Wedded bliss.  Some achieve it, some don’t.  We hear a lot about what you should do when you’re planning a wedding – from centerpiece ideas to prenuptial agreements – but we don’t hear much about the weird marriage-related laws that nobody bothered to repeal.  In this case, there is a reason nobody repealed it – people still use it!

Marriage By Proxy

Reportedly, in Montana two people can get hitched even if they don’t show up to the ceremony.  A website that facilitates this even today.  Montana, indeed has a law where both parties can wed without appearing, but Texas, Colorado, and California have a law where only one person has to show up.  In California, the only people who can do this are military personnel who are deployed and their intended.

This law came about in Montana back in the mid-1800′s when there were a bunch of miners moving into the mining towns.  They still wanted to marry their fiances, but it was hard to get around back then, so Montana enacted this law so they could.  I guess, even if a guy wanted to stay in the mines all day while his sweetie was back in Ohio or something he could – the double proxy law meant that neither party had to be present.

Today this law is mainly used for armed forces members who are deployed.  Why they wouldn’t want to wait to do it in person, I don’t know, but since there is a service out there that facilitates this type of thing, I guess it’s more common than you would think.

Watch out, however, if you are from Iowa.  Iowa does not recognize a proxy marriage.

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photo by UF Digital Collections

The collegiate life has been peppered with rumors and legends for as long as organized education has existed.  Stories featuring secret societies, legendary hazing rituals and haunted buildings are some of the more common (and colorful) tales known to be whispered in the corners of campus classrooms.  However, one of the most prominent urban legends that can be found running wild through the undercurrent of scholastic gossip is that of the rumored law forbidding more than five or six unrelated females from living together in a single house, on the basis that such a residence would constitute a brothel.  Although this law has never actually been documented, is commonly used (erroneously) to explain the lack of sorority houses on college campuses.

Now, the technical definition of a brothel is that of an establishment whose business is dedicated solely to prostitution.  That being said, the stereotypical lifestyle of the “sorority girl”, along with the concept of numerous young women living together, could lend itself to the perpetuation of this rumor.  Countless students from colleges and universities across the country have sought some record or factual basis in these claims.  Reported findings are sketchy at best and, in most cases, absent entirely.  The number of allowable women seems to vary from state to state, and no written record has ever been found of the law.  Rumors of the law seem to have emerged around the 1960’s, a decade which saw a drastic increase in the number of young women seeking higher education.  Although records in nearly every state have been traced as far back as the 1800’s, this brothel law simply can’t be proven.

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