I saw the comment on Brothers Judd somewhere, but couldn't track it down, but it came down to this:

You can't make divorce too difficult because it will trap battered spouses, but if you make marriage too difficult it will encourage commonlaw marriage and cohabitation.

These things are true.

Much moreso than gay marriage or even polygamy, I consider divorce to be the biggest threat to marriage. After all, what hurts a marriage more than frequent de-marriaging. The problem is that there are many cases where it is extremely important that a battered or abused spouse be able to get out of a marriage with their limbs and sanity in tact. On the other hand, the doorway that is open for special cases tends to get rushed with convenient passers-through.

But an idea occured to me: instead of attacking marriage or divorce, attack re-marriage. What if a divorce were easy enough to get, but that it came with a penalty: You can't remarry for five years. Or maybe ten. It seems to me that this would attack the idea that marriage is something that you can get in and out of without trapping someone (being unable to remarry would presumably not prevent a battered spouse from getting out) and without weakening the institution of marriage itself by having large numbers forego the process. Of course, divorced people would have to forego the process at least for some time, but they are generally "off the rails" anyway, from a social standpoint. By getting married and divorced, they have already gone outside the proscribed path that is expected of us.

Their penalty for de-valuing marriage is limited access to it in the future. That seems pretty fair to me.

I have at least two concerns with this:

First, there are many cases where the couple got married too young, didn't know what they were getting in to, and are being somewhat unfairly held into account for youthful indiscretions. While that holds some merit, we're reaching the point where "youthful indiscretions" continue into someone's mid-to-late twenties. Thirty, when the mother has only a limited time to produce children and will likely not see grandchildren until she well over sixty, is considered a good time to get married. Because we spend a good part of our twenties being stupid. That actions have consequences that you can't just send away is an important lesson that is missed amount younger people (particularly teenagers, but even up to people my age or a little younger). As a culture, we need to push people to grow up faster, not clear the way for them to grow up slower.

Second, If an divorced person meets and falls in love with someone that has never been married, it's the unmarried person that is paying the price for the actions of the loved one before they even met. This sort of thing already happens with debt and the like, but from a cultural standpoint it could be problematic because it throws otherwise track-bound people off the rails. Girl meets divorced man, girl can't marry divorced man, girl moves in with divorced man instead, girl breaks up with divorced man, girl sets herself up on a cycle of pseudomarriages that do not need a divorce. Of course, some of this is contingent on publically discouraging premarital cohabitation which seems to be of increasingly less concern. However, add a baby born out of wedlock to the above timeline, and the marriage becomes more important.

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One idea that has made the rounds more recently is that of a "Covenant Marriage," in which a prospective couple agree to undergo more counselling and set up barriers against a future divorce. The common complaint I have heard about this one is that the couples that are most likely to get a Covenant Marriage are least likely to need it.

That may be true, but I think the purpose that it would serve would be to get a couple to seriously think and talk about what marriage means to them. If neither want the roadblocks to be there, I might personally ask what the point of getting married in the first place is, but it does give couples a certain lattitude if both are practical-thinking, post-modern types that have resigned themselves to "the way things are nowadays." If both want a covenant marriage, that provides a way for couples that are probably unlikely to get divorced anyway to make a statement, of sorts, to themselves and others that their marriage is distinct from Elvis-officiated ones in Vegas.

But where I think that covenant marriages would be most helpful are when one half of a partnership wants one and the other half does not. That's when the conversation about marriage becomes all the more important. It takes two to marry, but it only takes one to cause a divorce. That's why it's very important that you know as much as possible about the person that you're marrying. One of the reasons I married Camille was that I found that she and I both had very idealistic views on what a marriage should be along with very realistic ideas on how a marriage should be.

Had Covenant Marriage been a possibility for us, and had one of us wanted one and the other not, that would have been a red flag. Not necessarily indicative of future disaster or anything, but something to talk our way through. The issue of whether or not she would take my last name became a flashpoint of discussion between us because it emphasized some of the differences she and I do have when it comes to marriage and we had to work our way through them. The Covenant Marriage could easily serve a similar role. If two people have differing ideas on the nature of marriage, it needs to be worked through before the marriage actually happens.