Cohabitation Contracts

Well, yes, clearly:

If the Commission’s advice is adopted, it will no
longer be possible for a man and a woman to decide to live together on
completely private terms which involve no licence, or interference from
the state.

The option of a completely free (but
enduring) association between two adults which deliberately abjures any
of the trappings or encumbrances of marriage will now effectively cease
to exist.

In order to enter into such an
arrangement, a couple would, paradoxically, have to sign a legally
officiated contract – a form of pre-nuptial agreement without the
nuptials – thereby submitting themselves and their relationship to
precisely the sort of legal scrutiny which they had presumably hoped to
avoid.

That is the point, of course. Really, who could be so naive as to think otherwise? Obviously you have to have permission from the State to have regular sex with another person. What do you think the place would be like if people just did what they wanted, willy nilly, without the oversight of a benign bureaucracy?

What do you think this is, a free country or something?

In

4 responses

  1. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “Obviously you have to have permission from the State to have regular sex with another person.”
    Oh, it’s worse than that. This law change proposed covers people co-habiting, not just those in a sexual relationship. If you share a house with a friend, you’re covered. What happens if you co-habit with 50 others in a commune is unclear.
    A typical piece of New Labour shite: the state picks a model for how people live, and everyone has to bend their lifestyle to fit.

  2. Adults who require their relationship to be backed by the force of law, already have a low cost, simple, method of registering that union. ( A marriage or civil union license is probably the cheapest legal contract you can ever get.)
    In the absence of such a contractual document, the law should not attempt to second guess at any underlying, unspecified committment. There can be no grounds for doing so. It would be a form of third party speculation, made binding upon individuals in a retrospective manner, without their knowledge or consent. All of this at the behest of an aggrieved party trying to obtain “rights” over the property of another, by stealth.
    “I’ve grown accustomed to her money, yer ‘onner…”

  3. AntiCitizenOne Avatar
    AntiCitizenOne

    I just thought…
    Perhaps this is a desperate attempt to keep the collapse in house affordability going by making more demand for housing. After all it’s going to cause more people to live apart/ less people to cohabit.

  4. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “Perhaps this is a desperate attempt to keep the collapse in house affordability going”
    I think it’s more to do with money for lawyers, seeing as this came from the Law Society.

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