[noirbot]

Yea, I've always found even the more progressive legal systems to be such that they're often, reasonably, less loose than most progressive cultures. I was discussing this with folks recently about Canada's proposed asylum class for trans/nonbinary folks.

There's obviously folks who neatly fall into either category, just like how three people who live together and have a communal sexual relationship could be neatly considered to be "married" to each other in a legal sense. It all gets more complicated on the edges though. How not-commited to your assigned-at-birth gender do you have to be to count as nonbinary in a legal sense? If I live with one person in a committed relationship, but also have a relationship with 4 other people I don't live with, how often do I have to see them before they have a claim on me? It only gets more complex when you consider asexual people, who may have many close emotional relationships with no real strong "ranking" or "best friend" or "partner".

It's much easier to just "do the reasonable thing" when it's your friends and there's only a few and much harder when it's the government having to intermediate a divorce, or child custody, or the option to have your partner immigrate.

[pcthrowaway]

> If I live with one person in a committed relationship, but also have a relationship with 4 other people I don't live with, how often do I have to see them before they have a claim on me?

I believe BC law is pretty clear that people need to live together in order to be considered common law. I know marriage doesn't have the same requirement, but there is no legal marriage to multiple people at this moment.

I don't think that could practically work with multiple people, if one of those people isn't living with the others and/or sharing finances. But to be fair, I haven't given it much thought yet. If a person has multiple partners who are equally significant, they should ideally be legally entitled to equal benefits, but of course this opens up more nuance.

> It only gets more complex when you consider asexual people, who may have many close emotional relationships with no real strong "ranking" or "best friend" or "partner"

Perhaps you misunderstand what asexual means. Asexual people might have romantic relationships. They might be married. They might even have sex! It's a spectrum, but has very little to do with who you might date, and more to do with what kinds of activities you might want to do with a partner.

Aromantic people are less likely to have romantic partners, and therefore, I imagine, much less likely to be married.

[noirbot]

As an asexual person myself, who is not aromantic, I'm well aware what asexual means. Obviously sometimes they're cleanly married or in a committed emotional relationship with one person. In general though, most people consider sexual and emotional intimacy to be tightly linked, and I've certainly had multiple times where I was in a long-term emotional relationship with multiple people I was not sexually involved with. Having to determine which of them, or none of them would have counted as my partner would have been hard to determine.

Defining at what point a non-sexual relationship with someone I live with crosses over into something closer to a common law marriage would be rather more difficult.

[pcthrowaway]

> Defining at what point a non-sexual relationship with someone I live with crosses over into something closer to a common law marriage would be rather more difficult.

If it were me, I imagine I'd be looking for things like the following to determine if the relationship is more like a standard roommate situation or a romantic relationship?

- "do we have long-term shared financial obligations/commitments like having bought a house, or maybe even an expensive car, together?"

- "do we share finances to the extent that more than half of one of our incomes is shared with the other?"

- "have we gone through a legal marriage ceremony"

- "do we have children who we collaboratively parent?"

I think "the spirit of" how legal benefits for marriage are structured are based on the (dated) assumption that married people are doing one or most of the above together.

On the other hand, friends who live together but who are not romantically involved and never were, are very unlikely to do any of the above (outside of legal shenanigans like getting someone immigration status)