We caved in to the strong-arm tactics of the state and will finally get married

I and my wife have been living together for 6 years in a domestic partnership. It's been a good, stable relationship and still is.

Years ago we decided that there's no point in getting married. It's a pointless ceremony that doesn't give us anything we don't already have. All the legal aspects (e.g. inheritance and splitting of possession in case of separation) have been arranged via legally binding contracts.

However, now that we are about to have a child, we ran into something I couldn't believe still exists in a modern society.

If we remain unmarried, there's a whole set of hoops we have to jump through before I'm officially recognized as the child's father.

It's not enough that my wife acknowledges me as her child's father and I claim the child as mine. Even a DNA test won't do.

No. If we refuse to get married, the current law - which is based on ancient legislation from a time when out-of-wedlock children were an abomination - requires the following:

-We both petition the state for official recognition of our parenthood.

-We need to provide the officials with notarized birth certificates, financial statements and extracts from our criminal records.

-We will be interrogated separately about when we met me, how long we have lived together, is there any domestic violence, how often we argue, what is our financial situation, how often we have sex, do we fuck around with other people, what kind of sex we usually have, have we ever used any kind of contraception and if so when, and we need to submit a detailed report on how we intend to arrange our finances and handle potential separation.

I've talked with people who have undergone this kind of a process and they say that it's for real. One couple was interrogated for about four hours. The interrogator tried constantly to provoke them with very intimate and detailed questions about sex life so that he could write down "refuses to answer". When he couldn't find any cause to refuse the parenthood claim he got increasingly pissed off. At the end he said outright that, in his opinion, it should be illegal unmarried couples to have children, but that he's compelled by the law to grant the parenthood to the father.

We don't need that kind of bullshit especially now that my wife is heavily pregnant. We'll get married, but not in a church. Fuck that.