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Comment by junto | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article. I hope that the families affected by this Met Police massive error of judgement find a way to get peace in their lives.

I imagine that many are deeply hurt by the actions of these undercover police officers. This lady was obviously deeply emotionally scarred by her failed marriage to this man.

I also feel some sympathy for the officers involved. The police are a brainwashing operation on young impressionable minds. In many ways they are also victims of the state.

It is likely that those responsible for the decisions that led to this happening are long since retired and nothing will happen to them, but it must lead to safe-guards to make sure it doesn't happen again.

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> I also feel some sympathy for the officers involved. The police are a brainwashing operation on young impressionable minds. In many ways they are also victims of the state.

On that subject, after his undercover deployment Bob Lambert (the officer TFA is about) went on to run the Special Demonstration Squad, and in that capacity was the boss of Jim Boyling, who also had a number of sexual relationships with unsuspecting members of the public. Just to make the victim / perpetrator question a bit more interesting.

Is it too much to require at least a summary reading of the article before posting comments? There was no marriage involved between the two main characters of the story.

Pardon the user for using the term "marriage" instead of "long-term relationship involving cohabitation, shared expenses, and raising children together". How clumsy of him to use a word that means "all of the above, plus formalized by the state."

I did read the article from start to end. In the UK you can live as common law man and wife without a formal marriage. I used the term loosely. Regardless of semantics, the two lived together as partners and had a child together. My point was the partnership failed and that must have been hard. This whole process has had a profound effect on these people's lives. That was the point I was trying to make.

I typed the comment quickly. I apologise if I offended anyone for the use of the word marriage without considering that many places in the world strictly limit the use of the word marriage to the act of standing in a church with a priest and saying 'I do'.

"In the UK you can live as common law man and wife without a formal marriage."

Per Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage#United_King...), it seems that the term is common but it does not actually convey legal rights like common law marriage in the US. Of course, since we were discussing use of terms, that fact is of only tangential interest.

Similar laws to those in the UK exist in Australia - a long-term couple that separates can, in the case of dispute when splitting common goods, be treated in a manner very similar to a divorce. Furthermore, I know that long-term relationships also bestow other rights on a couple, such as immigration rights (my brother's wife got her first long-term residency permit in Australia thanks to this, as she migrated before they were married).

English law grants very few rights to people in a common law marriage. It's really important to correct the myth that common law marriage means anything because it really doesn't in England.

Right. All of this is very jurisdiction specific (spatially and temporally). My understanding: Living together like a married couple long enough conveys actual marriage in some places in the US, various rights some other places in the US, not very much in England and Wales, and up to recently more in Scotland but that changed in 2006 and now Scotland is much like the rest of the UK.

>My understanding: Living together like a married couple long enough conveys actual marriage in some places in the US, various rights some other places in the US

Intent and agreement is a big one, not length of cohabitation. The two both must consent and intend on being married and basically tell everyone they are married. Just cohabitation for a long time isn't enough. Nobody can suddenly "find" themselves in a common law marriage they didn't intend or want to enter into, they both must intentionally agree to enter into one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-law_marriage_in_the_Unit...

Right, the "like a married couple" is stronger than that could've been read. An important point. Details still vary by jurisdiction.

Perhaps /u/junto is from a less liberal culture, and just assumed that if a man and a woman live together and have a baby, they are married even if the article didn't say that.

In the article, it says: "Bob claimed to be philosophically opposed to marriage; Jacqui was fine with that." so I suppose they didn't get married at all.

The people who came to my engagement party this weekend and said they don't believe in marriage as a public statement to family, friends, and everyone, about making a permanent commitment (for themselves) are the same people who are the only ones not really asking prying questions about "setting a date," which I really appreciate, since that's between me and my other half, and at the same time I feel like I can know that they are supportive of my engagement.

I'm not sure what it means to be "philosophically opposed" to marriage in and of itself. I guess it's more self-explanatory in the context of this story though, certainly always in hindsight or with perfect information.

Since you will presumably be asking these people to adjust their own plans once you do set a date, some interest seems entirely appropriate and characterising it as a purely private matter ("that's between me and my other half") uncharitable. Which is not to say that all forms of query on the topic are appropriate, or that repetition across many of even appropriate queries mightn't get annoying.

Of course. The point was not about my own situation, but to draw the nearest analogy to "don't believe in marriage" at all that I had at hand.

I am really less upset about the people who are asking the question than I may have made it out to sound. It's very important (and would conversely be missed if missing) to have family and friends who are interested, even if they are all asking the same question where it might feel like pressure that we just don't want to have right now.

Right - just trying to help keep things in perspective. Congratulations, by the way! :)

Thank you! :)

In this article, my guess is that Bob said to be "philosophically opposed" to marriage to avoid marrying Jaqui, the real reason behind that is that it would leave a trail of official papers behind him, which is not something you want to do if you're an undercover investigating agent.

Yes, clearly. I would be interested to hear such an argument from anyone who was not trying to conceal their identity as a secret agent (or anyone convincing enough who actually was still hiding this way, for that matter, but in the actual time before their outing and not in retrospect with that knowledge already revealed).

Surely there must be such an argument, maybe this is too far off topic and not the place for it here.

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