Your Relationship Is Not Valid

 

Sometimes you get a little window into how great the West could be if it just lifted its standards. 

“A New Zealand woman has taken her long-term boyfriend to a disputes tribunal for breaching a “verbal contract” by failing to take her to the airport, resulting in her missing a flight to a concert and forcing her to delay her travel by one day.

The woman told New Zealand’s disputes tribunal that she had been in a relationship with the man for six and a half years until the disagreement arose.

According to an order from the tribunal, released on Thursday with names redacted, the woman had arranged to attend a concert with some friends. Her boyfriend had agreed to transport her to the airport and stay at her house to look after her two dogs while she was away.

She messaged him the day before with a timeframe of 10am to 10.15am in which she would need to be collected. But he never arrived, leading the woman to miss her flight.

The woman said she incurred multiple costs as a result, including the cost of travel the next day, a shuttle to the airport and putting her dogs in a kennel…

…The woman testified that she had entered into a “verbal contract” with her partner that he would take her to the airport and look after her dogs…

…But the tribunal referee Krysia Cowie said for an agreement to be enforceable there needed to be an intention to create a “legally binding relationship”.

“Partners, friends and colleagues make social arrangements, but it is unlikely they can be legally enforced unless the parties perform some act that demonstrates an intention that they will be bound by their promises,” she wrote.

“When friends fail to keep their promises, the other person may suffer a financial consequence but it may be that they cannot be compensated for that loss.”[1]

The key point I want to draw out here is when the judge says, “there needed to be an intention to create a “legally binding relationship”. In other words, she saw no evidence that this couple had made any plans to have proper commitments, or that there was any specific legal agreement for this arrangement. Or to put it another way, the judge was telling this woman it is not the courts fault she failed to have a reliable relationship, that is her own problem.

There is a small, a very small, window here into how great the West could be if the courts would just stop rewarding or protecting those relationships which are not real commitments. One of the worst things that Aussies say is, “This is my partner.” You are not supposed to have a partner, you are supposed to have a wife, if you are a man, and a husband, if you are a woman. A partner is a someone you do business with. A partner is someone you work with. A partner is someone you might choose for a dance, or to play tennis, or some other endeavour. A wife, or a husband, is someone you have made a binding lifelong commitment to, before your fellow man and God, and you have an obligation to fulfill those commitments.

Boyfriends have no obligations to their girlfriends. Girlfriends have no obligations to their boyfriends. The kinds of relationships that most Aussies or Kiwis engage in are not binding, they are therefore not really valid, and I wish the courts would make these kinds of statements more and in more cases and situations. It would be good if a woman came to a judge and said, “He got me pregnant, he must support me”, and a judge said, “Did you make sure he was a decent bloke first who would commit to you? If not, then sorry, your fault.” It would be good if a man came to a judge and said, “That woman has my baby and I would like to see it,” and the judge said, “Did you make sure she was someone who wanted to commit? If not, not our problem."

I know some Christians will find this highly offensive, especially white knight men who want to blame men for all the ills in society. But the truth is that the state and the courts have a large responsibility in our society for the destructive path our nation has gone down and the way they have both worked together to legitimize illegitimate relationships again and again has led to many of the social ills we face. Women should not be rewarded by the hand of the state for entering into a non-committing and spurious relationship that leaves them stranded and without support. Men, likewise, should not be rewarded by the state for entering into a non-committing and spurious relationship.

I would love to hear more judges say, there was no “intention to create a ‘legally binding relationship’,” so your problems are not the court's problems. If the law did more of what this judge did in more situations, the pain of bad choices might start to remind more and more people in our society that God intended sex for marriage for a reason, because outside of marriage there are none of the same levels of commitment and protection built in that there are inside of committed marriages.

Of course, someone might respond, “Well, people don’t take marriages seriously also.” But if you needed to get married to ensure you had the same protections in the case of things going sour, then maybe people would. We need to stop legitimizing illegitimate relationships, if we want people to realize there is a difference between a legitimate relationship and an illegitimate one. Make consequences for ignoring God’s law great again, and by that I mean, make them more manifest and backed up by law, so that people will realize that they can’t just ignore everything God says and then expect the state to enforce agreements that were never made.

List of References

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[1] Caitlin Cassidy, 2024, “New Zealand woman takes boyfriend to disputes tribunal because he didn’t take her to the airport,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/21/new-zealand-woman-takes-boyfriend-to-disputes-tribunal-because-he-didnt-take-her-to-the-airport