Nothing Short term about marriage
 

The idea is that before couples tie the knot, they must extensively review the laws governing marriage and divorce with a lawyer, discuss divorce parameters and set a short-term length for their relationship, a term they would choose, although Laliberté used five years in her paper.

“There are three options after the term,” she said. “One you get divorced, the second one you renew your vows and the third one is to do nothing and then you are going to be married for the rest of your life like many people are right now. They will be more aware of the laws ... (so) it is going to be easier, not easy but easier, to get divorced.”

Laliberté argues that short term marriage contracts will strengthen the institution of marriage by encouraging young Canadians to wed because “a term of five years is going to be more easy for them to make that commitment.” She is considering pursuing the topic of short-term marriages as a PhD student and eventually hopes to not only see it in law but also be the first to take advantage of saying I do at least for the short-term.

Cliffs: Make marriage a short term contract (like 5 years) with the possibility of renewal or divorce once it expires.

http://www.catholicregister.org/item...about-marriage

hallo Lala, and welcome to the Cellar.

It's an interesting theory - not sure how that strengthens marriage though - if you're going into it with a five year plan, why not just live together?

The whole point of marriage is it is pairbonding with the intention of lifelong commitment. Now - most people these days know that there are no guarantees in that regard, and I'm all for making divorce less difficult and distressing - but it seems to me that one of the advantages of marriage is the sense of long term commitment that gives people the confidence to, for example, start a family together. If you're the kind of person who wants the legal and/or religious commitment of marriage, as opposed to living together with a personal commitment, I don't see how a five year contract would work.

Nothing Short term about marriage
 

Yeah, I see it as an opportunity to disregard your personal accountability in making a relationship work.

This makes marriage a farce IMO

Modern marriage is pretty much a farce anyway, isn't it?

Maybe it's different today, but when I got married, studies then clearly showed that people who live together before getting married were something like twice as likely to get divorced as those who didn't. The theory to explain this was that they were not as serious about the whole thing and therefore wound up likely to not be serious about the marriage either.

The contract should be for 7 years. Everyone's heard of the seven year itch. It'd be a shame to have renewed your contract after 5 years and THEN get the seven year itch ... with 3 years left to go.

I'm only committing myself to you for 7 years. You better prove yourself worthy in that time or else....


Just seems bizarre to me.

I remember hearing that too around the time I got married.

Someone hit me with that a few weeks out from our wedding day

I laughed at them. That statistic is for marriages already over, I said. It doesn't apply here, that's not how statistics work, I said. Marriages already over have no bearing on marriages happening now, I said.

11 years later we were divorced

The last time we talked about this, somebody (probably clodfobble) pointed out that it was the religious people driving that statistic, and that they weren't living together before marriage, and later on they were miserable in their marriage, but it was a horrible sin to get divorced, so they just stayed in a bad marriage.

So I don't know how much you can read in to that statistic. But I do think that you go farther when you aim high than when you aim low. That's a truth right there. That is.

J and I were a committed couple and lived together for 13 years, beginning when we had just turned 18 years old. That's longer than many marriages last. As far as we were concerned we were in it for the long haul. And the decision to split was no easier because we weren't married than if we'd have had to get divorced either. Maybe slightly easier because of the lack of kids, but still - it took three years of a broken relationship before we could actually bring ourselves to call it quits and the process of disentangling our lives took another couple of years.

We are still close and he's still one of the most important people in my life.

There are people who view the commitment as permanent, and those who don't. Of those who do, some will live together, and some won't. But of those who don't, I'd venture to say all, or near enough to it, will live together first.

Thus, living together is not a universal factor (there is no control group that is uncommitted but also choosing not to live together,) so it's a useful predictor by association, but almost certainly not an action you can take beforehand to alter the outcome.

Think about it this way. Homes with many books tend to create successful children. But that's only by association, because parents who read tend to create successful children. You can't fill a ghetto house with a bunch of unread books and magically create successful kids. And you can't keep uncommitted couples apart and magically make their marriage last.

I suppose that one individual in the couple could use it as a test for the other, as in, "I will refuse to live together, and see if he agrees to that rule in order to test his character," but again, you're only finding out who that person already is, not changing it. And in the meantime, your testing is revealing something about who you are.

I have a headache in my eye right now.

I have a headache in my tooth right now. And absolutely no wisdom to offer about marriage.

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a headache for either one ... old saying I just made up.