Introduction

A primary focus of this book is the legal treatment of couples in informal relationships, who have married under a religious law or in a personalized ceremony not recognized by the state, or who are cohabiting without a ceremony. As Rebecca Probert's chapter explains, some of those who have gone through a ceremony will have marriages that are classed as ‘void’, which for many legal purposes – perhaps counter-intuitively – gives rise to similar, and usually identical, consequences to valid marriages. But in other situations, while some of these couples may regard themselves as married – at least for religious, cultural or psychological purposes – they will be regarded by English law as having a ‘non-qualifying ceremony’. Such couples may (mistakenly) assume that their marriage is recognized by the state and conduct their lives accordingly. Paradoxical though it may appear, English law will treat couples in these ‘non-qualifying ceremony’ cases just as it would treat couples who live together but who are clearly not married in any sense, including couples who have deliberately decided not to marry precisely because they do not want the legal and cultural consequences of marriage.1 All these couples are commonly referred to in the UK as ‘cohabitants’; in some other jurisdictions, such as Australia and New Zealand, they have a ‘de facto relationship’ – that is to say, one that exists and is recognized in fact but not in law (‘de jure’).

The place of cohabitation in families in the UK today

Marriage remains the principal basis of family life in the UK: in 2017, two thirds of the 19 million ‘families’ (defined as couples with or without dependent children and lone parents living with a child) were based on marriage or civil partnership (ONS, 2017a). However, in 2015 the marriage rate (that is to say, the number of people marrying per thousand unmarried people aged 16+ in the population) was at its lowest since calculations began in 1862 (ONS, 2018c). Meanwhile, cohabitation is the fastest-growing family type.