It's a dim data point but not an isolated one, suggesting people are rethinking marriage, at least around the edges. Prenuptial agreements, a different sort of contract, are on the rise, as is vowless cohabitation. The ages at which people marry have hit record highs, 28.7 years for men and 26.5 for women. And gay marriage has provoked widespread conversation about the institution's meaning and place.
Last year, several lawmakers in Mexico City proposed the creation of short-term , renewable marriage contracts with terms as brief as two years. The idea was to own up to the reality that marriages fail about half the time.
Is marriage headed for an overhaul? A fundamental rethinking ? Is it due for one?
When the Mexican legislators proposed their idea, which was not passed, the archdiocese there called it "absurd" and said it was anathema to the nature of marriage . I decided to put the questions to a different group: the people who study marriage and divorce .
I asked whether society should consider something like a 20-year marriage contract, my own modest proposal that, as in the one from Mexico, acknowledges the harsh truth that nearly half of marriages in the United States end in divorce and many others are miserable. The rough idea: two people, two decades, enough time to have and raise children if that's your thing; a new status quo, a ceremony with a shelf life, till awhile do us part.
But despite having proposed it, whimsically, as a journalistic expedition, I found myself surprised and even unnerved by the extent to which some experts I spoke with say there is a need to rethink an institution that so often fails.
"We're remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions have changed," said Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington and author of books on love, sex and marriage. "We haven't scrutinised it."
The kinds of things that are changing: we're living longer; we live apart from families and are less inclined to religion, both marriage support systems; technology makes it easier than ever flirt or cheat and fuels instant gratification.
Over all, divorce rates have ticked down over the last 20 years, but just slightly. There is a growing marriage gap that mirrors the income gap, with people who are more educated and marry later in life more likely to stay married than less-educated people who marry earlier. And growing numbers of older people are getting divorced; a Bowling Green State University study found that the divorce rate for people 50 to 64 has doubled since 1990, and tripled for those 65 and above.
Dr. Schwartz said that gay marriage had become a tipping point to rethink marriage because it simply opened questions most people have been terrified to broach: Is there any other way to do this? Will doing so change the world?
Maybe, she said, for the better . As to my suggestion of a 20-year contract, she countered that people could do contracts of any number of years, adding: "It's back to the past, which used to involve dowry, bride price, economic arrangement. Nobody pretended this was not an economic arrangement." The idea of contracts "isn't new."
But, she said, "it's newly arrived at after a period of extreme romanticism."
Kenneth P. Altshuler, the president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, the divorce-attorney trade group, said such contracts were neither so absurd nor impractical as they might sound. He thinks they could address some of the financial costs associated with divorce.
One key, he said, would be figuring out a formula for predetermining alimony, given the extent to which money becomes a proxy for bitterness during divorce . That could be solved, he said, through tables that show what payments each spouse would make based on his or her eventual income in Year 20.
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