Marriage

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

What would you call secular marriage?

From personal experience? An expensive mistake.

Legal marriage has some interesting legal ramifications in my county:

Marriage invalidates any existing will. Divorce does not. If you are married and die intestate,your spouse gets everything.If you both die instantly in the same accident,the older person is deemed to have died first.If there is no will and no children,the next of kin of the younger gets the lot.

On marriage,in theory,any property already owned becomes "property of the marriage"

The man is legally the father of any children born to his wife during the marriage. This may change due to advances in DNA testing,but has not yet in my country.

Pedantic point: In my country ALL marriages are secular. Marriage is above all a civil contract and has been for millennia.Its main purpose has always been the protection of property,especially inheritance.
Until late last century,illegitimate children had no rights under the law. A person still must be legitimate to inherit any title under the rules of primogeniture.

The law does not recognise religious marriages unless they are registered with Births Deaths and marriages.All registering does is to formally declare the fact of a marriage, which requires no ceremony of any kind.


Wiki:


[/quote]Primogeniture is the common law right of the firstborn son to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings. It is the tradition brought by the Normans to England in 1066. According to the Norman tradition, the firstborn son inherited the entirety of a parent's wealth, estate, title or office. In the absence of children, inheritance passed to the collateral relatives, in order of seniority of the collateral line.[quote]