Bankruptcy lawyers hear from potential clients fairly regularly that they need to file quickly because they don’t want their future wife or husband to be held responsible for their debt problem.
In most cases, their fears are misplaced. The marriage, by itself, usually will not make the new spouse responsible for your past debts. There are really only a couple ways to become responsible for another person’s debt, by agreeing to it or by operation of the law.
If your new spouse signs a loan contract with you, before or after the marriage, they are responsible for the debt with you. But that’s because they signed the contract, not because they married you.
In many states, a spouse is responsible for the necessary expenses of keeping the other spouse whole. This is called the “necessaries doctrine.” It usually comes up when one spouse can’t pay a medical bill they incurred and the hospital can try to collect from the other spouse. This doctrine would normally only apply to debts incurred after a marriage, not to pre-marriage debt though. (Of course whether the hospital or their lawyer looks carefully at when the marriage occurred and avoids improper collection from a new spouse is a different problem altogether.)
And some state may have special rules for some types of debt. For example, if you were living together prior to marriage in a rental property, even if only one of you signed the lease, the landlord might potentially be able to sue the non-signing tenant for part or all of the back rent because they received value by living there. This would be true of traditional roommates as well as couples, of course.
So there may be some types of debt you can be responsible for together, prior to marriage but normally it is because of some other reason or law, not because you “took on the debts” of your new husband or wife.
Also it should be noted — being married does not mean your spouse has to file bankruptcy with you. They can file a joint petition, but are not required to be “in” the case.
There may be other reasons to file a case before getting married of course. For example, only part of a boyfriend’s income may count for the means test if you file before marriage, while more or all of it might count afterward. It’s an unusual feature of the 2005 bankruptcy amendments passed by a fairly conservative Congress would encourage people to live in sin but this is just one of the many presumably-unintended consequences of that legislation.
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