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Great Idea: Marriages w/Expiration Date


Brother Mango

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070921/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_germany_politics_marriage

 

 

German politician is espousing a 7-yr marriage contract that dissolves unless actively extended.

 

The article isn't a very good one. Talks mostly about scandal and the opposition to her idea. Even the headline suggests something whimsical. However, it seems to be an excellent idea for married couples to take time and actively determine if their situation needs to continue further. Or, one turns to the other and says, "we've got 2 years left and I'm telling you now that I'm done. So, how can we help each other to be prepared?"

 

This idea is long overdue but most certainly won't go anywhere. Not now.

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I think it'd make people work harder to keep a marriage together. Too many people figure, "eh, it's too hard to get a divorce so I'll just do my own thing" and marriages fall apart. It'd make people work harder to make sure the other doesn't leave them.

 

I'm also in the middle of a divorce right now. I could see how this could be beneificial in many ways.

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I think the short term plan is great if you're not planning on having kids. I'd prefer about 5 years instead.

 

 

That's where this plan kinda fails. They don't really take into consideration finances and custody.

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That's where this plan kinda fails. They don't really take into consideration finances and custody.

 

 

How does this fail where the current scheme doesn't fail?

 

This seems to be more of a policy design issue, instead of a good/bad issue.

 

Certainly it wouldn't make sense if at the 7 year mark the 2 people just get in moving vans and drive off. Surely there's got to be mechanisms for kids, finances, property, etc.

 

What do we have now? An open-ended contract that encourages people to hang on and hang on and hang on (maybe for 30 years) hoping things will get better. That's hardly a success.

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How does this fail where the current scheme doesn't fail?


. . . . .


What do we have now? An open-ended contract that encourages people to hang on and hang on and hang on (maybe for 30 years) hoping things will get better. That's hardly a success.

That thought process discounts those who actually picked the right partner the first go 'round. The current scheme isn't a failure. It's worked for thousands of years just fine. What isn't working is how many enter into marriages today thinking of it as nothing more than wearing somebodies letterjacket in high school. Before I get flamed . . . .yes I know there are some valid reasons for ending a marriage.;)

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I think the short term plan is great if you're not planning on having kids. I'd prefer about 5 years instead.

 

I can't imagine being in a committed relationship when there's an end date in the horizon. Just seems wrong. If you're not going to commit, don't get married. Seems pretty simple to me.

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Personally, I think this is bull{censored}. You're not supposed to get married unless you're actually planning on, oh I don't know, STAYING MARRIED!!! Getting married isn't a room-mate situation that you can just shrug your shoulders over and move on afterwards if it doesn't work out! Getting married is a life-choice - you're making a statement about commitment and love, and you're buying into the dream that love can last forever. Putting time-limits on that is basically saying that society deems the institution of marriage as a total sham and taking away from the seriousness of the decision. We should be giving people more incentives to stay together, not giving them an easy out once they get bored (ever hear of the seven year itch? you think it's a coincidence they're trying to set seven year limits?).

 

I think that this is a cash-grab for the German government. If you have to keep re-filing your marriage every seven years, you're going to have to keep re-paying the processing fee for the paper-work involved. I think that this is a lot less about maintaining the institution of marriage and a lot more about squeezing some Deutche-marks from their citizens.

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It's not that the current scheme fails, it's the people that fail. No one forces anyone to say "forever" or "until death do us part."

 

 

Correct. The people fail 50% of the time and of the "successful" 50% there are a lot of unhappy people. The barrier for entry is very very low and the exit barrier is quite high.

 

Is anyone forced to say "forever" or "until death do us part"? How do we measure "forced"? No, there aren't many shotgun weddings. But there are plenty of invitations to step over that low barrier. In some circles, a single person is looked as being somehow defective or hasn't grown up, yet.

 

Aside from all of that, it seems like it'd be a good idea to have a date that everyone knows is coming. If everything is going well, submit documentation for another 7 years. If things are weird, discuss it and see if an additional 7 years makes sense.

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That thought process discounts those who actually picked the right partner the first go 'round. The current scheme isn't a failure. It's worked for thousands of years just fine. What isn't working is how many enter into marriages today thinking of it as nothing more than wearing somebodies letterjacket in high school. Before I get flamed . . . .yes I know there are some valid reasons for ending a marriage.
;)

 

Thousands of years? Maybe the marriage contract as a concept is thousands of years old, but marriage in the way we experience it today isn't very old at all.

 

Very recently, women were essentially pets who weren't allowed to vote, own land or hold patents. Maybe today's model fits that time when there was clearly one person in charge.

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They did this on Star Trek. It was the reason there was no divorced in the 23rd Century. :lol:

 

Seriously, you have to renew your driver's licence every 5 years..........

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Aside from all of that, it seems like it'd be a good idea to have a date that everyone knows is coming. If everything is going well, submit documentation for another 7 years. If things are weird, discuss it and see if an additional 7 years makes sense.

 

 

I'm not opposed to this idea.

