We spent $0 on our wedding. We chose the long term "shack up" which, I guess, eventually made us common law married. ...
I wrote an
essay about common law marriage in another post. You presumably already know the law on the topic, but your post is a good jumping off point to follow up on one aspect of my essay.
In my essay, I mentioned how -- unlike Canada and most other countries -- the USA has a history of allowing marriage without any formalities, commonly referred to "common law marriage". Most states have abolished common law marriage by statute, but Texas (where you've mentioned you live, and presumably where the marriage was contracted) is one of the states that has retained the concept. However, Texas has actually codified "marriage without formalities" in statute in
Texas Family Code §§ 2.401-2.405, which may now be the sole legal basis for such marriage in Texas.
The Texas statutory scheme provides that in any proceeding (judicial, administrative, or anything else), "the marriage of a man and woman" may be proved by
- a declaration of informal marriage provided to the county clerk as described in § 2.402; or
- evidence that the parties:
- agreed to be married, and then
- lived together in Texas as husband and wife after the agreement to be married, and then
- represented to others that they were married.
The statute goes on to say that in the second kind of informal marriage (proved by the evidence mentioned above), if no proceeding has yet occurred by the time the parties have been separated for two years (such as a divorce proceeding), then it is presumed that the parties were never married, but that that presumption can be rebutted by evidence to the contrary.
The upshot of the above is the following: Under Texas law, no period of time living together can ever by itself create a marriage. That is only one of the three requirements. The period of living together needs to have been predated by an agreement to be married, and needs to have been followed by representation to others that you are married.
In
Revenue Ruling 2013-17, the IRS reiterated what it describes as a position that it has held for 50 years, namely that a marriage without formalities under state law constitutes a marriage for federal tax purposes. That means it is important to be aware of whether or not you are actually in a legally valid common law marriage (or marriage without formalities), because if you are, you cannot file your federal taxes as single person; you have to use one of the statuses available to married persons. This IRS position interacts in an interesting way with Texas law because under Texas law, your marital status is not technically determined until it becomes relevant in a "proceeding".
