4 - Faking Marriage

Summary

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.