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I can't imagine being in a committed relationship when there's an end date in the horizon. Just seems wrong. If you're not going to commit, don't get married. Seems pretty simple to me.

 

File for an extension at the end of your term. :D

 

However, I'm all for the "don't get married" advice.

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Thousands of years? Maybe the marriage contract as a concept is thousands of years old, but marriage in the way we experience it today isn't very old at all.


Very recently, women were essentially pets who weren't allowed to vote, own land or hold patents. Maybe today's model fits that time when there was clearly one person in charge.

 

 

Exactly! +1:thu:

 

Leave it to the euros (in this case, Germany) to propose such forward-thinking legislation.

 

In the US- nothing but southern Baptists and conservatives, both who misuse the term family values to the point of meaninglessness.

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Very true. However, the couple controls the entry barrier. The problem is that couples have little to no experience in making an evaluation on the front end.

 

 

This is an interesting concept in many areas of life: how much do we really control?

 

A person can have control over the decision to eat a single banana and call that dinner.

 

But there are other aspects of our lives where we'd have to be awfully strong to resist the invitations and incentives that we have to wade through. Peer pressure, self-esteem issues, a desire to be taken seriously, lack of information, lack of experience ... We could make a long list of things that make our own decision quite difficult.

 

No one is peeping in to see if person X is having more than a banana for dinner. But how does one manage the pressure of Thanksgiving dinner and being asked all day, "When are you going to find a husband? You're 35, never been married, and people will wonder what's wrong with you."

 

Many of us can reply, "Mind your own business!" Other people can't. They buy into the notion of being defective.

 

But it can be like that with being 14 yrs old and deciding whether to smoke cigarettes; or being the 1st in several generations who has zero interest in the family business.

 

Who are the people who go with the flow, and who are those who can resist the flow? It seems that marriage is offered as a 1-size-fits-all notion, and it's hard to resist that flow over the low barrier.

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Thousands of years? Maybe the marriage contract as a concept is thousands of years old, but marriage in the way we experience it today isn't very old at all.


Very recently, women were essentially pets who weren't allowed to vote, own land or hold patents. Maybe today's model fits that time when there was clearly one person in charge.

So essentially what you're saying is that if we just went back to women being property and not being allowed to vote more marriages would be better again. That makes the assumption that everyone was happily married, because everyone knew what their place was in the household. That couldn't be further from the truth. Divorce is even mentioned in the Bible. It's been around for thousands of years. The difference is that divorce was frowned upon unless certain criteria were met. That is no longer the case today.

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Personally, I think this is bull{censored}. You're not supposed to get married unless you're actually planning on, oh I don't know, STAYING MARRIED!!! Getting married isn't a room-mate situation that you can just shrug your shoulders over and move on afterwards if it doesn't work out! Getting married is a life-choice - you're making a statement about commitment and love, and you're buying into the dream that love can last forever. Putting time-limits on that is basically saying that society deems the institution of marriage as a total sham and taking away from the seriousness of the decision. We should be giving people more incentives to stay together, not giving them an easy out once they get bored (ever hear of the seven year itch? you think it's a coincidence they're trying to set seven year limits?).


I think that this is a cash-grab for the German government. If you have to keep re-filing your marriage every seven years, you're going to have to keep re-paying the processing fee for the paper-work involved. I think that this is a lot less about maintaining the institution of marriage and a lot more about squeezing some Deutche-marks from their citizens.

 

 

 

Ever been married?

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If you really want to stay married, there's no problem with this plan...you simply keep going. But more importantly this issue points out just how painful it is to get divorced. If this plan resulted in more divorces, it would only be due to people who only stay together because divorce is so ugly.

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This plan is simply a way for the traditional animal instincts of a male to mate with a lot more females over the course of a lifetime, than would be possible if they were stuck to a ball and chain.

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So essentially what you're saying is that if we just went back to women being property and not being allowed to vote more marriages would be better again. That makes the assumption that everyone was happily married, because everyone knew what their place was in the household. That couldn't be further from the truth. Divorce is even mentioned in the Bible. It's been around for thousands of years. The difference is that divorce was frowned upon unless certain criteria were met. That is no longer the case today.

 

 

There is no way to compare marriage today to marriage even 100 years ago. the world was much much different.

 

If we lived in a time when we expected to live just 50 yrs our decisions would be way different than one where we consider retiring at 65 and start a different life.

 

That idea alone means that there's more time and opportunity for people to simply grow apart.

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This plan is simply a way for the traditional animal instincts of a male to mate with a lot more females over the course of a lifetime, than would be possible if they were stuck to a ball and chain.

 

 

Baloney.

Plus, the politician who suggested is a woman.

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Perhaps if the 7 year plan sound good to you, you are not ready to be married. I think this is a wonderful tool of evaluation.
:thu:

 

Look at the cold hard math of a 50% failure rate.

 

If I bought something that failed 50% of the time, I'd take it back to the store and hope that the manufacturer would re-think the design.

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