You’ve found a few more friends to enliven your life. Better still, you’ve found the Mr. or Ms. Right you’ve been hoping for and even tied the happy knot. Now how do you keep them from tiring of your company and perhaps roaming off with somebody else? Nobody really knows the answer. Every couple is unique and so is their relationship. Author Anthony Powell suggests that marriage contains ‘the moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellowship of opposed commanders in total war.’ (A Dance To The Music Of Time)Easier divorce means that marriage is no longer a lifetime’s union. It is more like a formalised, voluntary convenience between a man and a woman for living together. Often neither has a clue what they’re getting into. Stricter laws would make it harder to end one marriage and enter another but such restraint is no longer a remedy for a disintegrating partnership. Other guidelines are needed as well as some incentive, financial perhaps, for couples, particularly when they have children.
Multiple Choice
In the US, the growth of ‘no fault divorces’ in the 70s and 80s (later adopted by Britain) was accompanied by a jump of more than 34% in marriage breakdowns over a decade. In an effort to bring down the national divorce rate of 50%, Lenawee County, an hour’s drive from Detroit, made every couple planning a wedding take premarital counselling. When Molly Teets and David Harris arranged to marry, they had to answer 165 multiple choice questions ranging over money
matters, hopes for children and their sex lives. Having scored well, they were cleared to marry in an old Lutheran church in southern Michigan.
This new regime took effect on 1 June 1997. Though it has no basis in law, Judge James Sheridan agreed with 60 churchmen and the 12 other officials who can conduct marriages in Lenawee County (pop. 50,000) not to do so until they had proof that the couples had been counselled. The state of Louisiana followed this lead by introducing a stricter form of matrimony called covenant marriage or ‘Marriage Plus’ in which the couple promise not to divorce, unless one is found guilty of a biblical transgression such as adultery, desertion or abuse. Marriage Plus is not compulsory but the alternative, the no fault divorce, dubbed ‘Marriage Lite’, is unlikely to be preferred as it is akin to confessing that the pair are not wholly committed and will split up if things go wrong.
Meanwhile, civil rights groups argue against tougher divorce laws on the grounds that it harms children and the wives of abusive husbands by prolonging bad marriages. The opposite stance is taken by those who say that ‘no fault divorces’ allow men to walk away from their responsibilities. But the Louisiana experiment is supported by a growing number of other Americans, too. Having grown up in a divorce culture they now think that marriages might be saved through community policies where religious and other leaders try to promote better relationships between couples by encouraging them to get to know each other before marriage. (Not too intimately, one hopes.)
Testing Time
In the UK, more efforts are also being made to cement the marriage bond by classes on how to communicate, to avoid conflict and adapt to children. Organised by the counselling charity Relate ( www.relate.org.uk ) in centres throughout the UK, the classes are targeted at couples planning either to get married, to cohabit or to go into a second relationship – a mix which hardly seems likely to inspire those hoping to walk to the altar with a first time Walter. Advice is also given on such ‘touchy’ issues (not quite what you think) as who will clean, shop and cook. There are also, sadly but perhaps a necessary concomitant to divorce, advice centres to help children get over the trauma that can result from a parental split.
Some church leaders, including the pastoral care adviser to the Bishop of Oxford, have proposed a church blessing to allow couples to live together before marriage ‘to test their vocation’. One is led to wonder what is the care adviser’s vocation. The Church of England has condemned this idea of a trial marriage; so did the head of the clergy section of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union, saying that betrothals and trial marriages were part of a bygone era. The section’s chairman confirmed these sentiments, saying that a trial marriage meant that the woman is more likely to be worse off.
Will any of these attempts prove a deterrent to the mounting tide of divorce, or halt the growing preference for cohabitation rather than marriage? You can’t rely on money, youth, beauty or even sexual attraction to keep a man or woman by your side forever, certainly not in the pristine condition in which they once were. Time takes its toll (if it is allowed to) and even the Grim Reaper might turn up unexpectedly to scythe through all your present hopes and future plans.