Marriage
We welcome you to this section on “Marriage”. Whether you are married or single for any reason, this section will provide you with information that will not only personally help you but also help you in assisting others.
The mention of the word marriage invokes different thoughts in different people. Some of the thoughts I have heard expressed are “Me, never!”, “How I look forward to it”, “Hell on earth!”, “Not a bed of roses”, “Wait until the elders demand the dowry”, “I should have known better” and many more.
The aforementioned reactions demonstrate that different people have different views on marriage depending on their experiences or what they have learnt from other people’s experiences. The Little Oxford Dictionary describes marriage as “the legal union of a man and a woman for the purpose of living together.” It also describes marriage as the “act or ceremony that establishes a legal union of a man and a woman for the purpose of living together.” Therefore it is important for us to understand that for a man and a woman to join up and decide to live together, there must be legal recognition of their union hence marriage. Secondly, an act or a ceremony recognized by the law must be performed to establish the union. So the question is what are the acts or the ceremonies and who is responsible for performing them in order for a union to be legally recognized as marriage?
The interesting thing is that while many people in Kenya know what marriage is all about, majority of those getting into marriage or those who are already in marriage do not understand the legal requirements of marriage including rights of partners and their children in a marriage, divorce, separation, payment of alimony; marriage of more people mainly women into an existing marriage among other issues that arise in marriage.
To help you understand the legal requirements for marriage, our first articles on marriage look at the legal aspects of marriage in Kenya. These include how the law in Kenya defines marriage and the characteristics of legal marriages. The articles are written by a competent lawyer who is an advocate of the High Court of Kenya. In an earlier article in the section on life situations, we carried an article on what spouses should do when their partners die with or without a will.