No Ring, No Problem
Video Transcribed:
Good day everybody. This is Dustin Peterson and I am the Oklahoma City Attorney.
Several times a month I will be bringing you answers to the most commonly heard questions from my clients and elsewhere, and bringing those answers to you so you can make better decisions in your own situation. Today’s question is a tricky one. I may need to leave my current relationship, but we were never married and I’m afraid I’ll have no house or car. Well, Oklahoma does recognize, currently, common law marriage. How do we tell if you have a common-law marriage? In the law, we like pneumonic devices and so we tend to remember common law marriage by the pneumonic device PEACH, P-E-A-C-H.
P stands for permanence. Is there a permanent demonstrated quality to your relationship? E is exclusive. Has the relationship been exclusively between you and your partner? A is an actual agreement. This is the most important to the courts. Some of the other factors they say are used just to determine whether you and your partner had an actual agreement that you should be married. C is cohabitation. Have you been living together? And H is holding out. Have you held each other out? This is my husband or this is my wife.
If those factors are present, it’s possible to establish that you are legally married, and therefore your property with your husband or wife would be subject to property division, equitable property division in divorce. Since there is no such thing as common law divorce, you would have to go through the court systems whether you are common law married or otherwise.
If you have questions about common-law marriage in Oklahoma or want to reach out to an Oklahoma divorce lawyer, give me a call at my office, at (405) 888-5400. You can look me up online at oklahomacitydivorceattorney.pro.