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Real life is messy. Things do not go as planned, the worst case scenarios do come true at times and sometimes we just make mistakes. Those mistakes can come back to haunt you years later in unexpected ways.
In my time as a lawyer, I have talked with people who have married and divorced multiple times, and cannot recall if each "marriage" was officially resolved before the next began. You cannot be married to two people at the same time, and that creates a problem for the current relationship.
I have also had calls from people with children of unresolved parentage. These adults find themselves needing child support, or seeking an adoption years after the other biological parent has disappeared. It becomes complicated to clean up their current parent child affairs, because the past issues were never resolved. Not impossible, just more complex.
I know why this happens. These are not "bad" people. They are regular folks, struggling like the rest of us to find a happy life. In that struggle they did the best they could with the issues at hand, and just tried to get by. That works until some unresolved issue from the past blocks something about their current life.
The point of this post isn't to condemn these people for their choices or current circumstances. The point is to have you stop and asses where you are in your current situation. If you are making changes in your life-relationships, or have in the past, stop and consider if you have tied, or are tying, up all the lose ends. Have you established paternity, have you divided debts and secured such in writing, have you established child support and visitation, will problems arise in securing passports? There are multitudes of issues that seem small now, that can be big problems later.
If you are in mid-change, consider consulting a lawyer to verify it is all being cleaned up. If you made changes without a lawyer, consult with one to verify you did not miss anything. It is always easier to clean up a messy problem as soon as it happens, than it is to deal with it years or decades later.