But there is no need to change marriage, for everybody else, for you to get what you want. All you need do is locate a like minded person and the two of you can set up whatever suits you. Have at it. What’s stopping you?
Nothing changes that by a large majority, the world over, almost every culture, the human animal IS hoping to pair bond for life.
Hey, let’s make a law requiring parents to adopt/re-adopt their birth children every five years.
It wouldn’t be, but not everyone combines their lives completely. I know plenty of couples who maintain hybrid home economies. His salary goes into his account, her salary goes into her account, he pays some of the bills, she pays some of the bills and they transfer money back and forth as needed. Not for any particular reason, but because they’ve never gotten around to creating joint accounts and “why bother now, this is working fine”. Which is does until they divorce and he’s been paying all the mortgage bills and she’s paid all the groceries.
May not be a problem, maybe divorce law where they live deals with this with no issue, but they haven’t bothered figuring it out, so if it turns out he can make a case that he’s entitled to a bigger share of the house, she’ll be sorry she didn’t look into that at the start of the marriage.
True. But let’s think about human nature for a minute. Everyone who marries know they might divorce. But they are likely to think it won’t happen to them. So if you put a 5 year check-in, will people up front think they are likely to divorce at that marker? I think not. Instead, they’ll say “Oh, that’s for other people, not us.”
So, if you propose short-term marriages to help with this issue, you have to require financial planning, too. Which is problematic.
The five year plan is a solution lacking a problem.
I have a sign posted on our pontoon boat that reads:
I have performed several of these ceremonies and have never had a complaint.
I don’t, I responded to a post stating “An automatic five year divorce will not be easier than a regular divorce”, with reasons why I think that specific statement was wrong.
Understood, but the only way it would be wrong is if people changed. Do we have any evidence they would? We can say they should, but we can also say they should do financial planning now in case they get divorced later, but most people don’t.
I disagree. I think it would be easier because it was specifically designed to be dissolved. I’m not a divorce lawyer and laws regarding both marriage and divorce differ from place to place, but I doubt there are many places where there would be no possible changes to make to marriage with the intent to make dissolution simpler.
Now there are lots of ways it wouldn’t be any easier, but that’s a different statement.
But again, if we’re talking about entanglements, the only way to make it simpler is not to entangle. Meaning “You can’t buy a house with this person” or “You can’t have a 401(k) in a community property state if you’re married,” etc. Unless you will require people to behave differently, their normal behaviors will lead to the problems. It’s not something inherent in marriage (aside from the community property states I mentioned) that requires the entanglement. It’s marriage and divorce laws that provide a template for how to disentangle the natural tendency toward entanglement.
It wouldn’t, and I am. Remember that those who wish can avail themselves of marriage contracts.
The “5 year marriage” trope used to be a staple of science fiction to show how things have changed in the future world of the future. People would get married for 5 years, and then either re-up or end the relationship. Trippy!
But back in the 50s when this sort of thing was a trope, divorce was difficult to get. And you couldn’t get a divorce just because you cheated on your wife. Your spouse had grounds to divorce you, but you didn’t have grounds to divorce your spouse. That’s why you used to see in movies sometimes someone complaining “My wife won’t give me a divorce!” He had left his wife and was seeing someone else, but just because he had left and was committing adultery that didn’t mean he could initiate a divorce, and if his wife didn’t want a divorce then he couldn’t get a divorce.
Even if both parties wanted a divorce, there had to be “grounds”, which mean one party would have to allege adultery or abuse or whatever, even if no such thing had actually occurred, otherwise no divorce.
And so, to fix this problem, the idea of term-limited marriage was invented. No longer would you have to provide grounds for divorce, no longer would only the injured spouse have the right to demand a divorce, now if one party wanted out then the contract would expire after the term was up, and would only be renewed if both parties agreed.
Except in real life the problem of divorce was solved in a different way, by no-fault divorce. Today, any party can ask for a divorce for any reason. If you want to leave your wife for the woman you’re having an affair with, you can divorce your wife and she can’t stop you.
We’ve also eliminated the legal concept of bastardy. Nowadays it doesn’t matter if you’re married to the person you had a child with, you are still the legal parent of the child.
So the problems term-marriage was supposed to solve have already been solved. And as others have pointed out, the complexity and expense of divorce is not that you’re getting a divorce, it’s that you’re splitting up the household. None of the complexity would be removed by term limiting marriage.
