The Divorce Colony

A lot of things in life shouldn't be painful, but they are (legally speaking). Starting a business, getting divorced, moving to another country for work, becoming a citizen of another country, getting an abortion, adopting a child - all of these are painful (unless of course one is rich) in terms of legal/paperwork/bureaucracy. This is assuming that one is clean with no baggage, has proper paperwork etc. If a person has criminal history (even a non violent one), it gets much worse.

For all the amazing advancements humans have made - it is sad that we can't make the absolute necessities of life easy and smooth. We have weird laws, we impose our opinions/ideas on others for no reason instead of letting them be - we are really a weird species.

Remember that all this pre-dates the sexual revolution. Patrilineal inheritance + no DNA testing + no effective contraception + no effective anti-VD measures + extremely dangerous abortion + no employment prospects for pregnant or childrearing mothers + no social security = patriarchal society where maintaining your own love life is almost impossible.

It's not a coincidence that people who are opposed to one of those enablers of female freedom I've listed are more likely to be opposed to others.

Traditional marriage is a contract that defines the relationship - that's what the vows are - but it differs from other contracts in that it's also at least partly for the benefit of children who are not born at the time it is contracted.

> What kind of society would force someone to travel from Paris to New York to Sioux Falls, where they have to take up residence for 90 days, so they can maintain their own love life?

I'll counter with a different question: what kind of society would destroy families on the slightest pretext, or without any pretext at all? And why is 'maintaining [one's] own love life' worth destroying a family?

> The toll it takes on a family is often irrevocable.

Which is why it used to be so rare: because folks realised how terrible divorce really is.

The only good thing I can see about no-fault divorce is that it's reduced the number of spousal murders.

I agree with you that the marriage laws no longer make any sort of rational sense, and that civil marriage should be a civil contract, although from a different angle: the sacrament which united my parents together has absolutely no resemblance to the legal fiction abused by, say, Kim Kardashian.

> stating clearly what's expected of both parties and how the relationship is fairly dissolved

Seems to me that 'til death do us part' is a pretty big item in most marriage ceremonies…

A lot has improved in the last century as a result of feminism, and the necessity of marriage laws is not as significant as it used to be. Still, I think they serve an important purpose.

A simple civil contract is not good enough for several reasons. First, people tend to make bad decisions when they are in love, and especially in situations where one party has fallen in love harder than the other, this would be very open to abuse.

The second problem is that marriages often produce children. And children are not property in the traditional sense, and I think it is not in any way reasonable to handle child custody with a pre-nuptial agreement.

The third problem is much more subtle and subjective, and I'm afraid I will have to do a bit of editorializing, but I think it is still quite important. The economy works well when everyone chiefly looks out for themselves, families and friendships work well when everyone chiefly looks after each other. Your mother didn't hand you a rental agreement the moment you were born, and while you may have had certain ad-hoc "I'll give you $20 if you mow the lawn" agreements with them, their desire for your well-being was based on much more than any potential value you might bring them in the future. A marriage is a lot more like a family than it is like an economy.

Marriage at one time encompassed a range of duties: work in the maintenance of the home, maintenance in retirement, medical care (especially in old age), and care for children (and later responsibility for them). Seen as an economic institution, it actually has a fairly large footprint. If we allow that marriage was never entirely about love -- I'm not sure people would have cared that much if it was -- then we can understand why the dissolution and redefinition of marriage has occasioned so much conflict.

Ultimately we still lack a sound alternative for describing and enforcing the obligations that surround care for children. People have children in ways that are sometimes impulsive; and they are inclined to abandon them and their spouse in the same way. Marriage is a countervailing force, since it attaches penalties to abandoning the family and also makes it hard to start a new one without some resolution with the old one -- so people's energies are less easily redirected.

That was in other states, like New York. In SD, it was just cruelty. That's one of the reasons she went there.

"But the case was in Judge Aiken’s hands alone. If he found that she had proven the baron’s cruelty, Maggie would be granted a divorce. If he found that she had not, the baron and the baroness would remain married."