News links sometimes disappear, so I’ll paraphrase: In Mexico City, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce within two years. So liberal lawmakers are proposing that budding brides and grooms be able to get a two-year contract on their marriage, with an option to renew, so as to avoid the cost and challenges of a divorce.

I may have blogged about it before, but my tagging is execrable so I can’t be sure, so bear with me: these guys may have an idea.

I think divorce has skyrocketed because (and while I hate generalizations I’m gonna do it anyway) many men still believe they’re operating under an old model, or have been raised by men who did, and modeled the behavior. Old model: back when a woman HAD to have a man to survive, all you needed to do to be a decent husband was to bring home your paycheck (or at least most of it), not drink too much, and not hit anyone so hard as to leave a mark. If a woman needed you to survive, all you had to do was be survivable.

Sadly (but only for the Old Model and the divorce rate), women have caught on to the fact that we don’t need to put up with ‘survivable.’ And that being alone might be better than being with someone who is just ‘survivable.’ And that the definition of ‘decent’ could be upgraded.

So I’m going out on the ledge to say: it’s a good thing the divorce rate has skyrocketed. It would be a bad thing if that Old Model persisted, and the divorce rate is a sign that it won’t. There are many who would tell you that the women’s libbers killed marriage as we know it, and I am fine with that. If the institution of marriage is to survive at all, and we’re going to really strive for romantic love to be the basis, the foundation of marriage needs to change so that it is a partnership, not a job.

Would the two-year Mexican contract accomplish that? I don’t know. Would I be on my best behavior if I knew I was getting a performance appraisal every two years and wanted to keep the gig? Most certainly. (Note: it might behoove all of us to treat our marriages as constantly being under review; how many people have been blindsided by a divorce, swooping in out of the blue like an eagle after a mouse?)

If I were in a relationship trough (and we all find ourselves in them) and knew that I had to stick it out at least until the end of the contract would it keep me from walking out the door and then maybe we’d be out of the trough when it came time to renew? Perhaps. Does the lifelong commitment thing make people depressed when they’re in a trough and make them more likely to want to pull the relationship plug? Would knowing that they had an out in two years make it easier (kind of like ‘one day at a time’ for an alcoholic)?

I know this: if you want to preserve the concept of marriage, managing the expectations of people about to get married would be a better place to start, rather than making it easier for married people to bail. But a lawmaker can’t do much with that, because that would involve manipulating social mores and pressure and conventions on a grand scale, so a two-year contract is born, with its little tail vigorously wagging the dog.

Full disclosure: my parents have been married for 61 years. They tell everyone that they kept the peace for the first years by agreeing that whoever left had to take all five kids; since then, they’ve lived in a death penalty state. Don’t believe it: they still make out in the kitchen. And we all know couples like that. So I’ll stipulate that truly happy marriages were forged back in the day, and can be today.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011