UTAH STATE CAPITOL—It’s day 18 of the 2026 Legislative Session and as usual there have been a spate of bills coming before lawmakers. Some have already passed and been signed by the governor and others are still being debated. 

Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, has one bill that has stirred up some conversation. SB110 – Marriage Amendments. “The bill would eliminate the recognition of common law marriage in Utah,” he said. “Common law marriage is where you don’t get married but then the relationship ends, usually there’s a death or a breakup. Then after the relationship, someone says, ‘well now I think the law retroactively should recognize my relationship as a marriage.’”

About 43 states have done away with this, said Weiler. “There’s nothing else in the law where, let's say, a woman’s husband dies and she says, ‘well, he really meant to get life insurance to cover me. So let’s pretend he had life insurance and I’ll pay the premiums for five years, but just give me the $1 million.’ We don’t do that in any other area of the law except for marriage.”

Originally common law marriage came along back in the frontier days, he said. “Maybe it was too hard to get to a justice of the peace for someone that could perform the marriage. So we just recognized it to prevent the couple being deemed to have been living in sin.”

Society has kind of moved away from that, said Weiler. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing but that’s just the reality.”

So in 1925, Utah banned common law marriage and it was banned for over 60 years, he said. “They brought it back in 1987 for one reason, they felt like there could be single people cohabitating and abusing the welfare system by both listing themselves as single even though they were sharing expenses and both qualifying for extra welfare benefits for being single.”

They brought it back for the sole purpose of trying to crack down on welfare abuse, Weiler said. “It was never used for that. Instead, creative lawyers have come up with all kinds of uses for it but it was never used to try to tamper down welfare fraud. What really bothers me is that somebody can get all of the benefits after the fact by saying ‘well, let’s recognize our relationship as a marriage’ but they don’t have any of the obligations.”

Weiler said if someone is married and their spouse gets into a horrifying accident, they could be liable for their medical bills and other things. “I’m a little bit suspicious of a policy that allows someone on the back end to take advantage of all the benefits, but on the front end, to have not taken on any of the obligations.”

Another of Weiler’s bills dealing with the family is SB161 – Evaluations in Guardianship Amendments. “There was a family in my district and some of the kids wanted to have grandpa or dad declared incompetent and not all of the children agreed and so there was a legal battle,” he said. “Grandpa/dad came out having been determined not to be incompetent. It left him and at least one of his daughters feeling like his rights weren’t fully respected.”

There were evaluations being done on him that weren’t being shared with him by doctors and there were reports from a court visitor being filed that were being used in the litigation that he didn’t have access to, said Weiler. “This bill is kind of tightening up to make sure that we’re treating people with dignity and respect throughout that process. That is a process that can easily be abused.”

As of Thursday, Feb. 5, both SB110 and SB161 had moved from the Senate to the House. To follow the session visit https://le.utah.gov/.