My Understanding Of Common-Law Marriage Law Based On Years of Watching Television Procedurals

1. Regular marriage is something you have to do on purpose; common-law marriage is a legal loophole you can get tricked into if you’re not careful

2. If you live with the same person for seven years, you are married (because of Jacob’s seven-year service to Laban for Rachel, I guess)

3. Also known as “The Bounder’s Codicil,” invented by morality-minded judges to outsmart rakes in the 1600s so they couldn’t just live with a lady for years and then leave her flat (probably with a pithy little phrase like “bed and board must benefit from the duration” too)

4. You can get out of this automatic marriage if you move out for like a month before the seven-year mark before moving back in, or if you make sure that all of your bills are addressed to you both separately

5. Maybe it’s four years

6. Or like “a year and a day,” which is either from fairy tales or from actual regional German medieval laws about apprenticeship or whatever

7. You can trick someone into providing you with an alibi by living with them for four-years and automatically triggering a common-law marriage, hiding the certificate from them

8. Relatedly, I guess once you’ve lived with someone for four years (or seven, or two) the state (which has been keeping track of this somehow, maybe through the IRS?) sends one of you a certificate in the mail just letting you know you’re common-law married now, but they only send it to one of you

   1. You don’t have to tell someone if you’re common-law married, which also means you could theoretically trick someone into getting common-law married by never taking their name off a once-shared utility bill, to hilariously-unpredicted consequence

9. Once you’re common-law married, you can’t testify against your common-law spouse, even if you want to

   1. Of which I guess the corollary is that “Spousal privilege means it’s illegal to testify against your spouse in court even if you want to”

   2. That doesn’t sound right

10. If you have a common-law spouse, you can commit any crime and they have to cover for you but they can get out of this by officially marrying the detective investigating you

11. If you’re formally married to one person and common-law married to another person, as long as they’re in separate states, you haven’t technically broken any laws, as long as you spend at least half of the year cohabiting with your common-law spouse

12. If your common-law spouse has been injured during the commission of an exciting and dramatic crime and is lying in a coma in the hospital, you’re allowed to go in and see them, but you need the added legal force of another relative before you can make decisions about pulling the plug

13. If you’re common-law married you can’t then get formally married to your common-law spouse, but since formal marriage trumps common-law marriage, if you formally marry somebody else you don’t have to get divorced, this is just your new spouse now

14. This kind of conflicts with Item 10 but I think that’s fine — you can stay common-law married after you get regular married but only if you want, you don’t have to

15. Legally speaking common-law marriage is entrapment

16. If you die while still being both kinds of married your regular widow gets your major stuff (properties, securities, stocks and bonds, liquidity events, etcetera) and your common-law widow gets your regular stuff (furniture, stuff you used every day, email passwords, whatever’s in your pockets at time of death)

17. Common-law children are just like regular children except they don’t get a Social Security number and aren’t bound by child labor laws

18. Common-law children outrank out-and-out illegitimate children if you’re in a Jane Austen novel, though

19. Common-law wife has rolling pin, curlers in hair, green face mask, cigarette, fuzzy bathrobe

20. Common-law husband has five o’clock shadow, unspecified back injury, not looking up from couch, “Can I borrow five dollars?”

21. “It’s legal trickery, drawing the wife up”

22. Somehow a corollary to the idea that “If you’re a cop, you have to tell me” but I’m not sure how

    1. If you’re a cop, you have to admit it when someone asks you directly, but if you’re common-law married, you don’t have to admit it to anyone, not even your common-law spouse

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