So what exactly is supposed to be solved here? If you want to divorce your spouse after five years, go right ahead. Your problem wouldn’t be made any simpler just because the process of divorce was automatically initiated.
Unless the proposal is to eliminate no-fault divorce at the same time as implementing term marriage, and the only time you can get an effective no-fault divorce is once every five years, and if you miss your window you’re stuck.
But what’s the point of that? What problem is this supposed to solve? The problem of being stuck in a marriage with someone you’ve grown apart from? We already have a solution to that.
The only way I could see this working is if there was another legally recognized kind of marriage. Let’s call it a “handshake marriage”, because at the end the parties are expected to shake hands and go on their way. Going into it, both parties would understand:
Non-renewal of the vows at the end of the term meant the marriage was dissolved and you walked away with whatever was in your name without concern with equality.
Any property jointly owned would be liquidated and split 50/50.
No children are involved.
You’d have to know up front that this type of split was possible. That way both people would know they’d have to keep things separate for the easy split. If they don’t want to split the house, only keep it in one name. If one person quits working, they don’t get any claim to the other person’s income at divorce since they knew the rules ahead of time.
From a practical standpoint it might not be much different than living together, but it would give the couple the same legal protections as traditional marriage.
I don’t think it would be right for most people, but I could see very rich and famous people using it where there is a huge imbalance in income between the spouses. This way someone won’t lose half their fortune to a gold digger.
What’s stopping you from doing that now?
This used to be argued for gay people who wanted to get married. You could just add someone to your will, give them medical power of attorney, make them beneficiary of your life insurance, draw up contracts that specified joint tenancy for the shared house, agreements for shared assets, and on and on.
All those things could be done on a case by case basis, and you could have a bespoke agreement that covered exactly what you wanted and nothing else.
Or you could just get married.
Or, if you think marriage is stupid, don’t get married.
How would it force people to answer that question? Would there be a requirement for people to figure it all out in advance, and receive permission before getting a marriage license? Because most people, when asked to answer hard hypothetical questions, just won’t. People suck at decision-making and planning generally. Get sex and feelings and such involved and they get even worse at it.
And how would you make it simpler? As mentioned upthread, it’s not the fact of marriage that makes it difficult to divorce; it’s the fact of actually living together and sharing finances, and having kids together.
I suppose you could try to prohibit a couple in a “short-term marriage” from mingling assets, jointly paying expenses, incurring long-term joint debt, and not having children, but I doubt that would work. Would you want the government to be regulating them and forcing them not to do any of those things? Would you want the government to bar them from having kids? What if the condom breaks? Or if they just decide to have kids, the rules of the five-year marriage notwithstanding.
In essence, the main feature of marriage for property rights is an assumption that the parties are an economic unit and if the unit splits, there should be a fair division of assets. That’s always going to be messy if the split is acrimonious.
Do you want it changed along the lines filmore suggests? There are difficulties. What if the title to the house is in Spouse A’s name, but the Spouse B made substantial contributions to the mortgage over the five years. If Spouse A then walks at the end of five years, does Spouse B get any compensation for the mortgage payments? If not, how is that fair?
Plus, this idea seems to assume that putting a five-year limit will make everything emotionally easy. I doubt that’s the case if the spouses have different expectations at the end of the five years. What if Spouse A thinks that everything is just fine and the marriage will be renewed, but Spouse B has decided that at the end of five years, that’s it.
When Expiry Day comes and Spouse B suddenly announces there will be no renewal, do you think Spouse A will just shrug and say, “oh well”?
Or might Spouse A react in exactly the same way as a spouse in a regular marriage who is suddenly told that the other spouse wants a divorce?
It’s not the marriage and property law that makes ending a marriage complicated. It’s the emotions and the sharing of assets and debts, plus kids.
That’s an issue that can arise with marriages in Norway today where what’s fair and what’s the law may differ or at least some work to figure out. My assumption is that with a five year contract you wouldn’t be allowed to leave that question open to be dealt with in case of a possible divorce, and you’d abide by the terms agreed upon in the contract you entered.
Yes, I assume such a requirement.
Then I imagine the five year option would be as popular as those “covenant marriages” that some evangelicals were pushing for a few years ago.