lawyer

#Which States still have common Law marriage?

Here's a handy chart:

About 15 of them, if you've been together long enough, otherwise 11 or 12, depending on the purpose.

Do you plan to move? ;-) It usually takes a number of years of cohabitation and other things, such as representing yourselves as married, before common law marriage kicks in.

Twelve.

Here is what Wikipedia tells us:

Common-law marriage can still be contracted in the following jurisdictions: Alabama . Colorado . the District of Columbia . Iowa . Kansas . Montana . New Hampshire (posthumously ), Oklahoma . Rhode Island . South Carolina . Texas . and Utah . Note there is no such thing as common-law divorce that is, you can't get out of a common-law marriage as easily as you can get into one. Only the contract of the marriage is irregular; everything else about the marriage is perfectly regular. People who marry per the old common law tradition must petition the appropriate court in their state for a dissolution of marriage.

But, like most things involving lawyers, it gets more complicated.

For example, in Texas, a couple can either go down to the courthouse and fill out a form and file it with the proper authorities or they have to enter into an agreement to live togehter as husband and wife, actually do so and hold themselves out to others as being married. Tex. Fam Code 2.401.

So just living together doesn't automatically make a couple married. They have to do that and hold themselves out as a couple with an agreement to live together as a married couple.

Also, there is a statute of limitations problem as well. Once the relationship breaks up, if there is a gap of more than two years before the claim is asserted that they were informally married, there is a presumption against the existence of the marriage.

No one ever said that marriage was supposed to be uncomplicated, did they?