A New Standard for Measuring Time

By now you know a celebrity famous for being famous was married for 72 days before filing for divorce. Kim's 72 days has become a new way to measure the length of marriages according to Joel Stein, satirist of Time magazine. A Kardashian is 5.07th of a year. So someone married 10 years can be said to have been married 50.7 Kardashians. Could turn into a new standard for measuring the length of marriages, don't you think?

This celebrity engagement and marriage was watched breathlessly both in the print and electronic tabloids as well as on mainstream TV, like the Today show. Her engagement ring has been valued at $2M; the wedding band at $200K. The wedding was the subject of reality shows and was widely reported to have cost mega millions. For example, the flowers alone were $2M! clearly at lot of time, money, and effort went into the wedding. Apparently nothing went into the marriage.

While the scale of this wedding is off the charts and well beyond what ordinary folks can expect to spend, there is a tragic commonality. Almost all couples in the US do exactly what Kim and her beau did: focus all their energy planning the wedding and little or no energy planning the marriage.

When I was in private practice, now and then a couple would come for pre marriage counseling. Usually they were referred by the officiating pastor who had detected problems while do the required preparation for them.  While at Church of the Holy Communion, I spent at least two hours with every couple who married there, somewhere between 12 and 20 couples a year. As a general rule, these couples had given little or no thought to what the marriage was going to be like.  Kids? How many? When?  Hadn’t talked about it.  Budgets? Division of labor? Hadn’t talked about it.  Spiritual and religious life now and after marriage?  Nope—hadn’t talked about it.  Handling the inevitable disagreements that come up in marriage?  We never argue!

The CHC couples were required to attend a one day workshop led by married couples in which the realities of married life were discussed.  They had to meet with me for at least two hours.  And the officiating clergy met with them as little or as much as he/she wished.  By comparison to most people getting married today, this was a lot of work on the marriage.  But the reality is, it was an token amount compared to what was needed.  But practically, it was all we could get.

The Church has declared that marriage is sacred and should last a lifetime.  Yet many churches require less preparation for marriage than is required for getting a driver’s license or a handgun permit.  And the state doesn’t require any preparation!  Just get the marriage license and a judge will perform the ceremony.  Clearly the Church and our society is not dealing well with this issue.  If we are going to bemoan the fact that somewhere between 40% and 50% of people who marry will divorce and the number is even higher for couples marrying for the second or third time, we need to address this serious matter seriously.

What can you do?  Make sure your kids get prepared.  Counsel friends to spend more time talking about their future together than what china pattern they’ll have.  Encourage formation programs to include workshops for engaged couples.  These are just a few things that are possible so a Kardashian doesn’t become the new standard for measuring the length of marriages.

Peace, Jerry

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