Marriage
I'm sixty. I'm a chronic pedant. I thought I would fact check before writing anything only to find that the Wikipedia articles on Common Law Marriage and Common Law Marriage in the United States say nothing in line with my understanding of anything.
I was fourteen when I was introduced to the concept. I visited my sister at UGA in Athens, Georgia who had a boyfriend named Julius and I ended up romantically involved with his best friend.
At some point, Alex and I went to the library on the University of Georgia campus together and he introduced me to computers, was shocked at how readily I picked things up and taught me to count in binary on my fingers. My recollection is while we were there, for fun he looked up Georgia laws in legal reference books you couldn't check out because Julius and my sister were more or less living together.
And he found that simply living together for seven years could be seen as a common law marriage in Georgia at that time.
Wikipedia doesn't list Georgia as a US state with common law marriage and explicitly states that merely living together is not sufficient to qualify as a common law marriage.
My father pursued my mother hard. She was an incredibly beautiful woman and she was a waitress or something but had fled East Germany with her infant niece when she was sixteen or seventeen to return the baby to its rightful mother after her sister came home from West Germany to attend their mother's funeral.
My teenaged mother had forged papers that probably weren't very good and claimed the baby was hers. My sister said that she only succeeded because the baby threw up on one of the guards and the guards just wanted the two of them the hell out of there.
So my mother was an illegal immigrant to West Germany from East Germany who spoke a bit of Russian because all school children in East Germany were required to take Russian and my father was a somewhat high ranking established soldier in the American Army during the Cold War.
They needed permission to marry and had trouble getting it.
I think my father was moved elsewhere in Germany by the military and he wanted her to come see him. He sent her cash in the mail three times to pay for train tickets and she didn't receive the first two and either he trusted her or didn't care because he kept sending it until she bought train tickets to go see him.
He rented a place for the two of them and told her it would take six weeks to marry. So she moved in and slept with him and was immediately pregnant and throwing up.
She went to the doctor to get a morning after pill because she figured my father would think she showed up pregnant and was trying to pull a fast one on him.
And dad begged her to not take it.
My father had already been married three times in an era when any divorce for any reason was a scandal. He married his first wife twice and they took turns divorcing each other.
His third divorce may not have been final when he met my mother and that may have contributed to their challenges in making their relationship a lawfully recognized marriage.
He learned of his second wife's infidelity in the worst way possible when a baby he desperately wanted was finally born and it couldn't possibly have been his. The father wasn't White.
He paid child support for six years on a child that clearly wasn't his in an era when married men were expected to support their wife and any resulting children no matter the circumstances.
It was an era when a man's paycheck wasn't his money, it was family money and if a soldier was a drunkard, the American military issued his pay to his wife in cash so she could pay rent and buy groceries for the family rather than allowing him to go on a bender.
My father didn't have a checking account when he met my mother. They were frugal people and she eventually insisted he open a checking account because she was carrying two or three months of his pay around in cash and worrying she would be robbed.
My father had two previous wives and no children and he promised my mother whatever she wanted if she would have that baby and marry him. He was in his thirties and desperately wanted children.
No one but the two of them KNEW the full details of their secret contract. I know he promised her he would retire in Germany and failed to keep that promise for reasons I finally felt I understood in my fifties due to multiple attempts at writing an initially overly personal blog called Native Influence which I repeatedly redacted.
I believe he failed to keep that promise to protect me after the American military stabbed him in the back and failed to keep its promise to him that he wouldn't have to return to Vietnam due to being on permanent profile for a serious shoulder injury.
He had dislocated his shoulder thirteen times, the first when the army tried to teach him how to ski. A classmate of his who pretended to be an idiot got an award at the end of the course for Most Improved, then informed them he was an Olympic skier and you MORONS don't know anything about teaching skiing.
The last dislocation occurred while doing pushups as part of PT. After that, he was permanently exempt from pushups and they said he wouldn't deploy to a war zone again.
Only they worded it oddly as being about deploying overseas and he returned to Germany when I was a tot which is where my mother wanted to be and then I guess they claimed he violated the agreement and so they weren't bound by it or whatever and the next thing you knew he had orders for Vietnam again.
He appealed the orders three times until a General said "You ARE going to Vietnam." and my father said uncharacteristically "The hell I am." and dropped his retirement papers.
This was the sixties. People didn't swear at work like that. It simply wasn't done.
If you've seen Apollo 13, modern audiences were like "I don't buy it that they were that polite and well behaved under that much pressure. You know they had to be dropping F bombs."
No, they weren't. If you talked like that, you lost your job.
After my father died, my mother went through his papers and was shocked at how thoroughly she was investigated for wanting to marry an American soldier and they could find no dirt other than she's German and speaks Russian.
She also found papers granting their request to marry and stating my sister is "legitimate" and my parents were effectively married when she was born and the couple and child shouldn't be penalized for this ridiculous government snafu that substantially delayed the marriage.
It took them something like two years to marry and a foot or two tall stack of paperwork.
I NEVER knew their anniversary date. I have always wondered if my mother was pregnant again by the time they got permission and if their refusal to celebrate their anniversary was a means to cover up the fact that my brother was conceived out of wedlock.
Perhaps I was the only one of the three really legitimate in the eyes of the law. I'm certain that offended my parents who certainly never wanted it to go that way and did everything in their power to try to make it otherwise.
I've spent my whole life wondering What is marriage?
We ALL know you can have a green card marriage where you barely know each other and if the government learns that is the case, it nullifies the marriage. So paperwork alone doesn't make it a real relationship and even the government isn't dumb enough to think it does.
But what is it that makes it a REAL relationship, a REAL commitment, REAL love between two people if for some reason you don't have the paperwork?
Like perhaps you don't have the paperwork because your asshole government refused to LET you have that paperwork for some stupid and arbitrary reason like your mother is the wrong kind of people in a political landscape that thinks politics matters more than what you two want as a couple and that wars between nations or whatever trumps the rights of your children to be recognized as legitimate and loved by both of their parents equally.