Common-law Marriage - Essential Distinctions From Statutory Marriage

Essential Distinctions From Statutory Marriage

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

Common law and statutory marriage have the following characteristics in common:

  1. Both parties must freely consent to the marriage
  2. Both parties must be of legal age to contract a marriage or have parental consent to marry
  3. Neither party may be under a disability that prevents her or him from entering into a valid marriage - e.g. they must both be of sound mind, neither of them can be currently married, and some jurisdictions do not permit prisoners to marry.

Otherwise, common law marriage differs from statutory marriage as follows:

  1. There is no marriage license issued by a government and no marriage certificate filed with a government
  2. There is no formal ceremony to solemnize the marriage before witnesses
  3. The parties must hold themselves out to the world as husband and wife (this is not a requirement of statutory marriage)
  4. Most jurisdictions require the parties to be cohabiting at the time the common law marriage is formed. Some require cohabitation to last a certain length of time (e.g. three years) for the marriage to be valid. But cohabitation alone does not create a marriage. The parties must intend their relationship to be, and to be regarded as, a legally valid marriage.

Read more about this topic:  Common-law Marriage

Famous quotes containing the words essential, distinctions and/or marriage:

    “The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
    —Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
    —Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)

    “Every relationship that does not raise us up pulls us down, and vice versa; this is why men usually sink down somewhat when they take wives while women are usually somewhat raised up. Overly spiritual men require marriage every bit as much as they resist it as bitter medicine.”
    —Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)