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Originally Posted by ken0042
Let me give a bit of a silly example to get across what I'm saying.
I meet a nice girl. A month into the relationship we find we are always at each other's houses, so she moves in with me. She helps out with the bills, and we are all lovey-dovey.
Seven months later she is tired of me leaving the toilet seat up, and decides to leave me. Because we have been living together for more than 6 months, she is now entitled to half of my stuff. This is due to the current "common law" marriage laws.
Now, if we had gotten married it would be a different story. But I didn't decide that I wanted to be married.
Or here's another example. I get myself a female room mate. She goes around telling people that we are sleeping together, when we aren't. After being room mates for a year she leaves, and tries to sue saying we were common law. It is now up to me to prove that we didn't sleep together.
Then it becomes a question of what if we did sleep together once or twice? Does the fact that we got drunk once and fell into bed together entitle her to $150K?
Now with same sex marriage; the same thing could happen here. That's why I think that gay or straight, it should be up to the couple to say "we want to be an official couple."
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Ok that's fair. How do you then cover the people who chose not to get married but have lived common-law for 40 years?