Let's reform marriage!
Monday, 27 July 2009 11:36 amThere's an odd inconsistency about marriage. If you want to get married, it's pretty straightforward and you don't have to prove the validity of the relationship (although if you then want to use the marriage as a basis for immigration, say, you will have to). If you want to get divorced, you have to give a Damn Good Reason, and you may also have to have lived apart for two years. The divorce process is not simple and takes many months.
In other words, the system is geared towards preserving marriage as a default state, one that is easy to get into and hard to get out of. I've always felt that divorces should be easier to achieve: if a relationship has broken down, forcing two unhappy people to live together just causes misery on all sides (yes, including the children - my parents were one of those couples who stayed together far too long "for the sake of the child" and it was hellish). But why is it so easy to marry? If you have to prove two years' separation or incidents of an equal gravity for divorce, why shouldn't you have to prove a period of cohabitation or something to show equal relationship depth in order to marry? The marriage rate would drop, but the divorce rate would drop even further. If it were possible to have a really good, unbiased resource, a short period of mandatory relationship counselling before either marriage or divorce would probably be useful as well, as long as it were not given actual power and was merely for guidance. Going back to cohabitation, if a marriage has broken down then you don't really need separation to see that, although I can see why a period of time to make certain could be useful (two years seems excessive, though). However, you don't know what it's like to live with someone until you've actually tried it, and then it takes a while to adjust, and you may well find that a relationship that was lovely when you were dating goes to pieces once you move in together.
Obvious problems with mandatory cohabitation before marriage: some people would refuse on religious grounds, and some people wouldn't be able to cohabit due to, say, not living in the same location. I'm not sure how far the second would be a real problem, in that couples could always delay marriage, but presumably there could be difficulties with starting a family. Mind you, I suppose it would be possible to adjust other laws accordingly. The religious problem is trickier, and shows up the increasing difficulties we have with the separation of church and state. I suppose one solution would be for engaged no-sex-before-marriage couples would be a two-bedroom dwelling, which would be no more expensive than sharing with flat/housemates, but it's still not perfect. Anyway, at the moment you can have a religious marriage (mixed-sex only) which is also counted legally as a civil marriage, but religious and civil divorces are separate. In some religions, including Judaism, the husband has sole control over whether or not a divorce occurs. If my father had refused to grant my mother a divorce, my mother would have been unable to remarry in synagogue and may well have felt that she was unable to remarry at all.
Incidentally, my ideal world assumes that same-sex couples would have exactly the same marriage rights as mixed-sex couples, and would scrap this nonsense about adultery only counting if it's with a opposite-sex partner. Indeed, gender really shouldn't be the point. It's awkward enough if you work with a binary gender system, and gets really tangled once you step outside that.
Other possibilities: get rid of marriage altogether; have some sort of renewable contract arrangement, for one or five years or whatever was chosen (some couples do this with handfasting); keep marriage as it is but make divorce as easy as marriage; truly separate out religious marriages from civil partnerships (for any gender combination); legalise group marriages, although this gets problematic since some group marriage traditions tend to be exploitative; raise the age for marriage, since 16 is terribly young and it's ludicrous that you can be considered old enough to do something as enormous as marriage but not old enough to vote or buy alcohol. Presumably it's to keep it in line with the age of sexual consent, but there's no real reason why the two should be the same, and indeed in some countries, such as the Netherlands, they're not.
In other words, the system is geared towards preserving marriage as a default state, one that is easy to get into and hard to get out of. I've always felt that divorces should be easier to achieve: if a relationship has broken down, forcing two unhappy people to live together just causes misery on all sides (yes, including the children - my parents were one of those couples who stayed together far too long "for the sake of the child" and it was hellish). But why is it so easy to marry? If you have to prove two years' separation or incidents of an equal gravity for divorce, why shouldn't you have to prove a period of cohabitation or something to show equal relationship depth in order to marry? The marriage rate would drop, but the divorce rate would drop even further. If it were possible to have a really good, unbiased resource, a short period of mandatory relationship counselling before either marriage or divorce would probably be useful as well, as long as it were not given actual power and was merely for guidance. Going back to cohabitation, if a marriage has broken down then you don't really need separation to see that, although I can see why a period of time to make certain could be useful (two years seems excessive, though). However, you don't know what it's like to live with someone until you've actually tried it, and then it takes a while to adjust, and you may well find that a relationship that was lovely when you were dating goes to pieces once you move in together.
Obvious problems with mandatory cohabitation before marriage: some people would refuse on religious grounds, and some people wouldn't be able to cohabit due to, say, not living in the same location. I'm not sure how far the second would be a real problem, in that couples could always delay marriage, but presumably there could be difficulties with starting a family. Mind you, I suppose it would be possible to adjust other laws accordingly. The religious problem is trickier, and shows up the increasing difficulties we have with the separation of church and state. I suppose one solution would be for engaged no-sex-before-marriage couples would be a two-bedroom dwelling, which would be no more expensive than sharing with flat/housemates, but it's still not perfect. Anyway, at the moment you can have a religious marriage (mixed-sex only) which is also counted legally as a civil marriage, but religious and civil divorces are separate. In some religions, including Judaism, the husband has sole control over whether or not a divorce occurs. If my father had refused to grant my mother a divorce, my mother would have been unable to remarry in synagogue and may well have felt that she was unable to remarry at all.
Incidentally, my ideal world assumes that same-sex couples would have exactly the same marriage rights as mixed-sex couples, and would scrap this nonsense about adultery only counting if it's with a opposite-sex partner. Indeed, gender really shouldn't be the point. It's awkward enough if you work with a binary gender system, and gets really tangled once you step outside that.
Other possibilities: get rid of marriage altogether; have some sort of renewable contract arrangement, for one or five years or whatever was chosen (some couples do this with handfasting); keep marriage as it is but make divorce as easy as marriage; truly separate out religious marriages from civil partnerships (for any gender combination); legalise group marriages, although this gets problematic since some group marriage traditions tend to be exploitative; raise the age for marriage, since 16 is terribly young and it's ludicrous that you can be considered old enough to do something as enormous as marriage but not old enough to vote or buy alcohol. Presumably it's to keep it in line with the age of sexual consent, but there's no real reason why the two should be the same, and indeed in some countries, such as the Netherlands, they're not.
