Soon after Sharareh Moazed and her partner were married in a religious ceremony, she said she moved into his Los Angeles condo and quit her job in engineering management to take care of him and his daughter.
After their split eight years later, she sued for financial support and a share of a multimillion-dollar home. A court dismissed her complaint. They never applied for a marriage license to get legally married.
"It's totally heartbreaking. The system is very disappointing," said Moazed, 55, who is studying law and trying to rebuild her life.
If you think divorce is messy, try leaving a life built together without ever having been legally married. More Americans than ever are facing that reality. Over 20 million adults are living together without the legal bonds of marriage, up from 14 million in 2009, according to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research. Protracted court battles around the country over everything from pets to property show how laws haven't kept up with the changing ways people are coupling up.
While state laws govern how marriages are unwound, resolutions for unmarried couples often hinge on a court's interpretation of case law, with varying outcomes.
"It's the Wild West," said Kristi Anderson Wells, a family lawyer in Denver.
The law generally treats marriage as a financial partnership and the presumption is that assets will be equitably divided upon breakup. A few states including Texas and Kansas recognize common-law marriages, where unwed couples who publicly represent themselves as spouses are subject to the state's marriage and divorce laws. But most states don't.
To ward off disputes, some unmarried couples have started turning to cohabitation agreements, which are like the prenups married couples use. But more often than not, former partners are surprised by the legal obligations they may or may not have to each other.
In many cases, the person with less who is seeking property -- often the woman -- is left without rights to it, said Albertina Antognini, a professor at Loyola Law School who writes about the contemporary American family.
Losing more than a partner
For custody of children, matters are more clear-cut. Once a parenting relationship is established, the same legal standard applies whether or not a couple is married -- the court weighs what is in the child's best interest.
Child-support obligations don't depend on marriage, either. Courts instead look at factors such as each parent's income and who is paying for child care.
But unwed couples often make informal arrangements over custody and child support, which can backfire and land them in court years later.
After living together for three years, Alex Taylor, a 33-year-old IT analyst in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and Amanda Hergenreter, broke up in 2018 and informally shared custody of their son.
"There was nothing set in stone, me being young and dumb," he said.
After disagreements over how much time they each had with their son, Taylor filed a paternity and custody action in family court in 2023, and got 50-50 custody. Hergenreter, who had become a nurse and made more than Taylor, was then ordered to pay him $118 a month in child support. The court also ordered that Taylor pay her nearly $30,000 for back child support for the years following their separation, an amount an appellate court later reduced.
Outcomes can be all over the map on other matters. Pets, for instance, are a common source of disputes.
Sarah Hurlock, a 29-year-old former Army supply specialist, has already spent $20,000 in lawyer fees trying to get pets back from her ex.
The pets -- Mango, a corgi, and a cat named Fluffy -- belonged to her before she and her ex moved in together, and she took them after they broke up, according to court filings. About nine months after the split, she said she drove from her new home in Texas to leave the animals with him at his place in Ohio while she dealt with health issues.
Robert Anick, a 31-year-old steel-mill operator, said she gave him the pets. “They’ve become part of my family,” he said.
A court awarded both pets to Anick. Ohio’s Supreme Court declined to hear Hurlock’s appeal, but she has requested its reconsideration.
“I feel like I’m getting a divorce with the amount of fighting back and forth, the ‘he said, she said’ and emotions instead of logic,” Hurlock said.
Surprising laws
A commission that drafts model laws for states to consider recently proposed allowing unmarried couples to enter into agreements about how to divide property and to bring claims against each other if they split. Though more couples are turning to cohabitation agreements, not all states recognize them. About 43% of cohabitants agree that property acquired during a relationship should be shared in a breakup, according to research by John Morley, a professor at Yale Law School.
Washington state is an anomaly. Couples determined to be in committed intimate relationships generally have to divvy up property acquired while they were together, even if one party paid for it and holds the title.
"People are absolutely dumbfounded by how their living together has created this potential shared interest in things," said Elise Buie, a family lawyer in Seattle.
Elsewhere, unmarried people generally have to be on the title of a property to have an automatic claim to it.
In California, a state appellate court concluded that Moazed's claims for financial support and property division after the split in 2020 were barred by a 1939 "anti-heart-balm" law, which prevents an individual from bringing a claim for a broken promise to marry.
Moazed, who was unaware of the law, said her ex repeatedly promised they would be legally married. She said he encouraged her to shop for a house they could move into for more space.
Her ex's lawyer, Matthew Hess, declined to discuss specifics but said that his client didn't have the opportunity to present evidence and tell his side of the story because the case was dismissed early on.
Moazed said her ex bought a house she scouted in Encino and rented it out shortly after. He paid $1.35 million, and it is now worth more than $2 million, according to Homes.com. She doesn't get a share of the appreciation -- or anything else, according to the court ruling.
"I was trapped, and hopefully, it's not going to happen to other women," Moazed said.