Fixed length marriage contracts?

YourValentine wrote: It is ridiculous to cater for every immature citizen who gets married without thinking only to find that it was a big mistake after a few months. If  citizens think they need a civil marriage to live happily with their partners they can pay for the divorce, for heavens sake. After all - in these happy days of freedom and choices marriage is not really needed if someone is not up to it, you can live together unmarried just as well. Children have the same rights no matter if the parents are married or not, so there is no need to make laws for every possible case of bad judgment,
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It would have been interesting to see the public response if the Reuters article that made the rounds focused less on the minimum contract term and the Catholic Church, only because both of those elements provoke reactions that are easy to anticipate.  It was the underlying shift of expectations that I found deeply thought provoking.  Just what would happen if we as a culture stopped thinking of marriage as something that should be for life, and started to think of it as something that could be for life if and only if couples continued to actively and freely choose it throughout their lives in the best interests of all?  When you consider that in the most optimal circumstances for selecting a mate fully a third of marriages still fail, and that some not insignificant portion of the ones that stay intact obscure people suffering in soul crushing boredom and loneliness, this is not just an issue for the fickle or those with bad judgement, but something much more like half the married population. 

What is tough to fully anticipate is what would change, and what wouldn't.  I think people would still choose to marry for the same reasons and with the same hopes and intentions.  As Mooghead illustrated, people in the vast majority marry thinking they will be spending the rest of their lives with the person they can't imagine living without, as committed and content as the day of the ceremony.  With at least half destined to be wrong, there is a definite appeal to the idea of anything that reshapes the experience of divorce from something that is so often absolutely shattering.  Some elements of that relating to a sense of failure and shame and loss of identify come almost wholly from social and familial expectations and the definition of a successful marriage as one that lasts forever rather than one that is happy and productive for it's duration. As you point out, people don't have to marry, but they do.  People still want the symbolism, emotional security and social benefits of being somebody's husband or wife and so should not expect never to lose anything in what is essentially a gamble of your future happiness to have these things, but I still think as a culture we can do better with all of this somehow.   If it became socially normalized for families to be reshaped rather than 'broken', that would save an awful lot of anguish for an awful lot of people.

All that said, it is easy to imagine the potentially negative impacts of such a system, and further positive ones too, but there must be some sweet spot that avoids a disposable culture and preserves the ideals of love and commitment and supports making it through in every way, but falls short of condemning people to living the one life they have unhappy and unfulfilled.

Sir GH wrote:

If this is indeed the catholic church getting their noses in there, then this is a pointless exercise.  They will essentially be shooting themselves in the foot, because it will be that much easier to "defy catholic doctrine" and get a divorce if the couple doesn't work out.  If indoctrinated people stay in their failed marriages, this change in law won't change that.  The only difference is it will be easier (and cheaper) to separate.
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Kind of a non issue, as the Catholic Church hands out annulments like Halloween candy anyway.  :)

Ah yes, good ol' catholic annulments.  But here's one thing I didn't know - one of the grounds for nullity is ..

"The intention, when marrying, to never have children"

Wow .. these people are just so archaic and irrelevant.

Wikipedia refers to that as canon 1101.2 which formally reads "If, however, either or both of the parties should by a positive act of will exclude marriage itself or any essential element of marriage or any essential property, such party contracts invalidly."  It's paraphrased also as "Willful exclusion of children: You or your spouse married intending, either explicitly or implicitly, to deny the other's right to sexual acts open to procreation."   Refusal of intercourse/refusal to have children or misrepresenting your ability to have children before marriage are also grounds for civil annulments, typically under fraud or extreme cruelty umbrellas.  So if your beef is a religious definition of the purpose of marriage that includes procreation, fine, but you'll have to be annoyed with others besides the Catholic Church.   If your beef is that the Catholic Church has exclusive domain on granting annulments for willfully denying their spouse children, you're simply mistaken.

A fairly recent law has introduced here what's called by people "administrative divorce" - that is, the possibility of getting a divorce before a notary public, without having to hire lawyers and stand in front of a judge at the local court. It's cheaper and way faster, but it's only possible when both people want the divorce and there's no dispute whatsoever over assets or custody. 

I'd welcome such fixed lenght marriage contract if it helped decreasing the number of cases brought before the courts. The way things are here nowadays, it's too much for the judicial system to handle. So with that purely utilitarian goal in mind, I'd greet a law introducing this kind of divorce, but I admit I haven't thought it through and that the consequences could be mainly negative.

GratefulFan wrote:

"So if your beef is a religious definition of the purpose of marriage that includes procreation, fine, but you'll have to be annoyed with others besides the Catholic Church."

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Fair enough, I'm sure they aren't the only ones.  Either way, it's archaic and ultimately irrelevant.  The church or whoever else imposes these beliefs are not a system of law enforcement.  Their philosophies are merely symbolic and hold no true influence over anyone - unless they allow it to.

The church hasn't had any actual power for centuries.  The word 'canon' in the 21st century is laughable.  It's merely a system of outdated philosophies.  And they use their guilt-based theology to manipulate primitive people into believing these philosophies actually have some kind of connection to reality.  Independently thinking people have rejected this style of governance since the enlightenment.

If a man doesn't want to have kids and his wife isn't aware of it before she marries him, then it's her own fault for not asking him about it.  There are certain things a couple should discuss before they get married.  She shouldn't need the church to jump in to annul her marriage because she and her spouse have poor communication skills.

The church should hold pre-marriage counseling classes if their beliefs are so important to them.  But it's not the actual beliefs that matter most to them - it's the power (or the illusion of power).  They'd rather use a couple as an example to appear as if they have some kind of influence over their personal choices than preempt this kind of thing in the first place.

In my country it is very easy to get divorced. You go to a laywer and sign a diivorce contract which has to cover all aspects like child care and division of assets. The contract is then presented to a divorce court and the judge will just sign it. Only if the couple cannot agree on all issues the judge will have to decide and lawyers will be hired to defend the causes of the two clients.

It is obvious that society often moves faster than the laws do. In my country marriage is still protected by a constitution that was written up in the 1940s when marriage was the only morally acceptable form for a couple to live together. Married couples still have some privileges - they pay less taxes, for example. The main idea behind this was the traditional alimentation marriage - the man husband went out to work, the wife had the children and stayed at home. A divorce was very hard to get and divorced people were judged by the socitey as loose and irresponsible. Wifes with children had to be protected against  social condemnation. Children born to unmarried fathers did not have any claims on the money and heritage of the unmarried father.

Of course this has changed totally - no woman wants to stay at home anymore and there is no alimentaion concept anymore. We still have the tax privileges for married couples although marriage has not been  the "cell of society" anymore for a long time. The question is: should the state sanction couples at all?  Should the state really sponsor couples who think they need marriage but in fact they only stay together for a while like any other unmarried couple? Maybe the state should go the step further and abolish all privileges and legal bindings for married couples. In this way laws do not be to modernised every ten years in order to keep up with the changed views within the society.

Of course there is a real problem: religious weddings can only be had when you are legally married in a civil wedding. If the state abolished civil marriages the churches would be given a privilege which they should not have imo: the only way to get married would be a church marriage. Maybe this is the only reason why  the state should continue to make up laws for civil marriages: to avoid that churches get more power over the lives of the people.