In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

No. 99-4058

Winifred E. Barron,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

Kenneth S. Apfel, Commissioner of Social Security,

Defendant-Appellee.

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Illinois.

No. 98-4179--James L. Foreman, Judge.

Submitted March 22, 2000--Decided April 17, 2000

 Before Posner, Chief Judge, and Diane P. Wood and

Evans, Circuit Judges.

 Posner, Chief Judge. Winifred Barron applied for

disabled widow’s benefits as the widow of Paul

Raymond. 42 U.S.C. sec. 402(e). She was turned

down on the ground that she had not been

Raymond’s common law wife, and appeals to us from

the district court’s refusal to set aside the

denial of her application.

 Barron, now age 64, has made a career of

marriage. We count seven, but the validity of

several, including the common law marriage with

Raymond, is critically in issue. She claims that

three days after she divorced her second husband,

she became Raymond’s common law wife under the

law of Michigan. That was at the end of 1956

(when she was only 20!), shortly before Michigan

abolished common law marriage (but it did not

abolish it retroactively). They separated in

1971, but the marriage was never dissolved. The

day before the separation, Barron married her

fourth husband. She divorced number four and

later number five, and was married to six at the

time of Raymond’s death in 1987. She divorced six

and married seven before applying for widow’s

benefits in 1995.

 There are a number of reasons to doubt whether

she was ever married to Raymond: they did not

hold themselves out to the world as being
married; common law marriage requires proof of

cohabitation, and it does not appear that she was

living with Raymond when they "married"; the

judgment of divorce from her second husband

(Raymond’s immediate predecessor) was not entered

until after she married Raymond; the licenses for

her subsequent marriages do not mention a

previous marriage to Raymond, while mentioning

her other previous marriages.

 There is more, which is the occasion for our

writing an opinion in what is, after all, a

frivolous appeal. The statute grants widow’s (or

divorced spouse’s) benefits only to an individual

who "is not married," 42 U.S.C. sec.

402(e)(1)(A), with three exceptions: (1) the

individual remarried after reaching the age of

60; (2) she (or he, but we’ll confine our

attention to widows, since that is Barron’s

class) remarried in her fifties but is now at

least 60 and at the time of her remarriage was

entitled to disabled widow’s benefits; or (3) she

remarried in her fifties, is still in her

fifties, and was disabled at the time of her

remarriage. 42 U.S.C. sec. 402(e)(3); 20 C.F.R.

sec. 404.335(e). Although now in her sixties and

applying for disabled widow’s benefits, Barron

fits none of the exceptions. She married her

current husband when she was 52, which rules out

(1); she was not entitled to widow’s disability

benefits at the time of that marriage, which

rules out (2); and she was not disabled at that

time, which rules out (3). It might seem that (3)

would also be ruled out by the fact that she is

over 60, but we think it apparent that the

statute and regulation refer to the applicant’s

age at the time of the application--the applicant

does not forfeit her entitlement by passage of

time during what may be protracted administrative

and judicial proceedings to establish the

entitlement. And Barron applied five years ago.

 But was she really "married" when she applied

for the benefits? That is a more complicated

question than might appear and one on which there

is no case law. One might think that since a

common law marriage is contracted without the

usual formalities, it can be dissolved without

the usual formalities. But that is incorrect.

Common law marriage is not a synonym for

cohabitation, "domestic partnership," or

contract. The purpose of common law marriage is

not to create a second-class sort of marriage,

but rather to repair unintended deficiencies in

the ceremony, documentation, or other formalities

of marriage, or in the legal capacity to wed (a

party might erroneously believe that he or she

had been validly divorced from a previous

spouse). See, e.g., 1 Homer H. Clark, Jr., The

Law of Domestic Relations in the United States
sec. 2.4, p. 111 (2d ed. 1987). That is why it is

important that the parties hold themselves out as

being married--if they don’t think they’re

married, there is no formal defect to repair.

 Common law marriage is thus to domestic

relations law what the doctrine of adverse

possession is to property law--a way of curing

formal defects in a legal status. And just as a

person who has acquired title by adverse

possession has as good a title as someone who

acquires it by a formal conveyance, so a common

law spouse has the same rights as any other

spouse. E.g., Adams v. Boan, 559 So. 2d 1084,

1087 (Ala. 1990); Lavery v. Hutchinson, 94 N.E.

6, 8-9 (Ill. 1911); Steves v. Smith, 107 S.W.

141, 143 (Tex. App. 1908). And so if Raymond and

Barron were married, their marriage was not

dissolved by "separation." Barron married three

times between their separation and Raymond’s

death, and if they had a valid common law

marriage, then all three marriages were bigamous

and therefore invalid and she would be his

unmarried widow. But death dissolves marriage,

and Barron’s current marriage was contracted

after Raymond’s death. She was therefore married

when she applied for widow’s benefits and, as we

have seen, she did not fall into any of the

exceptions to the ban on awarding benefits to

remarried claimants. For this reason as well as

because of the invalidity of the alleged common

law marriage, she was properly denied benefits.

Affirmed.