into a marriage or earn in the marriage that becomes community property. So it was so striking to me that many of the people I spoke to had this idea of what would happen that’s not actually based on how the law actually works.

GILGER: And you’re looking at some additional research on that right now, right?

COTTON: Yes, I’m actively now recruiting for a new study looking explicitly at some of these economic and legal dimensions of people’s decisions.

GILGER: So if this were a younger couple looking at wealth in a marriage and whether or not to get married and how that wealth accumulates because of the marriage, you would just think about a prenup first, right? Was that an option for many of these couples? 

COTTON: It’s interesting. People did bring up the possibility of a prenup, but it was all — mostly women actually, one man — but people who weren’t in relationships yet. And so they were sort of thinking forward, “What would I do if I met the right person?”

But none of the people who I spoke to who did get married had pursued a prenup. And all of the people who had pursued other kinds of things — so the commitment ceremonies, spiritual marriages, living apart together — none of them talk to me about seeing that as a possibility that would still allow them to get married.

GILGER: OK, so what’s your takeaway here, Cassandra? Like, are you thinking that people, as they’re considering relationships later in life, or maybe just more practical than people when they think about them earlier on? 

COTTON: I think there’s probably some element of the practicality, right? And certainly the people that I talk to would talk about being able to draw on a lifetime of experience coming into relationships in later life. They felt that they saw things differently than maybe they had in their 20s or even in their 30s, where at that stage you’re thinking, “I have all of this left ahead of me and I’m going to build a relationship and a life with a partner.”

But for people who are thinking about it more in later life, there probably is some of that practicality of “I’ve lived this great life. I’ve built all of these resources and assets. And now I can have a relationship that maybe fulfills me in different ways without the legal paperwork of marriage.”