JiltedFollow

Sued, yes. Win? No.

I wonder if she wants a female lover, I am game!

Looks like people need prenups on the first date now.

Teach me to not read the article.

Reason number 1537 for why it's easier to be gay.

Samira beat me to it.

But I think it also had to do with "legal" marriages being the preserve of the upper, landowning, class way back in the past. Engagements and marriages always had a property swap associated with them, whether of land or of goods, not jut between the bride and groom, but between the bride's family and the groom's family.

The engagement was a legal commitment to the marriage. The marriage would only not go forward if an "impediment" was discovered. So if it didn't go forward, it meant there was a significant scandal or slur attached to either the man or the woman.

It would have to be something serious, like discovering a criminal history, or immoral behaviour that would make one a social outcast. In the absence of these, you couldn't break off an engagement just because you didn't like your fiance's personality, without incurring a large financial penalty, since your fiance's family was counting on receiving property from your family.

So for quite a while historically, if an engagement broke up, with no payout of property from the jilting person to the jilted person's family, there was a social assumption that there was something nasty and wrong about the jilted person, who would then become an outcast, at least among the more morally pure of their social peers.

Hence the situation in historical romances, where morally superior men, wanting to break up with someone they are engaged to, heroically and "nobly" offer for the lady to "be the one to break up with him, in order that the slur shall not attach to her name." (He offers to take the social fall, so that he doesn't have to paying out a financial penalty.)



Edited, Jul 27th 2008 2:19am by Aripyanfar

Mmmm, BD, my point is that we have legal hangovers from the past, in reply to the plaintive OP question:



The question by Whimsi implies to me that s/he thinks society is so litigious now that there's new laws where romantic partners are financially liable for breaking up.

What I was pointing out was that the woman in this case was actually taking advantage of old laws still on the books. I'm not going to make a judgment about whether or not she was morally justified in this situation to use this legal tool at her command. I haven't read the link.

Edited, Jul 27th 2008 3:28am by Aripyanfar

Juries can rely a lot on the judge's instructions.


And if the judge was going with the traditional interpretation of the law as it remains on the books... ?

The law was all about dealing with marriages as financial/asset institutions. (and in the olde days the woman was one of the assets, being handed over from the posession of her father to the posession of the husband. That particular aspect of the marriage laws have been changed.) The marriage laws never handled love or romance aspects.

The marriage laws may well need a further change to comply with much more contemporary notions of financial responsibility between the two partners in a relationship.

Perhaps the old laws are more close to how people view corporations these days. What would this situation look like if the woman and man in this case were in fact two companies who had signed a contract to merge?

How ironic. He didn't want to marry her because of all the debt she owed, but now he's paying it off for her and then some. Might as well have stayed so he could get the milk.

I've seen this happen once before. Female had a medical practice, moved to be closer to her paramour. Consequently, she had to shut down her practice and try to build up another one. They broke up, she realized she lost a lot of money and sued for damages. They settled out of court. He ended up paying her moving costs for the move to and the subsequent move back to her area, plus a little bit more for the loss of her practice.

But then a year later she was calling him, begging him to take her back. He got a restraining order against her.