Common Law Marriage Case Centers Around April Fool’s Day Wedding Proposal Premised on Cubs Winning the World Series

Iowa is one of eight states that still recognizes common law marriage. But I’m going to guess it’s the only state in which an April Fool’s marriage proposal straight of a rom-com was at the center of a dispute about whether a couple entered into a common law marriage. The case in questions? In re Marriage of Nichols and Mauro, 2024 WL 697752 (Iowa App. 2024).

In In re Marriage of Nichols and Mauro, 

Nichols and Molloy Mauro met through a mutual friend on a trip to a Chicago Cubs game in 1995. They were both in their early forties and previously married and divorced. They soon began dating, and their relationship quickly progressed. On April Fools’ Day 1996—the Cubs’ opening day—the parties attended another Cubs game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. There—among two other couples who accompanied them and countless other “leftfield bleacher bums”—Nichols asked Molloy Mauro to marry him, complete with an airplane flying over the ballpark carrying a banner with his proposal. Molloy Mauro believes she agreed to the proposal in the moment. But the parties never set a wedding date or otherwise made formal wedding plans. Eventually, the pair joked to family and friends they would marry when the Cubs “won the World Series.”

Thereafter,

According to Molloy Mauro, their relationship began deteriorating around 2005 as the parties spent more and more time apart. And when the Cubs won the World Series in 2016, both parties said they were not going to get married yet. Instead, they told friends and family who asked that they would be waiting until the Cubs won another World Series. But according to Nichols, he was just talking about getting married “formally” and having a party because they already considered themselves married.

And there’s the heart of the dispute. Nichols says he thought they were in a common law marriage while Maura says she did not. Things came to a head in January 2023 when Nichols filed a “dissolution petition, asserting that he and Molloy Mauro had entered a common-law marriage and seeking an equitable division of the parties’ property.”

The case kind of hinged on Nichols’s testimony, which, again seems pulled directly from a rom-com. According to the court.

Looking at all this documentary evidence of marital status, like the district court, we see no present intent and agreement of either party to be married. Rather, the evidence shows that the parties varied in their representations of marital status “largely based on personal convenience or benefit.”…Nichols himself candidly admitted this intent on cross-examination:

Q. Charlie, isn’t the truth of this matter that when it benefitted you to be married, it was something that you did; is that correct?

A. That’s correct.

Q. And when it benefitted you to be single, then you held yourself out as single?

A. That’s correct.

Q. This is really about personal financial gain, rather than marriage, isn’t it, Charlie?

A. That’s correct.

Such strategically contradictory conduct “is inconsistent with the concept of marriage.”

As a result, the court concluded that there was no common law marriage and denied Nichols’s petition for dissolution.

-CM