Getting together commits far more than the ceremony. This section covers civil and religious marriage, civil partnership and cohabitation, the matrimonial property regime, assets and inheritance — and it gives, for each subject, what your country's law provides.
Marriage, civil partnership, cohabitation: each form of union binds differently, and the rules change from one country to another. Photo : Rachael Crowe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Why this section is here
Because getting together is the stage that commits the most and is prepared the least. The choice
between marriage, civil partnership and cohabitation, the property regime signed in a few minutes at a
notary's, what happens to the home, inheritance: these are decisions taken at the start whose effects
land ten, twenty or forty years later, usually at the worst moment.
The section therefore covers union in all its forms and what follows from it. Divorce and separation,
which are the other side of it, have their own section in the Advice pages.
Getting together, and what follows
This section covers union in all its forms — civil marriage, religious ceremony, civil partnership,
cohabitation — and what follows from it: the matrimonial property regime, assets and inheritance.
Divorce and separation now have their own section in the Advice pages. Each subject carries a page for every country, because almost everything here
depends on which law applies.
Three decisions that last
The first is the matrimonial property regime. It is settled in a few minutes at a notary's, or not
settled at all — in which case the country's default regime applies — and it decides the division ten,
twenty or forty years later. Separation of property, community of acquests, participation in acquests:
the three great families give very different results as soon as there is a business, an inherited asset
or an interrupted career.
The second is where you marry and where you then live. A marriage is valid everywhere if it was
celebrated in the form of the place of celebration, but matrimonial property, inheritance and divorce
follow connecting rules that do not always coincide. A Franco-German couple living in Switzerland can
fall under three legal systems for three different questions.
The third is what happens to the home. Whether it was bought before or during the union, jointly or
by one of you, with or without the other's money, changes everything at division and on death — and it is
the point couples settle last, although it is decided when the property is bought.
A page for every country, systematically
Almost nothing above is universal. The minimum age, the notice period, the documents required, the
recognition of foreign unions, the list of forced heirs, the length of divorce proceedings, the very
existence of a compensatory payment: all of it is national law. Every article in this section therefore
continues with a page per country, and the comparator puts two or three countries side by side before
you decide.
Every page in this section
The full structure of Couple life — sub-sections, pages, sub-pages and country pages — is on the site map, which lays out the whole site the same way.
