I dread the elections in France in 2027. France is one of the last bastions of Freedom that is capable of standing up to the authoritarian states if push comes to shove. The last few presidential elections have moved France closer and closer to having a Kremlin sock puppet in charge. While they have managed to pull back from the brink a few times, it only needs to go wrong once.
Thanks for sharing! Concerning logistics when travelling I can also share my experience.
I travel on a Dutch passport and my children, while also having Dutch citizenship, travel on German passports because that is where we live and where my wife is from. They also use my wife’s German last name. Therefore, when travelling, my kids and I have different names and nationalities. For some reason nobody ever questioned any of that. I keep a copy of the birth certificate just in case though.
I don’t want to excuse Netanyahu here. He certainly belongs behind bars in my opinion. However, he only holds a part of the world hostage rather than all of it. I see him on par with folks like Kim Jon Un or Mohamed bin Salman rather than Trump or Putin.
The answer will likely depend on the place in the world and even on the cultural background of individuals getting married. I’ll just share my experience.
We got married out of convenience. While it’s technically possible to arrange the bulk of the legal stuff with various contracts, it is just easier to use the “default contract” that already covers the most common use case. Some legal arrangements, for example cuts to inheritance tax or the right to remain silent when asked about your spouse in legal proceedings, are only available for “real” marriages.
Once we decided to have children we looked into the various arrangements needed to make that work and quickly found out that marriage is the easiest way to sort everything out. In our day to day life nothing really changed. In legal terms quite a lot is now different.
By the way, as others have mentioned, getting married isn’t expensive. All we paid was the administrative fee which was something like 50 Euros.
I remember visiting Mohenjo-Daro in the mid 1990s and being impressed by the sheer scale of time between these remnants of civilization and myself. It’s sad that the site isn’t as developed as it deserves to be, since it is among the oldest proofs of civilisation still around.
A really nice picture. Although I have never been to Cape Henlopen, I’ve spent many hours studying maps of Lewes for my hobby as an amateur mapmaker. Sorry for the link to Reddit, but I do feel like I’ve connected to that place somehow by virtue of these creative projects.
Perhaps they will be able to meet up in the afterlife soon, since I believe both of them are likely heading in the same direction there.