Cohabitation – Good or Bad Idea?

The questions of property and child custody (and they are interlinked issues anyway) have been the two major factors behind fuelling most debates in the legal and sociological circuits. ‘The Guardian’ newspaper has been following the issue hard since the late ‘90s. The grand old dame, BBC, has acknowledged this obliquely by referring to reports made by this paper. The ONS and several private sociological survey groups are also looking into the matters. Cohabitation is there to stay, and that is clear. But the rights of cohabiting couples are still far from reaching a certain standard of legal clarity.

The Debates

The take is between marriage and cohabitation on one hand, and divorce and cohabitation on the other hand. In the first case, holy wedlock is seen to be a deadlock by a growing number of British people. In the latter instance, couples enter a live-in relation to avoid the mess that divorce would bring in case they got married and split. If this strikes one as negativist thinking, it may be pointed out that the 2001 census of the Office of National Statistics counted 2.2 million cohabiting couples. By now, the number has increased much more. Some 1.25 million children had been born to these couples. This number has increased by roughly half a million by now. Most of these couples merely want to be careful with their lives, and they are not being pessimistic when they choose cohabitation. Unfortunately, according to the 2005 figures, failure of a remarriage is 60% more likely than the failure of a first marriage. This figure may seem striking at first. However, if we consider that people in the 40 – 45 bracket are getting the maximum number of divorces, it does not seem so unlikely. The second marriage might last longer than the first one, though.

Meanwhile, ‘The Guardian’ reported that the Law Commission has come up with reforms that will allow cohabiting couples to get a separation modeled closely on a normal divorce. This is applicable to partners who either have children or have lived under one roof for two to five years. The paper has also added that 70% of family lawyers in the UK agree that better laws are needed to support cohabiting couples. The present legal structure is lacking in too many crucial aspects, according to most. This is not a novel claim either. Apart from ‘The Guardian’, ‘The Telegraph’ and the BBC have been speaking about the need of better cohabiting law for some time now.

Pitfalls of Cohabitation

Those who feel that despite all the effort, cohabitation is still not safe enough as a bargain might not be very wrong.

• Property: The laws regarding the distribution of property and assets among cohabiting couples are still not standardized, as the variety of rulings on this matter show. Cohabiting couples are being increasingly urged to safeguard themselves by going for a cohabitation agreement. When one gets married and divorced, the legal mechanism works according to well-laid-out lines. In a cohabitation, especially when the partners have previous histories of other relationships, and assets from them, the deal can be unfair or bring in too many hassles. If you are a divorced woman living in your ex husband’s house with your present partner, and his child from another relation, and you want to part ways, who remains in the house and why? Who gets the child now?


• Custody: A troublesome issue even in so-called straightforward divorces, custody battles can border on the insane here, especially if none of the partners concerned are the biological parents of the child. In the case referred to above, the child may want to stay with his or her present step-mom, and the father may not appreciate that. If his ex wife turns up at this juncture, it would be enough for a television sitcom script. Sadly enough, these situations are no more flights of imagination, and real life plots are surpassing fiction in strangeness and complexity. The straight and narrow road down the aisle might still be the best for the children.


• Wills, bills, and others: Money can be a particularly problematic and painful area. You will have to change and re-create a will, make the necessary changes in bank accounts and all the papers, as nothing is ‘automatic’ as in marriage and divorce.