Marriage

• Author: Fara Brown
• Profession: Attorney-at-law practising in Jamaica for over 30 years
• Pages: 1-30

1. Marriage

1. INTRODUCTION

2. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: MARRIAGE IN JAMAICA

3. THE LAW: THE MARRIAGE ACT

•Void Marriages

•Marriage Ofcers

•Pre-Ceremony Requirements

•The Ceremony

•Post Ceremony Requirements

•The Role of Criminal Offences

•Other Marriage Acts

4. CONSORTIUM – THE LEGAL CONSEQUENCES OF MARRIAGE

5. PROCEDURAL ASPECTS OF THE MARRIAGE ACT

6. THE WAY FORWARD

INTRODUCTION

Marriage in Jamaica, as in many countries, is an institution which

is driven by a desire for social respectability and an opportunity to

make a fashion statement. There is also a major religious imperative

which lies behind the motivation to get married in Jamaica. The

rst motivator – social respectability – at least makes reference to

marriage as an ongoing relationship that alters the lifestyle of the

parties who enter into it. The second motivator, on the other hand,

has nothing to do with the nature of the subsequent relationship and

is focused entirely on the ritual of the ceremony; in short, it is not so

much a marriage, it is much more a wedding. The third motivator

acknowledges the power and inuence of the church, which remains

even in the second decade of the twenty-rst century. The push to

get young people who are about to become sexually active into the

Family Law in Jamaica

2

state of wedlock is far-reaching. Among any group of people in the

workplace or any other social grouping, some will be prepared to

quietly admit that they got married because of pressure from the

church. Sometimes, such marriages end in divorce, but often the

parties persevere and a stable family unit will emerge.

Another interesting observation of prevailing attitudes to marriage

in Jamaica and indeed other Caribbean islands is that, unlike

the Western notion of starting out with nothing and building life

together, many people want to have certain economic and familial

markers in place before getting married. This, undoubtedly, is a

longstanding position that will be examined in the next section.

…many slave women had their rst child with one man and the

rest of their children several years later with another man with

whom they settled for the rest of their lives.1

You see, in them days, man and woman married when them old,

so nega man wedding was far and few between....2

There are many possible reasons for this marriage in later life

practice. It may hark back to the material difculties of entertaining

the possibility of marriage during slavery and afterwards. It may also

be due to other factors.3 In any event, it exemplies the cultural

differences in the approach to and role of marriage in the Caribbean

as opposed to Western societies.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: MARRIAGE IN JAMAICA

‘The voluntary union for life of one man to one woman to the

exclusion of all others’ as a description of marriage,4 has over

time diminished in relevance and is less denitive of the marital

1. See Henrice Altink, ‘To Wed or not to Wed? The Struggle to Dene Afro-

Jamaican Relationships, 1834–1838’ Journal of Social History 38, no. 1 (2004).

2. From Mindie Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and

Society in Antigua and Barbuda (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,

1994).

3. See Keith Patchett, ‘Some Aspects of Marriage and Divorce in the West Indies

(1959) 1 CLQ 632.

4. Hyde v Hyde (1866) LR 1 P & D 130, specically referring to marriage according

to English law.