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Video Transcribed:  What are the three most common destination weddings as seen by Oklahoma divorce attorneys? I’m Tulsa attorney Oklahoma James Wirth and we’re about to go over that.

Okay, so if you’re a divorce attorney, you need to file a divorce petition, which we do frequently, one of the things we have to list on there is the county of the marriage. So we get to see who’s having destination weddings. And it’s interesting to see what type of destination weddings come into our office and what we file.

So what do you think the most common destination is? I’m about to tell you. It’s number one and it’s Carroll County. That’s Eureka Springs in Arkansas. So it makes a lot of sense. You might say, “Well, we see a lot of those maybe because the marriages from Eureka Springs don’t last very long.”

I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it’s just an indication of the sheer volume of Oklahomans who go to Eureka Springs to get married. And that’s the number one that we see at my office is Carroll County, Eureka Springs.

Number two I think is probably the most shocking. So we’re going to skip that one and go to the end. Number three, if you were thinking what would a divorce attorney see in Oklahoma, what’s the most common?

This is probably the one that you’d come up with. It’s Clark County, Nevada. That’s right, Las Vegas. And it’s interesting actually how little we see of it. It’s not the first most popular, it’s not the second, it’s not even close. It’s a distant third. So one might think what Elvis brings together, no man can break apart. That must be it because I would expect to see more. There’s certainly a lot more in number one and number two. So let’s skip on. Let’s get to number two.

And that is a little bit of a shocking one for you. And I’ll give you a little bit of a hint. Some people that get married at destination marriage of number two, when they go there they may not have any intention of getting married.

And sometimes even when they’ve left married, they may not even know it. So that’s the first clue. Second clue. Unlike some destination weddings you might see in the summer or the late spring, for this particular one it’s more late winter, early spring. All right, so what is it?

Well, this destination wedding that we see the second most often in Oklahoma at my law office, it’s H&R block, Jackson Hewitt. It’s your tax preparation office. That’s right because Oklahoma has common law marriage. And for common law marriage, it’s all about did you hold yourselves out as married?

You’ve got to show that there was an agreement to be married. But the most common way that’s proven is holding yourselves out as married. And if you check a box on an IRS form that says you’re married, you’re telling the federal government that you’re married. And that’s pretty good evidence that you’re holding yourselves out as married and that you intended to be married.

So a lot of people fall into that trap. They may not know the full extent of it. They go to a tax preparation service with their significant other that they’ve been living with. And that tax preparation service person knows that, “Hey, if we put you down as married, you may be able to save a lot of money.” And they’re like, “Okay, I want to save money.” They may not understand the exact extreme consequences of that, and that is you may have just caused yourself to enter into a common law marriage.

And a common law marriage, although it can be entered into easily, to dissolve it, it has to be done the same way as anything else, a divorce. And that’s why that’s what we see at my office. Number one, Eureka Springs, number two, tax preparation service, and number three, Las Vegas.