I don’t know if this is specific to my family, or my age, or my state, but I have had two family members who were in what were described as common-law marriages. One was my grandfather, the other was my tenuous connection to President Harding (second-worst president ever).
After he divorced my maternal grandmother (the estimable Granceil), my grandfather Earl was in a common-law marriage with his longtime paramour Alice. Alice lived with him for decades if not more. Their post-Lucille union was described to me as a common-law marriage, and that it was a thing a lot of people did.
Now, in my sixties, I have run across Wikipedia’s page on common-law-marriage and found that Missouri abolished those marriages in 1921 before he’d even married my grandmother. He’d have needed a legit divorce to dissolve it before marrying my grandmother. A common-law marriage could carry over from other states but he’d never lived in any other state.
So, essentially Mom didn’t think Grandpas should have paramours and didn’t realize I’d dutifully call Alice a common-law-wife both to her face and behind her back until I was 63-years-old. Now that I think of it, though, Alice did get pretty angry when Mom inherited Grandpa Earl’s minimal money. Alice might have believed she was married. I still bought it.
The other common-law marriage connection I had was Granceil’s half-uncle, who was Fanny Harding’s common-law-husband and father of her child. Common-law marriages require official divorces, and there was no divorce until Warren G. proposed to her, I believe. But then there was a fully justified divorce based on my great-great half uncles’ alcoholism and abandonment, setting the standard for what makes a good husband in my family. Not a drunk? Not a deserter? You’re the best!
The most interesting thing trivia I found about common-law marriages was that you can still have a legal common-law marriage in Kansas, the state right next door, and also scandalously in Utah, which I suppose is less scandalous than living in sin.
So many questions, Kansas and Utah. So many questions.