Common law marriage.

Yes. Colorado is one of the few states that still recognizes a marriage entered without a license or ceremony, and a common law marriage, once it exists, is a marriage for every purpose: property division, maintenance, inheritance and the rest. That is why the first fight in some cases is not how to divide the estate but whether a marital estate exists at all.

Under the Colorado Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Hogsett v. Neale, a common law marriage exists when the parties mutually agreed to enter a marital relationship and their conduct manifested that agreement. The old checklist, cohabitation, joint accounts, a shared last name, is still evidence, but no single factor is required, and the inquiry centers on the parties’ intent in the context of their actual lives.

No. There is no waiting period and no minimum. Years together do not create a marriage without the mutual agreement to be married, and a short time does not prevent one where the agreement and the conduct are there. The evidence decides it, not the calendar.

The record of ordinary life: joint tax returns filed as married, beneficiary designations, insurance enrollments, deeds and leases, joint obligations, how the couple introduced each other, what family and friends observed, anniversary cards. Each item is small; the accumulation is the case. The same record, read the other way, defeats a claim: separate returns filed as single, separate accounts, and introductions as partners rather than spouses.

Yes. The Colorado Supreme Court’s 2021 decisions confirmed that common law marriage principles apply equally to same-sex couples, including relationships that predate the marriage-equality rulings, with the test applied in light of the circumstances the couple actually lived in.

Both cases are litigated the same way and I take them from either chair. Sometimes my client needs to establish the marriage after years of partnership and a shared enterprise; sometimes my client needs to defeat a relationship being retroactively upgraded to marriage because a business became valuable. If a marriage is found, everything acquired during it is presumptively marital, from the date the marriage began. If it is not, the parties are unmarried and property follows title.

The same way any marriage ends: by a decree of dissolution or legal separation, or by death. There is no common law divorce. A couple who were common law married and simply separated are still married until a court says otherwise, which matters for the next relationship, the estate plan and the property acquired since.

Say so in writing. A cohabitation agreement, the unmarried sibling of the prenuptial agreement, documents the parties’ intent not to be married and sets out how property is held, while everyone agrees on it, which is exactly when documentation is possible. It is far less expensive than litigating the legal status of your own relationship after it ends.