Planning for marriages to succeed

I generally hate movies. However, the news of my being elected king of the world travels slowly. On my seventh-grade class trip to Washington, D.C., we cancelled our afternoon excursion on a snowy January Day and boarded the city bus for the closest movie theater. It was 1992, and Steve Martin’s Father of the Bride had just premiered. Although in the 15 years that have ensued following that trip I can’t perfectly recall the script, I remember Martin discussing the trauma of planning a wedding.

Maybe you’ve seen that film, or maybe—because bad luck has cursed you like a broken mirror—you’ve planned a wedding. If you have, you know the painstaking detail that brides and grooms devote to a series of events that will last, at the very most, 24 hours.

Perhaps you believe in inducing a massive coronary because a microscope detected a slightly greener hue to the turquoise ribbons on the ceremony invitations. That’s fine for those who get their jollies by putting themselves through high anxiety to achieve nothing lasting. I would like to believe that would-be spouses cared less about the pageantry of a wedding and more about the permanency of their union. There’s nothing wrong with a perfectly orchestrated wedding, but what about a marriage that also runs like clockwork?

When you open the phone book to “W,” you’re likely to find page after page of wedding coordinators. Well, flip back to “M” and see whether you locate any marriage coordinators. Huh? What’s a marriage coordinator? Browsing the Yellow Pages, you’ll notice therapists and clergy, but those professionals usually function as the ambulances at the bottom of the cliff. What if you need someone to prevent, rather than just clean up, a mess? What if you need a fence around the edge of that cliff?

A premarital agreement, or pre-nup, is the best way to preserve harmony and keep marriages strong. Many people wrongly believe that pre-nups are only for wealthy people who marry someone of more modest means. That view suggests that pre-nups anticipate divorce. Yes, for celebrities such as Donald Trump, Britney Spears, and Roseanne Barr, the pre-nups protected the affluent celebrities in their resulting divorces. But a pre-nup should be more than a warranty. It should be a marriage plan.

Americans tend to associate pre-nups with divorce because they associate marriage with divorce. As long as a marriage isn’t a forever commitment, a pre-nup plans for that marriage’s downfall. After all, something that doesn’t last forever will end at some point. It’s just a question of when. Very often, when something is planned well, it has a better chance of succeeding. If we planned success as diligently as we plan failure, far fewer marriages would skid into the ditch.