As I sit here and write I am riding in a car with an old college girlfriend, reflecting on the weekend I just had. We are on our way back from Houston, where we had a brief visit to celebrate the recent marriage of a mutual girlfriend from college. The party was nice; it was good to see old friends, and our alma mater won its football game Saturday night, so to say the least it was a good trip. It’s times like this that always make me feel nostalgic for the “good old days.”
But this feeling of nostalgia is not what I really want to talk about. What I do want to discuss is one particular topic that the three of us girls discussed this weekend – premarital agreements. Most people have heard of a “pre-nup” but they really do not understand the truth behind the process and the document. I’ll always venture to say that less than half of the people that have heard of a pre-nup have ever heard of a “post-nup.” Both premarital and postmarital agreements are tools that couples use to clarify the details of a marriage. Both “tools”, as I like to refer to them, are often scrutinized and put in a bad light, but are these tools really bad?
For instance, when two people enter into a business relationship, they sign contracts, don’t they? Or at least, shouldn’t they? In essence, isn’t a marriage relationship a business relationship? Two people contributing time and money for a common purpose, with the ultimate goal of a successful venture. So why is it then that so many people still consider it an insult for one partner in the relationship to ask the other to enter into a pre- or post-marital agreement?
I understand that a marriage has a key element that most businesses do not, that element being love, but perhaps our society places too much weight on the power of love? Maybe if we viewed marriage more like a business relationship and relied less on love, we wouldn’t have as many divorces. Think about how hard people work at preventing their business from failing. Shouldn’t we put just as much effort into our marriages?
As a single female, I don’t hold the answers to these questions. Nor do I feel that I am fully qualified to give an answer, since I have not yet been in a marriage myself. But what I do know, is that our country’s divorce rate lingers around the 50 percent mark. With one out of every two marriages ending in divorce, perhaps we need to reexamine our present notions of the marriage relationship.
Photo credit, Corey Leopold
