Trust and Co-Ownership
INTRODUCTION It is predominantly established fact that there has been a noteworthy boost in the figure of heterosexual or homosexual partners cohabiting outside marriage in the past three decades in the United Kingdom. Cohabitation has become the standard for a considerable fraction of the people in England and Wales and the increase in cohabitation is a phenomenon not restricted by the law makers. This trend recommends that cohabitation presupposes a better connotation in people’s life cycles, although it may still be untimely to aver that it ought to be observed as functionally corresponding to marriage. Nevertheless, the eminent intensity of optimistic misapprehension by cohabitants of their genuine legal position is conceivably further upsetting. There is evidence of a wide spread myth of the ‘common law marriage’ in which the cohabitants thought that unmarried couples acquire the same legal rights as married couples after a period of cohabitation. The assiduousness of the idea that the concept of ‘common law marriage’ still subsists is yet again predictable, even though it was put an end to in 1753 when marriage law was codified in England and Wales. The couples who consider themselves as common law husbands or wives nowadays recognise that they are in effect not married but are avowing instead that they have the equivalent privileges as if they were although it has to be distinguished that a ‘common law marriage’ was a legitimate nuptial. Cohabitants possibly will anticipate the European Court of Human Rights to rule that a cohabiting relationship outside marriage ought to be conferred acknowledgement in law and that a clear breach of complying with it engages a violation of Article 8 together with Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Conversely, the European Commission sustained the right of member states to grant lesser privileges to unmarried couples than married couples with the genuine endeavour of