Cohabitating couples need legal rights

What legal rights cohabitating couple need? I think they should be protected against domestic violence and their children receive same welfare like any other children with married parents, education and caring.

But for the cohabitating couple, do they need to be protected financially? I don't think so. When they choose the partner, they already have compromised their financial situation, if they feel insecure enough that he/she may need to share half of the wealth in the future when they divorce, and they still have an option to maintain the relationship in a cohabitation mode. However, when the legal protection will cover this area as well, he/she may only maintain the relationship into a more casual mode to prevent those trouble later. Also, it's relatively easy to prove a married couple than cohabitating couple. How many night per week they need to spend together? How about sleeping in different room? There will be more argument to define cihabitating relationship when someone wants to protect their own wealth.

I'm not against cohabitating couples, but only when the statistic is telling us that more people are in habitation instead of marriage, it means to me that people need options and marriage is only one of many ways. If the government makes habitation just like marriage, people will work out different way they find more comfortable.

Also, they are not forced into any relationship, neither habitation nor marriage. They should be more responsible to their decision.

Precaution steps are always recommended to all couples!

- Lilac

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Cohabitating couples need legal rights
Yvonne Roberts
by Yvonne Roberts

A new attempt to reform family law could finally win security for Britain's 2 million cohabiting couples – and their children

Here we go again. For 15 years, various organisations, lawyers, bishops and lords included, have tried to establish legal rights for cohabitees. On every occasion, the "don't put marriage in peril" band have unfairly won the day – making more children vulnerable to life on the breadline. On this occasion, Nicholas Wall, the head of the family law division, has said that unmarried partners should be given the right to each have an equitable share of assets and money should their relationship break down

Wall told the Times, "Women cohabitees, in particular, are severely disadvantaged by being unable to claim maintenance and having their property rights determined by the conventional laws of trusts." Wall said that, in one recent case, a house was bought by an unmarried couple jointly. "They had lived together for 10 years and had two children and the judge divided 90% to the man and 10% to the woman. We [in the court of appeal] reversed it and said it should be 50-50." The case is now going to the supreme court.

Resolution, an organisation of family lawyers, can point to any number of cases of women and men who have found themselves, after years of cohabiting, with no money and no roof over their heads and those of their children after a separation. Trust is fine when Cupid is still firing his arrows but once the end is in sight (or one half of the cohabiting couple dies), if the mortgage is in only one name, the other person could find themselves without a home or a share of a pension and assets.

Britain has more than 2 million cohabiting couples. Common-law marriage was abolished in the 1750s but according to a British social attitudes survey, many believe it is alive and well. 2% of people cohabited in the 1960s, now, at least 70% of us cohabit before or without marriage. Cohabitation is associated with higher levels of fragmentation. While 27% of couples split before their child is five, that compares with 9% of those who are married. But if critics of cohabitation rights really want to boost marriage the best path is one of redistribution; boost everyone's income substantially and improve education considerably.

People who marry, according to research collated by the charity, One Plus One, tend to be wealthier, have better education and may have a faith. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher's book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier and Better-Off Financially, uses studies to prove exactly what they proclaim in the title. What the two don't tackle nearly so well is the chicken-and-egg dilemma. Namely, does marriage make people happier and healthier – or is it the happy, healthy people who tend to get married?

If the answer is the latter, cohabitation rights aren't going to make much different to the state of our nuptials. Many who cohabit say they don't marry because they lack prospects and the money for a proper wedding and house, or the man doesn't have a wage. Others cohabit because one partner won't commit to marriage. Some drift into cohabiting. So, say a girlfriend is chucked out of her flat, and temporarily moves in with her boyfriend, pays half the mortgage, that interim arrangement stretches into a couple of years. The relationship breaks up, should she then be eligible for half his assets, even if there are no children? (Hopefully, such a couple would be able to come to their own arrangement, but heartbreak can be a vengeful business.)

Earlier attempts to improve cohabitation rights (and the rights of dependents living together, for instance, two sisters) suggested a minimum of two or five years' cohabitation and children having been born to the partnership before a fair division of assets takes place. It's difficult. What if a woman has a child within 18 months of cohabiting? And what too of the right to dissent? Some people cohabit precisely because they want a relationship in which the state and the law play no part. That may not seem like the stuff of romance, but aren't these couples entitled to their own particular kind of happy-ever-after too?