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| Increase In Cohabitating Couples Raises Concerns |
| Alan Kopit, lawyers.com Legal Editor |
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For many couples, their first step over the threshold today is likely to come without rings on their fingers.
That's because forty percent of all U.S. adults say they have lived with a romantic partner to whom they were not married, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive® and commissioned by LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell's lawyers.com. These arrangements open up a host of legal concerns that did not commonly exist even one generation ago.
"Thirty years ago, unmarried couples living together would be an exceptional occurrence. Today, it's a common practice," observed attorney Alan Kopit, lawyers.com's legal editor. "Yet couples are often unaware of the unique legal and financial implications of such arrangements until problems arise."
Without the legal status of marriage, Kopit pointed out, cohabitating couples lack legal protections their married counterparts enjoy.
"In the eyes of the law, the marriage relationship generally supersedes all others, automatically giving spouses rights to make legal and financial decisions for one another if one person is incapacitated, for example." Kopit said. "Unmarried couples may discover during a medical emergency that those decisions are left to blood relatives."
"In addition, in the event of the death of one partner, shared property, including a home, may not be automatically transferred to the survivor," Kopit said.
Documents like powers of attorney for healthcare and finances, which dictate a specific individual who is responsible for making decisions if a person is unable to do so him- or herself, can be particularly important for cohabitating couples, according to Kopit.
"They should also consider how shared property is titled, particularly real estate and bank accounts, to ensure each party has the access and ownership rights they want," he said.
"A cohabitation agreement - a written document outlining a couple's rights and obligations to each other and their household - is a widely underutilized instrument, but can be extremely helpful in the event the relationship dissolves," Kopit added. "Remember, there's no divorce court to make decisions in those situations."
Cohabitation Gaining a Foothold in America
America has experienced a sharp increase in the rate of cohabitation. According to U.S. census data unmarried couples living together increased 72 percent between 1990 and 2000. Moreover, according to the lawyers.com survey results, younger adults are more than twice as likely as their older counterparts to have lived with a romantic partner without a marriage license. Many Americans between thirty-five and forty-four years old (56%) have cohabitated. Less than one-in-four (23%) people over fifty-five have done so.
"Younger couples don't have the benefit of taking their legal cues from their parents' generation when it comes to cohabitation," said Kopit, "That makes it particularly important for them to seek out good legal counsel if they enter into these type of relationships."
Alan Kopit is the legal editor of lawyers.com and partner at the Cleveland-based law firm Hahn Loeser & Parks LLP. He has contributed columns to lawyers.com, focusing on consumer and small business legal issues and his media appearances include MSNBC, CNBC, CNNfn, Bloomberg Television, WEWS-TV Cleveland (ABC), WKYC-TV Cleveland (NBC), WKBC-TV Houston (NBC), Bloomberg Radio, and legal contributor to NBC-TV's Today show. For more information about Alan Kopit, please see his biography.
Harris Interactive® fielded the online survey on behalf of LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell's lawyers.com between June 8 and 10, 2005 among a nationwide sample of 2,153 U.S. adults aged 18 and older. The data were weighted to be representative of the total U.S. adult population on the basis of region, age within gender, education, household income, race/ethnicity, and propensity to be online. Though this online sample is not a probability sample, in theory, with probability samples of this size, one could say with 95 percent certainty that the overall results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Sampling error for the sub-samples of those aged 35 to 44 (437), those aged 55 and over (607), Westerners (475), Midwesterners (493), Northeasterners (464), those who are divorced, separated or widowed (383), those who are married (1,068) and those who are single (540) is higher and varies.
LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell's lawyers.com is the leading lawyer directory on the Web, providing access to more than 440,000 attorneys and law firms nationwide. More than one million searches per month are conducted at lawyers.com by consumers and business people in search of the right lawyer for their needs. |
