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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.
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Well, I'm not a marriage lawyer but I would think it would strongly depend on what kind of decisions she made in those 7 months. If she decided to drop out of school and look after you (maintain your house and cook for you ... blah blah blah) then yes she would be owed half of all the possessions you aquired over those 7 months.
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Originally Posted by ken0042
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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As in the other example, sex isn't enough. Interestingly sex is a requirement in a marriage but sex doesn't imply a marriage (or common law relationship). To the best of my knowledge she would have to have performed non financial benefits to the household. That is to say she would have had to given up a job in order to maintain your household.
In essence women "getting half" is mostly protection for them not having earned money or developed a career so they could benefit the household and further your career and your earning potential. Also, once children enter the relationship she may have acted as the caregiver of your children while you went out and earned money and bought things for the household. Surely, she should be entitled to a portion of these even if she wasn't "married" to you.
Or in the mini corporation analogy, most of her work was "non billable" however it was no less important to the maintenance of the corporation.