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Let’s Get Married when we’re 40

p. A “(extlink)Salon article”:http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/11/18/marriage_pacts/index.html (subscription or ad required) talks about the increasing prevalence of contingency plans where singles plan with friends of the opposite sex to be emergency wedding partners, when they get older.

bq. Christine and Max made the pact in their late 20s, while on vacation in Mexico: If neither of them was married by the age of 40, they’d marry each other. Though they’d never been an official couple, their friendship had, over the course of five years, resembled something awfully close. As Christine explains it, in addition to traveling to romantic destinations such as Mexico, “We saw sunsets and held hands and did karaoke and met people together and went to weddings together.”

p. Although the article talks about many reasons for these plans inspired in many cases by the 1997 movie “(extlink)My Best Friend’s Wedding”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119738/ range from veiled attempts to suggest the possibility of romantic involvement between 2 friends, to a safety net for individuals who use a “gold standard” of another person to avoid the possibility of intimacy. I think one of the most interesting ideas was couples who approach the idea of the marriage pacts in much the way many Asian individuals see arranged marriages:

bq. “It’d be a pragmatic decision. Here’s someone you’ve known your whole life. All the tough parts are out of the way. Your families know each other, you like the same activities, you have the same values. It would be a marriage of convenience, and you would have to create the physical side. The rest of it would come easy [when] usually it’s the opposite.”

p. In an age with dramatic increases in mobility, with individuals entering and leaving marriage as circumstances in their life change, I find this kind of mentality to be an interestingly counter to mainstream thought. If couples enter a relationship with the attitude that lots of work is necessary to build the relationship, but it’s their basic compatibility which will make the wedding work, how does that affect their prospects for long-term success? Will they match, beat, or exceed the 25% divorce rate of their peers?