It's Just Too Damned Easy to Get Married in This Country

For as long as I can remember, I've heard people complain that it's too easy to get divorced in this country. In fact, some states are enacting laws that will allow couples to enter into a kind of "super" marriage, a "covenant" marriage, that will be harder to end. It's nonsense.

Are there too many divorces? Sure. But the problem isn't that it's too easy to get divorced. The problem is that it's too easy to get MARRIED.

Think about it. Why do we always hear that "it's too easy to get divorced"?

• People have unreasonable expectations about marriage being "perfect".
• People don't want to do the hard work.
• People have no sense of commitment.
  

The list goes on, but the objections are generally all in this same vein. And they're all things that relate to the state of mind and the expectations and the investment people make WHEN THEY GET MARRIED.

Remember when it wasn't so easy to get divorced, and hardly anyone did it, and it was socially frowned upon? Well, I don't either, but I know there was such a time, and I know that fewer people got divorced--but I know something else that no one ever seems to think about: it was pretty damned rare in those days for someone to pop off to Vegas and marry someone he or she had known for three days then, too.

In some states, you have to wait a few days to get married after applying for a marriage license, but if that's too long to wait you can always pop across the border. The Catholic Church is about the only institution in our society that puts any kind of restrictions and delays on the right to get married, and what happens? Lifelong Catholics--not nominal Catholics, but believing, practicing Catholics--get married outside the church so that they won't have to "jump through the hoops". That's a significant decision when you consider that the Catholic church doesn't recognize marriages of baptized Catholics that take place outside the church without permission. But it's even more significant when we think about how it bodes for a marriage. It essentially says, "This is the commitment I'm making for the rest of my life--I'm giving up my individual life to become one with you, and committing to sacrifice whatever is necessary to make you happy and to make our marriage work--but I can't wait six months and attend four classes. Let's cut some corners."

So we go into marriage determined to Get What We Want Now. Most people, I'm sure, don't go into marriage contemplating divorce, but it's always an option, isn't it? Surely that changes things. What if you knew when you got married that it really was a lifetime commitment, that you really couldn't change your mind, that you really were going to be waking up next to that person every day for forty or fifty or sixty years, no matter how you came to feel about him? Would you make the same decisions?

Yes, there are too many divorces. But the answer isn't to stick people in bad marriages, usually without the tools to make them workable, but to discourage bad marriages in the first place, to require the time and space and investigation necessary to let people make good decisions about marriage before they enter into it. Then, making it a bit harder to get divorced might be a good accompanying step. It might help to reinforce the seriousness of the commitment. But reinforcing the seriousness of a commitment never really made or understood, explaining after the fact that you've signed on for something you never intended or even recognized, isn't to anyone's good.

Let's forget about revising divorce legislation and require a six month waiting period after you apply for a marriage license.

Let's forget mandatory counseling sessions before a divorce petition can be filed and make couples counseling or marriage education classes a PRE-licensing requirement.

And let's assume that anyone who is too impatient, too bent on instant gratification and having things his own way, to "put up with" those requirements lacks the maturity for a successful marriage, anyway.