Marry in Haste...

You might well wonder what Julia Roberts, Shannen Doherty, Drew Barrymore, Bette Midler and a 42-year-old Chicago psychologist named Kate Wachs have in common.

As it turns out, all married impulsively. Quickly--and in major defiance of every mom’s maxim: Gee, honey, maybe you should get to know this person you’re about to marry before you actually get married.

Barrymore’s marriage to tavern owner Jeremy Thomas lasted about a month. Noting that she and Thomas had not so much as cohabited before their marriage, Barrymore said at the time of her wedding, “I guess we’re doing it the old-fashioned way. Kind of.”

Doherty and Ashley Hamilton split up six months after they tied the knot at a picnic in her back yard. Their courtship reportedly lasted only two or three weeks. (The marriage, if not the divorce, surprised even Doherty’s publicist.)

In a positive dream state while Lyle Lovett was removing her garter at their wedding reception, Roberts remarked: “He makes me so happy. He’s so good to me.” These days, heated tabloid speculation notwithstanding, Roberts and Lovett insist that they’re still wildly in love.

When Midler and Martin von Haselberg reconnected in October, 1984, after having met briefly once before, sparks flew. Two months later, they were heading to Las Vegas to get married. This winter, Midler and von Haselberg will celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. They have one child, a daughter, Sophie.

As for Wachs, her two-year union with seaman Don Donner is so successful that in some circles of the American Psychological Assn.--whose members, you might think, ought to know better--getting married impulsively is now known with some admiration as getting hitched “Dr. Kate-Style.”

“That means quick,” Wachs said. She and Donner met one evening at the grocery store, after he tracked the scent of her perfume (Paloma Picasso) down the aisles.

“You should get some for your girlfriend,” said Wachs, no fool.

“What girlfriend?” Donner said.

By morning, they were engaged.

The short life span of many high-profile impulse marriages has given the practice a seriously bad name. Hasty marital decisions make waste-y divorce proceedings, the logic goes--often correctly. Infatuation is an evil drug, your sensible maiden aunt warned. Feels great while you’re in its spell. When the effect wears off, look out.

But while admitting that they have no vast data pool to draw on, many experts wonder if instant marriages deserve their reputation as an automatic formula for disaster.

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Love-at-first-sight is a treasured myth of our culture, these social scientists point out. The mysterious stranger is an ongoing icon. Passion’s a more enjoyable route to a raised heartbeat than fishing or an aerobic workout. And spontaneity is exhilarating, a rush that rules out reason.

Put these elements together, said Cambridge, Mass., psychologist Barry Dym, and you’ve got the recipe for an impulse marriage.

And, Dym said, “I kind of doubt that they have any worse chance than anyone else.”

In fact, he added, “since the chemistry is so strong, they may have a better chance.”

In Austin, Tex., psychologist Pat Love was the first to agree. The Wachs-Donner scenario, for example, seemed perfectly plausible to Love, who once entered an upscale Dallas watering hole with two close female friends. Love and her friend Maisie went to find a table. Their friend Sue, meanwhile, found a new husband.

“By the time Maisie and I found a place to sit down, Sue was engaged,” Love said. “This guy she later married saw her looking around and says, ‘Who’re you trying to find?’ And Sue says, ‘You.’ ”

So the marriage, Sue’s third, lasted less than a year. Love’s response: So what?

When it comes to finding a life partner, she said, “the truth of it is, I think it’s kind of a crapshoot anyway.”

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Because embarking on an impulse marriage is like buying a car without a road test--or a warranty--many couples rapidly end up visiting the marital equivalent of a mechanic.

Omaha psychologist Patricia O’Hanlon Hudson said she despairs when she sees a couple “three months after the marriage that took place two months after they met.” Yet she called this kind of counseling “a real opportunity to deal with impulsivity”--a trait she equates largely with immaturity.

Instant marriages, concurred Berkeley psychologist Stephen Goldbart, are often “the bread-and-butter couple that we see in therapy. They fall in love, they run off and get married, they run into trouble.”

Couples who fall in love and marry instantaneously often find themselves “over-amped,” said fellow Berkeley psychologist David Wallin, who, with Goldbart, has written a new book called “Mapping the Terrain of the Heart” (Addison Wesley, 1994).

The sex may be stupendous, Wallin said--a meshing of mutual fantasies. But instant marriage participants are probably “merger hungry,” he said, meaning that “they can’t bear to be alone.” Partners who marry quickly also tend to over-idealize, Wallin said, portraying the new mate as “a dream come true.” Few mortals, as it happens, can measure up to such expectations.

Revenge and rebound are fairly common themes in instant marital histories, Goldbart said. Then there is the “Omigod, I’m 45, and I’m still not married and I have no kids” script that sends men and women alike leaping into the next pair of semi-warm arms that wander into the neighborhood.

And some people, Goldbart said, are simply “impulse-ridden,” devil-may-care in everything they do, marriage included.

“These are the kinds of marriages we suspect won’t last very long,” Goldbart said, because as soon as they polish off the wedding cake, “they’re off to the next impulse.”

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But Kate Wachs would hardly have thought of herself as impulsive, a woman who waited 40 years before pledging her troth and who has made a comfortable living running the “Dr. Kate Relationship Center,” arranging matches and offering “A-to-Z” love advice to men and women.

And Steve Brody, a psychotherapist in Cambria, Calif., with a specialty in marital counseling, would also steer away from an impulsive self-image. Nevertheless, when the subject of impulse marriage came up, Brody admitted that “well, I’m in one.”

As a student at UC Irvine in 1971, Brody recalled, he met this nice young woman at the campus malt shop. (That really was what it was called, Brody said, sounding only mildly embarrassed.) Their first date, a bicycle ride, lasted four days. They moved in together a month later, and marriage followed soon. Twenty-two years and two children later, they are still “very much in love,” Brody said.

As a consequence, no doubt, of his own quite positive experience, Brody cautioned against black-and-white judgments on impulsivity. Still, he advised that even the most abrupt unions should abide by what he calls “the three Cs of a relationship”: chemistry, commitment and communication.

“By chemistry,” Brody admonished, “I don’t just mean genital gymnastics”--but rather, similarity of values, personality and background.

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But while the confluence of those qualities became immediately clear when she met Donner, Wachs said she would not necessarily use her own experience as a model.

“It’s not that a fast marriage can’t work,” Wachs said. “It’s just that if you’re getting together with someone in less than two months, you could be being persuaded by infatuation.”

As for the odds of success, she said, echoing the assessment of many of her associates: “It might work, it might not.”

The amorous sensation that generally accompanies marriage, after all, is “an altered state of consciousness,” psychologist Love said. Decisions formulated in that condition sometimes last forever. But an impulse marriage may be no different from any other spur-of-the-moment practice--or purchase--in its vulnerability to the test of time.

Love, for one, is far more generous in talking about her first marriage than in describing her first furniture--both undertaken at about the same point in her life.

“I can’t even think about the couch I had at age 20,” she said.