memes

Why would you marry a bad spouse? You should figure that out before you marry them.

So you are saying that everyone has a perfect ability to flawlessly determine whether another person is a good spouse for them or not? That is an impressive feat, especially considering that, by definition, said person cannot be their spouse until they have already married them, making evaluation difficult.

(Of course, a partial solution to this is to live with a potential marriage partner for several years beforehand in order to get a chance to at least do a thorough evaluation, but this is not a solution that "traditionalists" tend to be happy with.)

How about this, what’s the point of marriage? If it can be discarded at a whim, what does it mean in the first place?

Divorce is not that easy or cheap, even when it is no-fault. It is hardly ever something done "at a whim"--outside of places like Vegas where people also tend to get married on a whim, in addition to making other bad life choices.

I mean the problem with this entire discussion is marriage has no standard meaning anymore. Traditionalists think of it as a sacred vow, taking till Death do us part very seriously. Others think of it as some irrelevant social construct and an excuse to have a party.

I doubt that there are nearly as many people in the latter camp as you seem to think that there are, especially given that marriage has legal ramifications, making it nontrivial to get out of even under the best of circumstances (again, unless maybe you got married on a whim in Vegas).

I’m in the camp of it’s forever or it it’s pointless. Life is change. People change. The work that goes into marriage is the work of ensuring you grow together, not grow apart. I wouldn’t marry anyone that didn’t agree.

This presumes that both spouses act in good faith, which will not always be the case. One spouse may not turn out to be as committed as the other spouse in practice in putting in this work, and this is the kind of thing that is not easy to find out until years in, so declaring that "You should figure that out before you marry them." is both callous and impractical.

In the most extreme case of bad faith, one of the spouses might reveal themselves over time to be an abuser, and this might not even be obvious to the outside world if the abuse is emotional rather than physical so that there are no bruises that can be pointed to for proof. So your proposal that the abused spouse not have the freedom to walk away from the marriage without immediately losing everything to their abuser--unless perhaps they are allowed go through an ugly and painful legal battle to prove that they are being emotionally been abused by their spouse and therefore their spouse is at fault in which case they might be allowed to walk away without losing everything--is incredibly cruel.

In fact, let me be really explicit about what I am getting at here: the real risk, as I see it, is not that you will marry someone else who will divorce you "at a whim", but that someone else will marry you, after which it will turn out that you are the asshole in that relationship, and, based on the things you have just said in this thread, you will then do everything in your power to trap your spouse in that marriage. This is a big reason why no-fault divorce laws exist: to protect other people from you.

Of course, if you disagree with me and you believe that the real risk is that you will marry someone else who will change their mind and discard you on a whim, and not the scenario I described in the previous paragraph, then I would suggest that "You should figure that out before you marry them." If you do that successfully, after all, then what do you have to fear?