Did you know that if you live together with your girlfriend or fiancée or boyfriend, etc. that the two of you could be involved in a common law relationship and not even know it?
A common law relationship in Canada and many of the US states is established between two people if they are living together in a conjugal relationship for at least one year. This must be a continuous twelve month period and it cannot be separate periods which together add up to one year. However, you would be allowed short temporary absences that involve business travel, family reasons, or vacations. When it comes to this “common law relationship”, it involves a man and a woman living together but not being legally married. It is not the same thing as a legal marriage; in a legal marriage partners have both more rights and more obligations than in a common law situation. In the eyes of the law, contrary to popular belief, no amount of time (not even 60 years) of a common law relationship will turn it into a legal marriage. Only by having a legal marriage can you obtain the rights and obligations of a husband or a wife.
If a common law relationship ends, spouses have very little responsibility to support each other compared to a marriage. As for child custody and visiting rights after the end of a common law relationship both the father and the mother of the child are joint custodians and they have the same rights in asking for custody, etc. as any divorcing couple. When it comes to ones property, the Family Law Act states that a husband and wife have equal right to half of all the things they owned as a “couple”, no matter who paid for the item or whose name is on the deed, etc. When it comes to a common law partnership this law does not apply. Whoever paid for an item, or who can prove something is “theirs” would be entitled to it.